Achievement Management:

Success Secrets

Dealing with Failure

How To Avoid Stupid Failures and Grow by Learning from Failures

"Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently"

– Henry Ford

Failure as a Primary Vehicle for Success

"If you give people freedom to innovate, the freedom to experiment, the freedom to succeed, then you must also give them the freedom to fail. According to Deepak Seethi of AT&T, the organization of tomorrow will demand mistakes and failures. It is only by trying lots of initiatives that we can improve our chances that one of them will be a star."⁶

Failure provides a great learning opportunity and should be viewed as a very lifeblood of success. "Although most people hate to be labeled a failure and love to be labeled a success, it is only through seeming failure that most of life's greatest successes are achieved. Usually, "failure" or "success" is almost entirely in the eye of the beholder... Failure is very often a misperception about the difference between what exists and goes unnoticed (such as growth and learning when we fall short of reaching a goal) and what is realized later (longer term success)."⁵

Differentiate Between Noble Failure and Stupid Failure

David Pottruck, the CEO of Charles Schwab, says: "The idea that failure is okay is ridiculous. I am not going to go around the company and reward someone for failing. But here at Schwab we differentiate between noble failure and stupid failure."¹

Charles Schwab has a set of criteria for defining noble failure. Noble failure occur when:

• you have a good plan and know what you're doing, you've thought everything through carefully, and have implemented with sufficient management discipline, that if you look back in review, you'd conclude it was thoughtfully done

• you have a reasonable contingency plan to deal with any initial failure and the contingency plan must have been implemented

• you need to debrief yourself and ask what you can learn from the experience that will lead your company to be smarter next time.

Charles Schwab journals their failures and lessons they've learned. They maintain also a display of failed innovations and created a videotape for employee orientation. "When celebration of noble failure becomes institutionalized, people within the organization are more willing to reassess earlier decisions¹" and take corrective measures.

Preventing Failure

Failure is not an accident – it's the result of interactions in a system. It has structure and sequence. NLP teaches you to habitually take a systemic view of things - to look at the different elements in a situation as parts of a system which functions for good or ill. This system involves people and a sequence of events, thoughts, feelings, actions and interactions. "Once you understand how the system is working – for or against you – you have a means of structuring things differently in the future, so you can avoid 'failure' again."²

 Case in Point  Abraham Lincoln

Failed in business in '31. Defeated for the legislature in '32. Again failed in business in '34. Sweetheart died in '35. Had a nervous breakdown in '36. Defeated in election in '38. Defeated for Congress in '43. Defeated for Congress in '46. Defeated for Congress in '48. Defeated for Senate in '55. Defeated for Vice President in '56. Defeated for Senate in '58. Elected President in '60... This man was Abraham Lincoln.

 Case in Point  Jacuzzi

"In the 1950s the Jacuzzi brothers invented a whirlpool bath to treat people with arthritis. Although the product worked, it was a sales flop. Very few people in the target market, sufferers from arthritis, could afford the expensive bath. So the idea languished until they tried relaunching the same product for a different market – as a luxury item for the wealthy. It became a big success."⁶

 Case in Point  Microsoft

Many costly Microsoft product failures provided the learning and opportunity for development of many of Microsoft's biggest successes. Examples include:

• Many apparently wasted years working on a failed database called Omega resulted in the development of the most popular desktop database, Microsoft Access.

• Millions of dollars and countless hours invested in a joint operating system project with IBM that was discontinued led to the operating system Windows NT.

• A failed multiplan spreadsheet that made little headway against Lotus 1-2-3 provided learning that helped in the development of Microsoft Excel, an advanced graphic spreadsheet that leads the competition.⁴

Steve Jobs' 12 Rules of Success

11. Learn from failures. Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations... More

The Art of Innovation: 9 Truths

By: Guy Kawasaki

• Don't worry, be crappy. An innovator doesn't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it's truly innovative. The first permutation of a innovation is seldom perfect – Macintosh, for example, didn't have software (thanks to me), a hard disk (it wouldn't matter with no software anyway), slots, and color. If a company waits – for example, the engineers convince management to add more features – until everything is perfect, it will never ship, and the market will pass it by... More

 Case in Point  Dell Computer Corporation

"At Dell, innovation is all about taking risks and learning from failure," writes Michael Dell⁷, the Founder & CEO of Dell Computer Corporation. "Today, we're well known for inventory management, logistics, supply chain management, and such, but that wasn't always the case. Back in 1989, we had a very large disaster – large, at least, for the small company we were at the time. The personal computer industry was making the transition to a new type of memory chip, and we found ourselves stuck with far too many of the old kind. That was a costly mistake, and it took us about a year to recover, but we learned from it. The failure led us to develop a new way to manage inventory, and we went from being last place in the minor leagues to where we now win the World Series every year."

Turning Failures Into Opportunities...

Pursuing Opportunities Faster than Competition...

Fast Experimentation...

Creative Problem Solving...

Energizing People...