Back Story:
Fail Faster
"Fail faster to succeed sooner," or so the saying goes.
Intellectually, it makes a lot of sense. Most small businesses fail. Most new products vanish without a trace. Venture capitalists -- arguably the best idea finders in the world -- are delighted if a third of their investments succeed.
So if failure is inevitable, better get it over with, learn the lesson, and move on.
You first.
That's the difficulty, of course. Neither most corporate cultures nor society at large are terribly tolerant of failure. The more spectacular the failure, the more dire the career consequences are likely to be. Falling short of a difficult goal is often punished more severely than shambling along in mediocrity. ¶ 2003 ALCS...
One of my favorite examples of the rewards of falling just short is the story of the 2003 Boston Red Sox. After stumbling through August, a strong September earned them a playoff spot. They came back from two games down to beat the Oakland A's, 3-2, in the Division Series. Then they went head-to-head with the New York Yankees, finally losing the American League Championship Series after ace pitcher Pedro Martinez failed to hold a lead in game seven.
Consensus around the baseball world was that the 2003 team owed much of their success to their manager, Grady Little. However, Little was also blamed for the loss, having left Martinez in the game even though he appeared to be tiring in the eighth inning. His contract was not renewed, but he received numerous Manager of the Year votes.
Yet the spectacular career- and company-killing failures are usually not the result of "failing faster." Just the opposite. These disasters happen when companies refuse to admit failure, plowing more and more resources into an idea that just isn't going to work. Rather, the point is to identify failures quickly and move on to something else. ¶ Then again......
Of course, no sooner do I write this than I start reading The Innovator's Solution, in which Clayton Christensen argues that most business analysis suffers from poor theoretical grounding, particularly a tendency to declare that a single excellent company's methods should be followed universally, rather than trying to identify the circumstances in which those supposedly universal methods fail.
Copyright © 2007 Katherine Derbyshire
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