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That is a great question. And it depends on why - and how - you teach cases. Little thread. https://twitter.com/pontific8/status/1335090269755232256
If you teach cases as exemplars of virtue, beauty, and success, Tony’s tragic ending ruins the Zappos story. We cannot use it in class any more, his imperfection messing with the idea that leaders always win. But that happens only in the case studies.
If you teach cases as works of fiction, ways to evoke the peak and valleys of the human experience at work, Tony’s tragic end does not make it less useful to study his trajectory. In fact, only more so. This way of teaching cases, I contend, is both more dramatic and more real.
Even before this happened, when I taught the Zappos case that @naskin and I wrote, the issue of Tony’s compulsion to be happy, to be social, often came up. He was the introverts’ worst nightmare of a boss.
The question of the line between passion and obsession especially for enterpreneurs. Always came up. The archetype of the sad clown, and the burden of a mask. It was all there before if you weren’t blinded by the light, as we often are with successful leaders.
That’s why I loved learning and writing about him, he was a wonderful literary character, his charm so seductive and his shadow just about visible. He made no secret of it and accepted controversy.
I’ve often used him as an example of what makes a good case protagonist. You admire him enough but you’re not sure you want to be him. In fact, you do, sometimes. But he’s stuck being him all the time. And that always hurts.
So we should not stop teaching Tony’s life and passion at work. Any more than we should stop reading Romeo and Juliet because their passion, so stubborn and irrational, does not end well. That is the point.
Only those who have never been obsessed with work, or never met enterpreneurs, will be surprised by that turn of events. Tony was not unlike Maradona, with business instead of a ball. And if we had that talent and those means, and we were lonely, we might all go that route.
