I can easily answer that. There is no such thing as bad publicity. People have surprisingly short memory.

I give you an example. At one of my previous workplaces, the managers of two closely operating teams once gathered a small subset of both teams and put before them an ambitious task. Essentially they asked us to make a major overhaul of a crucial part of our software. In an environment where even small changes took months to realize, they asked us, "is it possible to make this happen in four weeks?"

Wee looked each other in the eyes, discussed pros and cons, and eventually concluded that yes, if we drop everything else and are left alone without interference, if would be just about doable.

And so the project started. The first thing I knew was one minor team leader, hitherto unknown and insignificant, took lead and started churning a document after document of this specification and that requirement and this whathaveyou... My part of the project was finished well ahead of the deadline. In fact all the coding was done faster than expected. But not so the PRDs, ERDs and God-knows-what-RDs.

In the end, it took over six months to finish a "four weeks" project.

So what happened to this rising start of a team leader? You guessed it. He was quiet for a while. But two years later, when the company had been reaping the benefits of the finished project for a while and management forgot that it took 6 times longer than it should to implement, he was praised as the hero and put forward as an example of how to lead successful projects. And of course promoted to lead more projects.