By: Eva Keller
The junior executive who loses ten million dollars expects to be fired. In the story that has circulated in leadership circles for decades, Tom Watson Sr., who led IBM through its rise into a global company, looked at him and said, “You can’t be serious. We just spent ten million dollars educating you. You’re forgiven.”
Dr. Dave Jones has spent 25 years telling that story to Christian CEOs.
Not because it is a feel-good management parable, but because it exposes something most leaders will not say out loud about themselves.
When someone on their team makes a costly mistake, forgiveness is not the first place they go.
Anger is.
What Anger Actually Reveals
In Plan to Win, Dave identifies Anger as one of four toxic motivators he calls FLAP: Fear, Lust, Anger, and Pride, which he describes as the hidden operating system running most Christian organizations. His diagnosis of Anger is unusually specific.
Anger, he argues, is not primarily about volume. A leader does not have to raise their voice to be operating from anger. The real tell is entitlement, the quiet belief that reality owes you alignment, that the team owes you a certain outcome, that when things go wrong, someone is in payback mode.
When he coaches leaders through it, he reduces it to a single diagnostic sentence:
“You owe me. Something was taken from me, and I am in payback mode.”
That is what anger sounds like underneath the professional language. And once a Christian CEO can hear it in themselves, the framework becomes a mirror they cannot un-look into.
The principle Dave draws from it is the same one the Watson story illustrates. A team that took a significant financial swing and missed has already paid for the next breakthrough.
The tuition has been paid. The only question is whether the leader is humble enough not to throw it away by making the failure about punishment rather than learning.
Anger in that moment does not reduce the cost of the mistake. It multiplies it by destroying the psychological safety that makes the next attempt possible, and by signaling to everyone watching that failure is an identity verdict rather than a data point.
Why Christian Leaders Are Particularly Susceptible
Dr. Dave Jones does not let faith-based leaders off the hook on this point. If anything, he argues they are more vulnerable to anger-driven leadership than their secular counterparts, because the stakes feel higher.
When a Christian CEO believes their organization is doing God’s work, a costly failure can produce something that looks like righteous indignation but functions exactly like entitlement, the belief that this organization deserves to succeed, that God’s favor should have protected them from this outcome, that the person who caused the loss owes something beyond a professional accounting.
That conflation of mission and entitlement is where organizational blame cultures get built. And once a blame culture is in place, Dave observes, it operates quietly.
It does not announce itself. It shows up in how team members respond to new ideas, how quickly they escalate problems, and whether they bring bad news before it becomes worse news.
The Antidote Is Not Conflict Avoidance
Dave is careful to distinguish the antidote to anger from its common misapplication. Forgiveness and patience, the replacements he prescribes, are not passivity.
They are not the avoidance of accountability or the tolerance of repeated failure without consequence.
What they replace is the demand.
The antidote to anger, specifically, is releasing the expectation that others owe you a particular outcome, and choosing grace as a structural operating principle rather than a one-time concession made when the leader happens to be in a good mood.
The story only carries weight because the response reads as policy rather than a one-off gesture.
Dave is asking Christian CEOs to do the same thing: to decide in advance, before their next mistake happens, what the organization’s posture toward failure will be.
The leaders who build organizations that outlast pressure, he argues, are not the ones who never experience costly failure.
They are the ones who have already decided what failure means before it arrives.
Dr. Dave Jones’s book, Plan to Win, is available for purchase on Amazon.
