Cathie Black on Making Mistakes, Moving On

Cathie Black has handed in her resignation as New York City’s schools chancellor in less time than it takes to say “standardized testing,” and those who campaigned against her tenure by citing the clubbiness of her selection (she is a friend of Bloomberg), her educational inexperience (she had barely set foot in a public school before December), and her tone-deafness (she proposed birth control as a solution to classroom overcrowding) will be delighted by the development. Meanwhile, Black will presumably be retreating to her Connecticut home to consider the lessons to be learned from her brief, controversial stewardship of 1.1 million schoolchildren; and mixed with a sense of failure will no doubt be one of relief that she need no longer wake up each morning as the least-liked public official in the history of Bloomberg’s mayoralty.

For observers of Black, some clues to her manner of dealing with failure can be gleaned from the book she wrote while still publisher of Hearst, in 2007: “Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead in Work (and in Life).” “I’ve made all kinds of mistakes on the job—some of them real doozies,” she reports. (One instance: she took Ambien instead of Advil during an important meeting and had to be ferried back to a hotel to sleep it off.) She continues:

If I needed three days to get over every day I was criticized, I’d never have gotten anything done in my career. Not only does it waste time and energy, it also colors how others see your mistake—and by extension, how they see you. If you stay torn up over a mistake, others will assume it was worse than it probably was. But if you move on quickly, minimizing the damage, you’ll have power over how the mistake is perceived by others.

Just how much power Black will have over the public perception of this latest and disastrous act in her career remains an open question—but for Mayor Bloomberg, who this morning said, “I take full responsibility for the fact that this has not worked out as expected,” the bungle is an embarrassment. (He’s appointed Dennis Walcott, a deputy mayor who actually knows about education, to be her successor.)

Another anecdote from Black’s book seems applicable under the circumstances. Once when Black was the publisher of USA Today, she sent an aggrieved memo to a superior, and in it noted that he might think her “bold” for laying out her complaints. The memo fell into the hands of Al Neuharth, the newspaper’s founder, who scrawled on it the following: “Bold? No. Fucked up? Yes.” Without necessarily resorting to schoolyard language, public-school parents have been saying as much since Black’s misguided appointment. There will be some happy faces at pickup today.

Photograph by Michael Nagle/Getty Images.