People don't become leaders because they never fail. They become leaders because of the way they respond to failure. - Gerald M. Weinberg

Within IBM at that time, growing a beard without getting fired was an indisputable mark of technical genius.

Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't.

Or, suppose you want to motivate your managers to ship products on time, so you conspicuously promote each manager whose product goes out the door on schedule. All goes as planned until the situation arises in which one of your managers has a project where the testers are reporting numerous problems. Because managers who have shipped products on time have been promoted, this manager thinks, I want that promotion so I need to ship this on time, but those bug reports are getting in the way. I know what I'll do! I'll put the testers on another project until the developers have a chance to catch up.