SummaryWhen an expensive piece of factory machinery fails to do its job efficiently, no time is lost sending a crew of mechanics to repair it as quickly as possible. When a machine breaks down repeatedly, it is usually discarded, with a resultant loss to the plant of perhaps tens of thousands of dollars in investment, spoilage of raw material and time lost. When amanin a responsible position fails to do his job efficiently, no crew of mechanics can rush to the scene, repair kits in hand, to restore his efficiency. When his failures continue over a period of time, the man, too, like the machine, must be discarded with a resultant loss to the plant of perhaps tens of thousands of dollars invested in his training for the responsibility of an executive position. No wonder industry today is gravely concerned over the failure of men who have been placed in management positions and whose failure, after a period of time, has cost the company heavily.At the beginning of this study, questionnaires were sent to 300 major executives in American industry asking each executive to consider one man whom he had appointed to a management position and who had failed in that position.The items in the questionnaire were roughly grouped into two categories. Results of analysis of the responses indicated that “personality factors” were more important as causes of executive failures, in comparison to “knowledge lacks,” in ratios of two to one in terms of frequency of checked items as well as in terms of weighted ranks; and in ratio of eleven to one when the respondents were asked directly which was more important.In general, the findings are similar to earlier studies of the causes of failure of lower level employees—clerical, and semi‐skil