here’s an old saying that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. When things are going well, everyone wants to claim their place in the victory lane. But when life takes a turn, few are willing to own responsibility; instead, most people try to place the blame somewhere else and put the situation behind them as quickly as possible.
While no one wants to stand in front of a crowd and cop to a mistake or slog through a project they know isn’t going to end well, such challenges often provide the greatest lessons, if we take the time to truly process and reflect. But this often means leaning into the full roller coaster of emotions — from fear, loss, and shame to soul-searching and renewed passion.
Here, a few W. P. Carey School of Business alumni — success stories every one — lay bare their lowest moments and the insights they now see in the rearview mirror.
He could have wallowed in everything he’d lost, but instead Walker’s faith and his ability to stay focused on the future led him down a new, unexpected path. He became a championship bodybuilder, served in the U.S. Army Reserve, and lived overseas working with the YMCA before transitioning to commercial real estate.
“Your failures test your mettle,” Walker says. “It’s OK to be afraid, but you have to step through it to get to where you need to go. Sometimes you don’t know where that’s going to take you; you just have to know, ‘If this is the direction I need to move, then I have to put my energy and effort into it 100%.’”
Fewer than 90 days in, that all started to change. “They created a position for me for which I was not remotely qualified,” he says. “It had to do with regulatory issues, and my background is in lending and operations.”
Gorman spent all of his time reading U.S. code manuals searching for subjects where he felt comfortable while connecting with experts in other areas. “I became a specialist in one section, but they needed a generalist in everything,” he says. “It just didn’t work out.”
He ended up leaving the company and landed a position that better matched his expertise in lending. Today, he’s the executive vice president and a commercial banker of UNB Bank, a position that resulted from the acquisition of his previous company, Meridian Bank, nearly five years ago. That time, Gorman was able to weather the acquisition thanks to his solid footing and a network of fellow experts who could guide him when he faced the unknown.
“Some people like to have an uncomfortable feeling,” he says. “They seek different challenges to learn all kinds of different things. For me, there’s something to be said about being an expert in your field — and I am.”
When the family moved into their first apartment, it backed up to a Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Dixon wanted to join but couldn’t afford the club’s $20 membership fee, so a staff member offered to cover the cost. The organization changed the course of her life: She went on to become the club’s National Youth of the Year and a national youth spokesperson, which landed her an appointment on President Barack Obama’s Corporation for National and Community Service. Dixon also parlayed that $20 membership fee into $100,000 in academic and achievement scholarships.
“Ever since I became the National Youth of the Year, I had been held up on this pedestal, so to go to school and fail felt like I was slapping everyone in the face. How could I disappoint these people who believe in me so much?”
Dixon ultimately rebounded and graduated with honors. She earned a master’s degree from Arizona State, is pursuing a doctoral degree in organizational leadership, and is an entrepreneur and motivational speaker. But she also learned an important lesson about letting the demands and expectations of others fall away while staying focused on her goals.
“I tell myself I have to prioritize the things that are important to me,” she says. “I have to put time aside for school or my health. If I’m traveling and busy, I have to put time aside for my family and friends, because life is precious.”
“Part of the art of taking a risk is putting your brand at risk,” he says. “It’s having the confidence to know that you have a well-thought-out argument, and being able to defend it.”
Sometimes, the risk pays off. When McKenna was president of Salix Pharmaceuticals, the company had $300 billion in debt, but his team approached the board to invest $100 million to create a new sales force. The risk ultimately fueled the company’s long-term growth.
But with another company, McKenna’s risk wasn’t met with the same reward. He entered a co-marketing deal with another organization to bring to market a new drug that would help patients safely withdraw from opioid use. “This is something I was passionate about,” he says. “It was a drug that was shown in clinical trials to work. On the surface, how could this go wrong?” However, the private insurance and government agency payers weren’t responsive to reimbursing the drug, and McKenna’s company was never able to scale to the level it expected.
“Sometimes these products can be ahead of the curve,” he says. “If it had been a few years later, and legislation had caught up, this drug would have been very successful. It’s one of the more frustrating things in my career, but I would do the deal again — I would just structure it differently.”
Throughout his career, McKenna has tried to create a business environment that prioritizes improvement over the status quo, even if it means that failures are inevitable, because that helps create a culture of support and innovation.
“At a lot of big companies, innovation is stifled,” he says. “You unencumber the business by giving people the latitude to test and learn new initiatives, measure what impact they have, and share the learnings — both positive and negative. This is a way that you can move an organization from being stagnant to one that’s willing to fail in a safe environment.”
That environment is a balance of clear parameters and expectations for the team — “It’s not a free-for-all,” he says — and leaders who are involved in the process and encourage novel ideas.
“I want to put the right framework in place that allows them to experiment,” McKenna says. “You have to be prepared that eight out of 10 ideas are going to fail, and that’s OK. How do you pivot from those failures and focus on the good, and the two where it was successful are worth the effort?”
“When the market crashed in 2008, all of that evaporated,” says Walker, now a senior vice president for Cresa Phoenix. “The shopping deal crashed. The tenants backed out because the economy went bad. I lost my house. Everything went up in smoke.”
Walker watched as his mentors struggled to recover; many even left the industry. But he’d already seen his worst and come out on the other side, so he knew he could do it again; after taking some time for soul-searching, he ultimately returned to his roots, focusing on brokerage with tenants and companies with which he already had strong relationships.
“The market was bad and a lot of them did have to hold back,” he says. “But for some of them, it was a good time to grow because we were able to get even better real estate deals.
“It was out of that I became a lone wolf and started working on my client relationships. I built my business back off the ground, which led to an opportunity with DPR Commercial Realty, and then APL Logistics came knocking. Today, I feel like I’m living the ultimate vision I had in 2005.”
here’s an old saying that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. When things are going well, everyone wants to claim their place in the victory lane. But when life takes a turn, few are willing to own responsibility; instead, most people try to place the blame somewhere else and put the situation behind them as quickly as possible.
