We tend to think of transformational leaders emerging fully actualized. We look for early indications of promise, sure that there must have been nascent signs of greatness from the start. It’s hard to imagine those that attain the highest level of achievement are anything less than destined for greatness.

While talent clearly plays an important role in success, most talented people live their lives without any great distinction. Some attain some moderate level of achievement, but simply go unnoticed. Others even fail miserably. A few hit on the right mix of luck, skill, time and place that catapults them to greatness.

What’s interesting about the stories behind so many of those of remarkable achievement is how they often begin with heartbreaking tales of desperation and failure. Yet, those failures didn’t define their path. In fact, very much the opposite. It is what they learned from their early struggles and failures that helped make them the historic figures we know today.

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In 1993, after being named IBM’s CEO as it was quickly careening toward insolvency, Lou Gerstner said, “There’s been a lot of speculation as to when I’m going to deliver a vision of IBM, and what I’d like to say to all of you is that  the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” It was a peculiar thing to say, especially for an executive renown for his strategic acumen, and people took note.

What Gerstner meant was that IBM was broken internally. It had lost sight of itself and fallen into infighting. It no longer sought to serve the customer. Instead of collaborating, executives engaged in endless turf battles. Until IBM’s culture and values could be brought back into harmony with the market, it didn’t matter what the vision was.

Today, America has a similar plight. We are undergoing profound shifts in our racial makeup, urban concentration and generational demography in the midst of great geopolitical and technological disruption. We need to build a new social contract based on shared values that align with those shifts and, until we do that, any vision for the future will be irrelevant.

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The moon landing in 1969 was, in many ways, the high point of the American century. Since then, we’ve been beset by scandals like Watergate, Iran-Contra and two  presidential impeachments, mired in never-ending wars that we don’t win, while increasingly encumbered by rising debts and income inequality amid falling productivity growth. Incomes have stagnated while education and healthcare costs have soared.

Yet in an essay written back in February, just before the Covid-19 crisis, Ross Douthat wrote that these apparent woes are actually signs of success.  In effect, he argued that we lack major technological breakthroughs because we become so technologically advanced and we lack economic progress because we’ve become so prosperous.

Even then, it was a strange and somewhat maddening position to take. Why would Douthat, an intelligent and insightful man, write such things? Because he so wanted to believe them that he went in search for facts to support them. Many of us have been doing the same. Yet the Covid-19 crisis has unmasked us and it’s time to start facing up to the truth.

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Within hours of planes crashing into the World Trade Center on 9-11, stories began circulating that it was not, in fact, the planes that caused the towers to collapse, but explosives planted inside by someone with access. Since then a number of conspiracy theories have circulated that people ranging from government employees to Wall Street Traders were responsible for the attack.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that there are no shortage of alleged schemes about the coronavirus epidemic, from theories that the disease is caused by 5G mobile networks to that Bill Gates cooked it up as part of a global plot to electronically track us through vaccinations. Even the president’s son has a pet theory.

The simple truth is that when a tragic event happens, we lose our sense of control and there will never be a shortage of hucksters willing to take advantage of that, for profit or for other reasons. Often, these are elaborate narratives and can seem very convincing. Yet the schemes tend to have common characteristics which we can use to spot and nullify their effect.

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“Greed…is good,” declared Gordon Gekko, the legendary character from the 80s hit film Wall Street. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind”

The line resonated because it answered a question that people cared deeply about at the time, “how can we become more efficient?” In the face of heightened competition from Japan’s doctrine of total quality management, American firms appeared too sclerotic to compete. Corporate raiders preaching shareholder capitalism offered an easy answer.

The results are clear. Since then the stock market has crashed a number of times, the last one resulting in a Great Recession. Productivity growth has been depressed for half a century. The incidence of extreme weather events and pandemics like coronavirus is on the rise. Clearly we’ve been getting the wrong answers. It’s time we started asking different questions.

