Total failure (the story of Under Armour)

Kevin Plank got kicked out of high school. Then he grew up, started Under Armour, and became a billionaire.

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A few years back, when I was working on my book about Harvard Business School, I was surprised (naively, in retrospect) to find that alumni were falling all over each other to be featured in it.

So many people wanted to be profiled, in fact, that I came up with a series of standard weeding-out questions to ask.

I asked them to write to three people who knew them from different parts of their lives, for example—cc’ing me, and authorizing them to speak to me candidly about anything they wanted to know.

And, I asked them to describe for me an important time that they failed at something.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for when I asked the question, but I later realized that the best answers were the ones that…