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Career-Building Blunder: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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Sometimes, an intelligent boss will determine that the best candidate for an important job is the one who has just caused a disaster.
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The employee might become a [[Failure Knight]], dovetailing with this trope: someone with empathic, almost embarrassing levels of devotion stemming from their past failure.
See also [[Secret Test of Character]], [[Training Accident]], [[You Did Everything You Could]]. Compare with [[You Have Failed Me...]], when a subordinate gets harshly (and, often, terminally) punished for even trivial mistakes. Compare [[The Dilbert Principle]].
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* In ''[[Soul Eater]]'' [[Big Bad|Arachne]] gives this as a reason for averting [[You Have Failed Me...]].
* In ''[[Legend of the Galactic Heroes]]'', this is one of Reinhard von Lohengramm's most admirable traits: when a subordinate fails him, he just tells him that he knows the subordinate learned his lesson and will do better next time. He is universally right in his judgement.
== Film ==
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== Literature ==
* In Lee Lightner's ''[[Warhammer
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* ''[[The Thrawn Trilogy]]''
** Grand Admiral Thrawn promotes a subordinate who failed to capture Luke's ship with a [[Tractor Beam]]. The subordinate received high praise because he went above and beyond his duty in his efforts, creating new strategies on the fly that, even though they failed, still bespoke top-notch problem-solving skills. (Bonus points for actually taking responsibility for his failure.) The tractor beam operator was then told to work out a way to counter Luke's trick. [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|And he did.]]
** Contrast with a similar situation in a previous book; the tractor beam operator in that case exhibited both incompetence and
** This trope is also how Wedge Antilles manages the formation of [[X Wing Series|Wraith Squadron]]; [[Shell-Shocked Veteran|previously-trained pilots]] who screwed up in various ways, many of them not really their fault, get one last chance. Wedge is scrupulous about the pilots he accepts, though; of the ~40 pilots that try out, only ten make it in.
** This happened, in a rather unusual way, to Bevel Lemelisk, one of the designers of the original Death Star. He had been responsible for the exhaust port flaw on the original Death Star. The Emperor [[You Have Failed Me...|had him executed for that blunder]]...and then used a Sith technique to transfer his consciousness to a clone body. Lemelisk was then placed in charge of redesigning the Death Star. And every time he made another mistake, the Emperor would execute him [[The Many Deaths of You|in some new gruesome manner]], then transfer his consciousness to a clone body again.
* Piankhy, the title character of ''The Black Pharaoh'' by Christian Jacq, does this to a village leader who betrayed him, not before scaring him a bit by shaking a knife.
* ''[[Artemis Fowl]]'': Julius Root is hard on Holly for several reasons, one of them being that she failed once and failed bad, and she must thus be the best to have that one failure be minimal compared to the rest of her actions.
* For Sherlock Holmes, it was 'The Adventure of the Yellow Face.' He was way off the mark, and arrived at the wrong conclusion. Fortunately, the case resolved itself before he could make too big a fool of himself.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Motivation Index]]
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