Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to repay $11 billion.

Lan, chairwoman of  Vietnamese developer Van Thinh Phat, was sentenced to death in April for causing losses equivalent to US$27 billion at Saigon Commercial Bank in which she owned a 91.5% stake.

Now, along with 33 others, she has been accused of fraudulent appropriation of assets, money laundering and illegal cross-border currency trafficking.

Investigators concluded that Lan had been moving illegal funds abroad and investing in Vietnam’s property market.

Rick Broadbent, The Times Writer, rightly points out, “Few have owned up. It is usually the dodgy meat, the diet pills, the rogue doctor or the painkillers. Longer bans may get them out of the sport, but they will not stop them cheating because dopers never think they will get caught.”

General David Petraeus, former CIA Director, Commanding General of the Multi-National Force in Iraq and Allied Commander in Afghanistan is a classic example of a highly intelligent and successful leader, who in a moment of weakness, fell from grace. His extra-marital affair with Paula Broadwell and his subsequent confession, “After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extra-marital affair.”

In Malaysia, Najib Razak, the former Prime Minister, was embroiled in one of the largest financial scandals in history, known as the 1MDB scandal. The scandal involved the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the state investment fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). In 2020, Najib was found guilty of corruption, abuse of power, and money laundering, leading to a significant fall from grace for a leader who once wielded considerable influence in Malaysian politics.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France, was convicted in 2021 of corruption and influence peddling, becoming the first former French president to receive a custodial sentence.

He was found guilty of attempting to bribe a judge and of using his influence to gain information about an investigation into his 2007 campaign finances. Sarkozy was sentenced to three years in prison, with two years suspended.

In the sporting world, we have Lance Armstrong, seven-time Tour De France Champion who was stripped of all his titles for the most comprehensive and systematic cheating in the history of sports. When asked if how he had felt when he was doping, he confessed, ‘It did not feel wrong. I did not feel bad about it.”

Finally, who can ever imagine that Jimmy Saville, a BBC Presenter and a devout Catholic, could have gotten away with sexually-abusing children as young as 8 years old or over 50 years! He was never found out until after his death!

For a long time, I have subscribed to the dictum by Peter Drucker, “Leverage on your strengths until your weakness becomes irrelevant.” I am beginning to have second thoughts.

Having studied, researched and examined many leaders who have fallen, I begin to realize we are all mortal and weakness matters. Many men and women have fallen because of particular weakness in their lives.

Whether it was:

• The late pop icon Whitney Houston (drugs)
• The immaculate Russell Wasendoff, Sr, Founder of Preregrine (jailed for 50 years for orchestrating a fraud and misleading regulators for 20 years),
• The hard-driving Peter Gasso, (Former Chairman of New York Stock Exchange, ‘story of guilt, deceit, ego & negligence’[i]),
• The generous philanthropist Jerry Epstein (the late financier and philanthropist, donated large sums of money to educational and scientific institutions, including Harvard University and MIT)
• First female President of South Korea, Park Geun-hye (jailed for colluding with close friend Choi Soon-sil to extort money from large corporations and allowing her to meddle with state affairs.)

Examples abound, but they have one thing in common their weaknesses have become their downfall. Allow me to share two perspectives about weaknesses.

1. We all have weaknesses

“Be you ever so high, the law is still above you.”
– Thomas Fuller, British historian

It is unfashionable to admit that we have weaknesses, especially in our Asian Culture. We have to be strong, or at least appear to be strong. Admitting our weakness is to lose face, even when our failures are revealed. We often deny them and deflect the blame. Allow me to emphasize: We all fail and falter but we need to recover.

There are four types of weaknesses. Every one of us suffers from one or more of them.

• Character Weakness

“I am flawed. Deeply flawed. I think we all have our own flaws.”
– Lance Armstrong[1]

This weakness stems from a character flaw in our lives. It is deep-seated within the individual. These are areas in our lives that we struggle with, such as anger, lack of self-control, power, lust, or jealousy. These weaknesses, left unchecked, will derail us. For example, Tiger Woods has developed an unusual habit of satisfying his sexual urges through indulging in sexual escapades. As my colleague, Michael Tan would pronounce, “We don’t have character flaw, all characters are flawed.”

