????當前最不會招人嫉妒的或許就是摩根大通CEO（J.P. Morgan）杰米?戴蒙了。

????近期，戴蒙除了被招至美國國會作證，還獲知自己的公司正面臨多家聯邦機構的調查，從美國商品期貨交易委員會（CFTC）到美國聯邦調查局（FBI），再到美國證券交易委員會（SEC），都赫然在列。此外，在媒體的狂轟濫炸中，他還必須花很多的時間來認錯道歉，痛罵自己及手下團隊“愚蠢”、“疏忽”、“錯誤至極”。

????簡單說，杰米?戴蒙已被拉下了大白馬，那匹他曾騎著安然走過金融危機的大白馬。

????但如今，正如普遍看法，摩根大通交易巨虧20多億美元的過程中看來并無不法之處。這些交易絲毫不牽涉到納稅人的錢，相關調查似乎主要是為了順應加強監管的政治表演，不過其中還夾雜著嘩眾取寵和幸災樂禍的意味。至少迄今為止，沒有發生什么會真正嚴重損害摩根大通長期股東價值的事情。只是——哦，摩根大通犯了個錯誤。僅此而已。

????從華爾街到工廠車間，犯錯是再平常不過了。工作有難度，節奏快，又復雜。人非圣賢，孰能無過。如果你已工作過幾年，肯定也犯過錯。

????由此引出我們的主要觀點，事實上它不是摩根大通的問題，或者至少不光是摩根大通的問題。它是管理上非常關鍵的時刻之一：嚴重失誤后怎么辦。幸好，很少有什么失誤會像摩根大通這次的交易巨虧那樣獲得這么高的關注。但我們要談到的原則是一樣的。職業生涯中，衡量人的不光是犯了多少錯（因為人都必須為自己的失誤付出代價），還包括我們如何走出失敗，這一點同樣重要。

????如果你是一位管理者，無論級別高低，一次失誤可以對你產生兩種作用：它既可以界定你，也可以激發你。

????正確的選擇顯而易見，但不幸的是，太多時候發生的都是前面這種情況。一次犯錯可能就為一位管理者貼上了標簽。陷于自責內疚、自我懷疑或者兩者兼而有之的情緒之中，他卷入了類似于漩渦的惡性循環，對這次重大失誤耿耿于懷，無休止地尋找所有造成失誤的原因，文山會海地梳理預防性流程和舉措，與每個感覺可能受到沖擊的人交談，反反復復地捶胸頓足。

????當然，上述做法也不是全然不對——確實，有些絕對是有必要的，特別是“解剖”錯誤。肯定沒人希望同樣的錯誤犯兩次！但這樣怎么也走不出這個漩渦——而且，它只有一個方向，那就是向下。

????If there's one person you probably don't envy right now, it's Jamie Dimon.

????In the past week, the J.P. Morgan (JPM) CEO has been summoned to testify before Congress and learned that his company is facing investigations by an alphabet soup of federal agencies, from the CFTC to the FBI to the SEC. He's also had to spend a lot of time in the middle of a media feeding frenzy, offering mea culpas and referring to himself and members of his team as "stupid," "sloppy," and "dead wrong."

????In short, Jamie Dimon has been knocked off the large, white horse he rode through the financial crisis.

????Now, echoing the general consensus, nothing illegal appears to have occurred in the course ofJ.P. Morgan's $2 billion-plus trading loss. No taxpayer money was involved, and the investigations, it seems, are largely pro-regulation political grandstanding with a dose of schadenfreude thrown in. At least so far, nothing has happened that's actually going to seriously damage the bank's long-term value to shareholders. It's just that -- well, it's just that J.P. Morgan made a mistake.

????Guess what? It happens all the time, from Wall Street to the factory floor. Work is hard, fast, and complicated. People make mistakes. God knows we've both made them, and if you've got a few years of work under your belt, so have you.

????Which leads us to our main point, which is really not about J.P. Morgan at all, or at least not about it alone. Rather, it's about one of the most common crucible moments in leadership -- a big messy failure. Thankfully, very few screwups will garner the same level of public attention as J.P. Morgan's trading loss. But the principle we're getting at is the same. Over the course of your career, you won't be measured just by how many mistakes you make, because you'll make your fair share, but you'll be measured, as importantly, by how well you recover from them.

????Look, a mistake can do two things to you when you're a leader, no matter your level in an organization. It can define you, or it can galvanize you.

????The right choice is obvious, but unfortunately, far too often, the defining thing happens anyway. The mistake becomes a leader's identity. Stricken by guilt or self-doubt or both, he enters something of a vortex, obsessing over the blunder, searching incessantly for all the reasons it could have happened, conducting endless meetings to go over processes and procedures to prevent it from ever happening again, talking to everyone who feels affected in any possible way, and letting the breast-beating go on and on and on.

????Some of that is fine, of course -- indeed, some of it is absolutely necessary, especially the "autopsy." You definitely don't want the same mistake to happen twice! But that darn vortex of self-defeat is always around -- and it only goes in one direction, down.