Yes, the small treasure here is the story of Paul Otlet's ideas and work. The 'lessons learned', not so much.
It's a sound concept to learn lessons from the failures of others, even, and perhaps especially those others who otherwise excel in their field. However, as this piece shows, it's easy to draw the wrong lessons from singular biographies.
A better approach might be how failures are investigated, analyzed, and cataloged in various fields such as aviation and rock climbing. Those seemingly dry failure reports can make surprisingly fascinating reading, and the collections that bring them closer to data than anecdotes can provide powerful insights.
So, maybe some kind of Institute For The Study of Career Disasters? Not entirely joking, it'd be genuinely helpful to, for example, go beyond just the "90% of all small businesses fail in X years", and provide actual analyzed insight (not just more anecdotes) into what makes the difference between success and failure, and what failures have good prospects of successful restarting (i.e., their death was more likely just bad luck /Force Majeure vs pilot error)...
It's a sound concept to learn lessons from the failures of others, even, and perhaps especially those others who otherwise excel in their field. However, as this piece shows, it's easy to draw the wrong lessons from singular biographies.
A better approach might be how failures are investigated, analyzed, and cataloged in various fields such as aviation and rock climbing. Those seemingly dry failure reports can make surprisingly fascinating reading, and the collections that bring them closer to data than anecdotes can provide powerful insights.
So, maybe some kind of Institute For The Study of Career Disasters? Not entirely joking, it'd be genuinely helpful to, for example, go beyond just the "90% of all small businesses fail in X years", and provide actual analyzed insight (not just more anecdotes) into what makes the difference between success and failure, and what failures have good prospects of successful restarting (i.e., their death was more likely just bad luck /Force Majeure vs pilot error)...