Failure Resume
About the author

Raed Saber Elaydi, PhD

Management scholar, executive coach, and the principal of a coaching practice serving CEOs, founders, and senior executives across nearly three decades.

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Raed Saber Elaydi is a management scholar and executive coach. For fifteen years he held the Amoco chair at Roosevelt University's Heller College of Business; in 2025 he stepped away from the academy to focus on authorship and full-time consulting.

He holds a PhD in management from Texas A&M University, where his dissertation — The Development and Testing of a Nonconsequentialist Decision-Making Model — introduced and empirically tested a model in which emotions and the stuck state of the decision-making process function as primary drivers of adult decision-making rather than as noise around a rational calculus. Work from the dissertation was published in the International Journal of Organizational Analysis in 2007.

Since 1998 he has been the principal of his own executive coaching practice, serving CEOs, founders, and venture capitalists. The seven composite carriers who anchor the teaching of Failure Resume are drawn from this work.

His scholarly publications include work in the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, and the Journal of Macromarketing.

He is based in Orinda, California. Failure Resume is his first trade book.

Selected credentials

  • PhD, Management — Texas A&M University, Mays Business School
  • MS, Accounting — Trinity University
  • BS, Finance — University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business
  • Amoco Chair, Heller College of Business, Roosevelt University (15 years)
  • Principal, executive coaching practice (since 1998)
A note from the author

On why this book.

I sat across from a man named Addison Baker Duncan in the summer of 1996, the year I was twenty-three. I had been rejected, that spring, from the master's program I had organized my life around. The rejection was the surface event. Underneath the rejection was a configuration of failure I had been carrying since my early childhood and would not, on my own, have recognized as failure I was carrying.

Across two months of three-hour daily sessions, in a 1930s office in San Antonio, Baker shepherded me through the specific interior work the book now makes portable. He died in 2019. The book is the form in which what he gave me can be offered, in altered form, to a reader who will not sit in his chair.

I have been thinking about how to make the work portable for almost three decades. The book is the form the thinking has finally taken.

A shepherd does not teach from a distance. A shepherd walks the same ground the carrier is walking, and lets the walking itself do most of the work.