March 01, 2021 Success is an alluring subject. People want to know how the rich got rich, how the famous got famous, how a world-changing product was born. But those success stories are generally told without considering the failures that happen in parallel, says Balázs Kovács, associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale SOM. The same issue complicates studying the history of ideas, says Kovács, who recently set out, with Jerker Denrell of Warwick Business School, to understand the rise and fall of the concepts that form the shared language of business leaders and both shape and reflect their strategy.