• Personality Weakness

“Where does personality end and brain damage begin?”
– Doug Copeland

This weakness arises out from an over-utilization, over-indulgent and arrogance about a particular personality trait. For example, those of us are more introverted tend to fall into ‘paralysis of analysis’ syndrome. On the other hand, the extraverts can overwhelm people by their ‘verbal diarrhea’ especially when they dominate discussions at meetings.

• Competence Weakness: 

“If you look at the 19 hijackers who came to the United States in Sept. 11 to commit those acts, if you’d looked at them before they got onto a plane, you could probably say the same thing. There were various levels of expertise, various levels of competence.”
– Robert Mueller

This weakness comes from the strength of our competence. The flip side for every strength is a weakness, if there is no check and balance. For example, leaders who are strategic thinkers are less concerned about execution, resulting in big pictures that remained unpainted.

Those who are sales-focused and have strong drive to deliver results can become so ambitious that they may do whatever it takes to reach their marketing targets, including using any means to achieve their end or neglecting their health and family in pursuit of their sales goals. Or like the hijackers or the Mafia, we can use our competence for the wrong reason.

• Emotional Weakness: 

“Negative thoughts are like termites that chew up and spit out happiness.”

This is the result of the negativity in our brains that overwhelms our minds: worries, anxieties, fears, meanness and hateful thoughts. These are aggravated when we are over-stressed and do not have enough sleep or rest. They intrude into our psyche and gnaw at the fabric of our lives. They tend to depress our emotional well-being and make us feel self-defeating as we act on these negative outlook and worst fears.

Some of these emotional angsts have deep-seated psychological pains that associated with deep rejection, unresolved bitterness, and traumatic past.

As you can see, any of these weaknesses can prevent us from becoming effective leaders. Hence, there is a need to recognize which area we are weak at and learn to manage them.

2. We are bound to fail

None of us is spared from failure. I believe that we are bound to fail, unless we put time and effort to address our weaknesses. The increasing pressure of life, the higher expectations from society, the inevitability of conflict escalation in this competitive world and the relentless pursuit of perfection have made failure even more probably, acute and pervasive.

Coupled with the anonymity and accessibility of quick-win schemes or easy-sex websites, we become even more vulnerable. Worse still, we are made to believe that we can get away with it.  We think we can hide and not be found out. Like Lance Armstrong, we can keep denying and live a life of lies, without admitting that we are frauds. He once said, “As long as I live, I will ever deny doping.”[2]

What was most petrifying was Lance Armstrong’s conversation with Oprah Winfrey[3]:

Winfrey: “Did it feel wrong?”

Armstrong: “At that time, No.”

Winfrey: “Did you feel bad about it?”

Armstrong: “No. That was even scarier.”

Winfrey: “Did you feel in anyway you were cheating?”

Armstrong: “No, the scariest.”

Armstrong confessed that his ‘win at all costs’ mentality, shared by many champion and aspiring athletes, was a flaw. His strength had become his weakness.

To recognize that we can and do fail should make us more conscious of our failings and fallibility. In this way, we can become more attuned to our vulnerabilities and hopefully, make ourselves more accountable to others. But how do we deal with weaknesses?

[1] The Times, London, Assoicated Press, Agence France-Presse. Shaken to The Core. Reprinted in The Straits Times. SPH. July 16, 2013.

[2] Rick Broadbent, Only good news is, cheats can run but they cannot hide. The Times, London. Reprinted in the The Straits Times. SPH. July 16, 2013.

[3] Dan Siegelman. Oxymoron 101. Forbes Global. Oct 28, 2002. Since that piece, corporate America has seen frauds and greed in a far greater scale, with the near collapse of the global financial market in 2008.

[4] Peter Elkind. The Fall of the House of Grasso. Fortune. Nov 1, 2004.

[5] Associated Press. It was one big lie, Armstrong confesses. Reprinted in the Straits Times. 19 Jan, 2013.