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Like a lot of people, I’ve been participating in group Zoom calls with people from my past lately. One that’s especially engaging is a group from my high school class that meets once a week. It’s interesting to hear people from very different parts of the country share their experiences in the type of candid way that only old acquaintances can.

Unfortunately, a number of my classmates were infected with the virus. One, an executive at a paramedic services company, was filling in on the front lines when he got it, even though he had on full protective gear. He believes he got it through his eyes. Others spoke of weeks in bed, unable to move.

So I find it bizarre when I see other people I know who deny the severity of the crisis. In most cases, these are otherwise reasonable people, who watch YouTube videos or other alternative sources of media that minimize the crisis or portray it as a hoax. As hard as it is to believe, these people aren’t crazy. Rather, they are falling prey to very common cognitive biases.

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We’re beginning to see the peak of the Coronavirus crisis in hard-hit urban areas like New York City, thanks to social distancing measures and the bravery and dedication of healthcare workers. Yet despite the progress, you only have to look at Singapore to see that the epidemic can back flare up at any time.

Meanwhile, we’re seeing armed mobs show up at state capitals to protest lockdown restrictions even as Covid-19 hotspots shift from larger cities to rural areas like Albany, GA, Sioux Falls, SD and Gallup, NM. In many ways, these areas are more vulnerable due to higher prevalence of health conditions and less access to medical care.

Clearly, we have a deep problem with trust. Research from Gallup finds that trust in institutions has been declining for decades. A study at Ohio State found that, when confronted with scientific evidence that conflicted with their views, people would question the objectivity of the science. Our social contract is broken. We need to establish a new one.

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Why are organizations so resistant to change? Many point to a corporate immune system or to organizational antibodies that instantly attack change. The idea is that leaders prefer stability to disruption and put systems in place to reduce variance. These systems will instantly seek out and destroy anyone who tries to do anything different.

This is a dangerously misleading notion. There is no such thing as a corporate immune system. In fact, most senior executives are not only in favor of change, they see themselves as leading it! However, while most people are enthusiastic about change as a general concept, they are suspicious of it in the particular.

The truth is that is if the change you seek has the potential to be truly impactful, there are always going to be people affected who aren’t going to like it. They will seek to undermine it, often in very dishonest ways. That’s just a fact of life that you need to accept. Yet history clearly shows that, with a smart strategy, even the most ardent opposition can be overcome.

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In 1964, as the financial revolution was gathering steam, an MIT economist named Paul Cootner published a collection of essays called The Random Character of Stock Market Prices. Based largely on an obscure dissertation by a forgotten frenchman, it laid the foundations for a new era of financial engineering.

Yet among the papers included was one that told quite a different story. Written by Benoit Mandelbrot—a mathematician not an economist—it showed that the seemingly sophisticated models significantly underestimated volatility and risk. In effect, he was predicting that these models would massively blow up one day.

No one disputed Mandelbrot’s facts, because they were clear and indisputable. Nevertheless, reputations were invested and there was of money to be made. So Mandelbrot’s warnings, although not altogether forgotten, were put in the back seat and we paid an enormous price. Clearly, then as now, we failed to invest in resiliency. Will we ever learn our lesson?

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I recently took part in an online open forum for thought leaders. While we were discussing a wide range of topics, including the economic and social impact of previous crises, somebody came out and said, “You know, when this is all over we’re probably going to have another #Occupy movement.”

It was an apt observation. #Occupy, after all, was a reaction to the Great Recession and it’s reasonable to expect that once we get the Coronavirus under control many will demand serious changes to be made. However we should remember that #Occupy was a massive failure that achieved little if anything at all.

Clearly, our government has failed us, but it goes far beyond that. Markets have also failed us. Technology and globalization have failed us. Perhaps most of all, we have failed ourselves. Collectively we have failed to make good choices as a society. So we need to learn the lessons of #Occupy. It’s not enough to get angry and make noise, we need to build a better future.

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