While no one wants to stand in front of a crowd and cop to a mistake or slog through a project they know isn’t going to end well, such challenges often provide the greatest lessons, if we take the time to truly process and reflect. But this often means leaning into the full roller coaster of emotions — from fear, loss, and shame to soul-searching and renewed passion.
Here, a few W. P. Carey School of Business alumni — success stories every one — lay bare their lowest moments and the insights they now see in the rearview mirror.
He could have wallowed in everything he’d lost, but instead Walker’s faith and his ability to stay focused on the future led him down a new, unexpected path. He became a championship bodybuilder, served in the U.S. Army Reserve, and lived overseas working with the YMCA before transitioning to commercial real estate.
“Your failures test your mettle,” Walker says. “It’s OK to be afraid, but you have to step through it to get to where you need to go. Sometimes you don’t know where that’s going to take you; you just have to know, ‘If this is the direction I need to move, then I have to put my energy and effort into it 100%.’”
Fewer than 90 days in, that all started to change. “They created a position for me for which I was not remotely qualified,” he says. “It had to do with regulatory issues, and my background is in lending and operations.”
Gorman spent all of his time reading U.S. code manuals searching for subjects where he felt comfortable while connecting with experts in other areas. “I became a specialist in one section, but they needed a generalist in everything,” he says. “It just didn’t work out.”
He ended up leaving the company and landed a position that better matched his expertise in lending. Today, he’s the executive vice president and a commercial banker of UNB Bank, a position that resulted from the acquisition of his previous company, Meridian Bank, nearly five years ago. That time, Gorman was able to weather the acquisition thanks to his solid footing and a network of fellow experts who could guide him when he faced the unknown.
“Some people like to have an uncomfortable feeling,” he says. “They seek different challenges to learn all kinds of different things. For me, there’s something to be said about being an expert in your field — and I am.”
When the family moved into their first apartment, it backed up to a Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Dixon wanted to join but couldn’t afford the club’s $20 membership fee, so a staff member offered to cover the cost. The organization changed the course of her life: She went on to become the club’s National Youth of the Year and a national youth spokesperson, which landed her an appointment on President Barack Obama’s Corporation for National and Community Service. Dixon also parlayed that $20 membership fee into $100,000 in academic and achievement scholarships.
“Ever since I became the National Youth of the Year, I had been held up on this pedestal, so to go to school and fail felt like I was slapping everyone in the face. How could I disappoint these people who believe in me so much?”
Dixon ultimately rebounded and graduated with honors. She earned a master’s degree from Arizona State, is pursuing a doctoral degree in organizational leadership, and is an entrepreneur and motivational speaker. But she also learned an important lesson about letting the demands and expectations of others fall away while staying focused on her goals.
“I tell myself I have to prioritize the things that are important to me,” she says. “I have to put time aside for school or my health. If I’m traveling and busy, I have to put time aside for my family and friends, because life is precious.”
“Part of the art of taking a risk is putting your brand at risk,” he says. “It’s having the confidence to know that you have a well-thought-out argument, and being able to defend it.”
Sometimes, the risk pays off. When McKenna was president of Salix Pharmaceuticals, the company had $300 billion in debt, but his team approached the board to invest $100 million to create a new sales force. The risk ultimately fueled the company’s long-term growth.
But with another company, McKenna’s risk wasn’t met with the same reward. He entered a co-marketing deal with another organization to bring to market a new drug that would help patients safely withdraw from opioid use. “This is something I was passionate about,” he says. “It was a drug that was shown in clinical trials to work. On the surface, how could this go wrong?” However, the private insurance and government agency payers weren’t responsive to reimbursing the drug, and McKenna’s company was never able to scale to the level it expected.
“Sometimes these products can be ahead of the curve,” he says. “If it had been a few years later, and legislation had caught up, this drug would have been very successful. It’s one of the more frustrating things in my career, but I would do the deal again — I would just structure it differently.”
Throughout his career, McKenna has tried to create a business environment that prioritizes improvement over the status quo, even if it means that failures are inevitable, because that helps create a culture of support and innovation.
“At a lot of big companies, innovation is stifled,” he says. “You unencumber the business by giving people the latitude to test and learn new initiatives, measure what impact they have, and share the learnings — both positive and negative. This is a way that you can move an organization from being stagnant to one that’s willing to fail in a safe environment.”
That environment is a balance of clear parameters and expectations for the team — “It’s not a free-for-all,” he says — and leaders who are involved in the process and encourage novel ideas.
“I want to put the right framework in place that allows them to experiment,” McKenna says. “You have to be prepared that eight out of 10 ideas are going to fail, and that’s OK. How do you pivot from those failures and focus on the good, and the two where it was successful are worth the effort?”
“When the market crashed in 2008, all of that evaporated,” says Walker, now a senior vice president for Cresa Phoenix. “The shopping deal crashed. The tenants backed out because the economy went bad. I lost my house. Everything went up in smoke.”
Walker watched as his mentors struggled to recover; many even left the industry. But he’d already seen his worst and come out on the other side, so he knew he could do it again; after taking some time for soul-searching, he ultimately returned to his roots, focusing on brokerage with tenants and companies with which he already had strong relationships.
“The market was bad and a lot of them did have to hold back,” he says. “But for some of them, it was a good time to grow because we were able to get even better real estate deals.
“It was out of that I became a lone wolf and started working on my client relationships. I built my business back off the ground, which led to an opportunity with DPR Commercial Realty, and then APL Logistics came knocking. Today, I feel like I’m living the ultimate vision I had in 2005.”