When I look through someone’s CV, I find myself looking for the difficult parts. The good schools and universities are impressive. So are the blue-chip employers, senior positions and steadily increasing responsibilities.

But I am usually more interested in something else. What happened when things became difficult? What did you do when you did not have the advantages you were accustomed to? When something was taken away? When you failed, lost a job, inherited a difficult situation or found yourself somewhere where your credentials no longer mattered very much?

I am not suggesting that everyone needs to suffer to become capable. Nor should we completely discount privilege or a good education. But I do think adversity reveals things that success sometimes conceals. It shows us how people respond when the environment stops helping them.

I think the same applies to businesses and to the people who lead them. Some businesses operate within extraordinarily favourable economics. They may enjoy regulatory protection, scarce licences, captive customers, preferential access to resources or other forms of economic rent.

Their executives may produce impressive profits and earn substantial rewards. But how much does that tell us about their management capability?

I am much more interested in the business that faced intense competition and had to reinvent its proposition. The company whose costs suddenly made its business model unviable. The organisation that lost a major customer or faced an adverse regulatory environment. The business that was struggling and had to be turned around.

What did management do then? Did they understand what had changed? Could they make difficult decisions? Could they change the business model?

I have seen some of this in my own career and advisory work. The situations from which I have learned the most have rarely been the comfortable ones. They have been businesses where something fundamental was not working; the economics had changed, competition had intensified, capability was missing or the existing model had simply run its course.

These situations force questions that successful businesses can postpone. Difficulty has a way of stripping away comforting assumptions. People discover things about themselves when life becomes difficult and so do businesses.

We also learn most about leaders when circumstances stop doing the work for them.