Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations

CHAPTER EIGHTTURNAROUNDS

The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not the absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before.

—Jim Collins, bestselling business author and consultant, in How the Mighty Fall

 

The raid on the Rocky Flats nuclear site near Denver produced bone-chilling results: more than a hundred tons of toxic plutonium waste and numerous “infinity rooms,” sealed to prevent entry because the radioactivity readings inside were off the radiation scale. ABC News’s Nightline ominously called Building 771 “the most dangerous building in America.” The nation was stunned.¹

From the 1950s through the 1980s, Rocky Flats produced seventy thousand ...