Success Quote by Walter Wriston

Wriston’s line has the clipped confidence of a man who spent his career betting on uncertainty and pretending it was a science. “Judgment” is usually marketed as an executive virtue, something you accumulate like frequent-flyer miles: sit through enough meetings, read enough reports, and wisdom arrives on schedule. He punctures that fantasy with a grin. The only reliable factory for judgment is experience, and the raw material for experience is error. Not just any error, either: “bad judgment,” the kind that stings, costs money, dents reputations, and can’t be polished into a neat PowerPoint lesson until after the damage is done.

The subtext is almost managerial heresy. It quietly absolves failure while refusing to romanticize it. Wriston isn’t saying mistakes are good; he’s saying they’re inevitable, and the people most worth trusting are the ones who’ve already paid tuition. Coming from a titan of late-20th-century finance, that matters. Wriston helped shape the modern banking ethos: globalized capital, larger bets, sophisticated risk models, the sense that complexity could be mastered. This quote is the necessary antidote to that swagger, a reminder that models don’t produce judgment, consequences do.

It also functions as a cultural permission slip inside high-stakes institutions: stop demanding spotless resumes, stop punishing every misstep as moral failure, and start building organizations where errors are survivable and therefore instructive. The wisdom lands because it’s brutally recursive: if you want better leaders, you have to tolerate the very thing you claim to hate.