Fix the Forty-Nine (Paperback)

Paperback. Everyone gets forty-nine percent wrong. Greatness lives entirely in the repair.The best leaders you know are wrong almost half the time. So are the best parents, partners, and friends. What separates the great ones isn't a better hit rate - it's what happens in the hour after the miss.Fix the Forty-Nine turns repair into a system anyone can run. Drawing on fifty years in boardrooms on five continents - as a global pharmaceutical CFO, investment banker, and director on more than forty boards - and on one hard going-back at his own kitchen table, George Bickerstaff delivers the complete method: Name the break in one sentence - honest mistake, bad call, lie, or slow break - before you touch it. Act inside the first hour, because the fix loses value every hour it waits. Own it in four sentences: what happened, my part, the fix, the date. Forgive mistakes loudly - and tolerate a lie exactly once. Then repair the arenas where trust actually breaks: the wrong number, the deal that has to change, the room that went silent, the institution in public crisis. And master the hard cases - when you were the one who broke it, when it can't be fixed and walking away is the honest repair, and when the machine broke it at machine speed and the apology is still yours.Every chapter ends with a tool you can run the same day. Every public case - Tylenol, Salomon Brothers, Maple Leaf, Knight Capital, the lawyer sanctioned for trusting an AI's invented citations - is verified against primary sources. And the back of the book turns the system into practice: a scored self-assessment, a 51-second pocket card, a 30-day repair program, and a deployment playbook for boards and bosses.Your errors were never the question. The other fifty-one percent is a set of learnable moves. This book is the set.From the author of Radical Trust, Build the Table, and Proof Before Promise. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…