Celebrate Failure

So says Richard Watson in this FastCompany column. An extremely interesting observation is regarding people’s response to failure. Most people will deny it, or attribute it to causes outside themselves! This is because as Watson says “Most people believe that success breeds success and they believe that the converse is true too, that failure breeds failure”.

Another interesting viewpoint in the essay is regarding the oft-repeated “tenacity advice”. Most motivational speakers urge people not to give up. They say that if you just keep on trying, you will eventually succeed. And if you don’t, it must have something to do with your not trying hard enough. Watson believes this to be false. He advises us to learn from failure and try again differently.

As Henry Moore said: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is: It must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Watson’s top five tips for failing with greater frequency and style:
1. Try to fail as often as possible but never make the same mistake twice.
2. Set a failure target as part of each employee’s annual review.
3. If projects are a failure, kill them quickly and move on.
4. Create a failure database as part of knowledge management.
5. Set up annual failure awards. If this gets too successful, stop it.

What do you think?

Quotes from Peter Drucker

1. Help is defined by the recipient
2. The critical question is not “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?”
3. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. He alone gives employment.
4. It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.
5. An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.
6. You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers — because without trust, they won’t fight.
7. Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.
8. It is easy to look good in a boom.
9. Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.
10. The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.
11. There are keys to success in managing bosses. First, put down on a piece of paper a “boss list,” everyone to whom you are accountable. Next, go to each person on the list and ask, “What do I do and what do my people do that helps you do your job?” And, “What do we do that makes your life more difficult?”
12. Workmanship is essential: In fact, an organization demoralizes itself if it does not demand of its members the highest workmanship.
13. A decision is a commitment to action. No decision has, in fact, been made until carrying it out has become somebody’s responsibility.
14. It’s much easier to sell the Brooklyn Bridge than to give it away. Nobody trusts you if you offer something for free.
15. The ultimate test of an information system is that there are no surprises.
16. Until a business returns a profit that is greater than its cost of capital, it does not create wealth — it destroys it.
17. The question has to be asked — and asked seriously — “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now?” If the answer is no, the reaction must be “What do we do now?” Very often, the right answer is abandonment.
18. Freedom is not fun. It is a responsible choice.
19. One can’t manage change. One can only be ahead of it.
20. Just go out and make yourself useful.
21. Conventional wisdom is often long on convention and short on wisdom.
22. Businessmen owe it to themselves and owe it to society to hammer home that there is no such thing as “profit.” There are only “costs”: costs of doing business and costs of staying in business; costs of labor and raw materials, and costs of capital; costs of today’s jobs and costs of tomorrow’s jobs and tomorrow’s pensions. There is no conflict between “profit” and “social responsibility.” To earn enough to cover the genuine costs, which only the so-called “profit” can cover, is economic and social responsibility — indeed, it is the specific social and economic responsibility of business. It is not the business that earns a profit adequate to its genuine costs of capital, to the risks of tomorrow and to the needs of tomorrow’s worker and pensioner that “rips off” society. It is the business that fails to do so.
23. I would hope that American managers — indeed managers worldwide — continue to appreciate what I have been saying since day one: Management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, it’s so much more than ‘making deals.’ Management affects people and their lives, both in business and many other aspects as well. The practice of management deserves our utmost attention; it deserves to be studied.
24. Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven’t.
25. Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately generate into hard work.
26. So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
27. What everyone knows is usually wrong.
28. Popularity is not leadership. Results are. Leadership is not rank, privileges, titles, or money. It is responsibility. There may be ‘born leaders,’ but there surely are too few to depend on them.
29. Leadership is not magnetic personality – that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ – that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
30. Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard and the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations.
31. Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.
32. In today’s marketplace, productivity is the true competitive advantage.
33. The effectiveness of an organization depends on work being done at the lowest possible organization level.
34. The one truly effective way to cut costs is to cut out an activity altogether. There is little point in trying to do cheaply what should not be done at all.
35. The best way to predict the future is to create it.

My Life as a Knowledge Worker – By Peter Drucker

Just read this absolutely brilliant article by Professor Drucker in Inc Magazine, in which he writes about the seven experiences that shaped his attitude to life and work.

Thank you Gautam Ghosh for leading me to it, and for the excerpt…

“I had no idea what I would become, except that I knew by that time that I was unlikely to be a success exporting cotton textiles. But I resolved that whatever my life’s work would be, Verdi’s words would be my lodestar. I resolved that if I ever reached an advanced age, I would not give up but would keep on. In the meantime I would strive for perfection, even though, as I well knew, it would surely always elude me.

I have done many things that I hope the gods will not notice, but I have always known that one has to strive for perfection even if only the gods notice.

Gradually, I developed a system. I still adhere to it. Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject, but they are enough to understand it. So for more than 60 years I have kept on studying one subject at a time. That not only has given me a substantial fund of knowledge. It has also forced me to be open to new disciplines and new approaches and new methods–for every one of the subjects I have studied makes different assumptions and employs a different methodology.

I have set aside two weeks every summer in which to review my work during the preceding year, beginning with the things I did well but could or should have done better, down to the things I did poorly and the things I should have done but did not do. I decide what my priorities should be in my consulting work, in my writing, and in my teaching. I have never once truly lived up to the plan I make each August, but it has forced me to live up to Verdi’s injunction to strive for perfection, even though “it has always eluded me” and still does.

Since then, when I have a new assignment, I ask myself the question, “What do I need to do, now that I have a new assignment, to be effective?” Every time, it is something different. Discovering what it is requires concentration on the things that are crucial to the new challenge, the new job, the new task.

To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do–they are the keys to continuous learning.

First, one has to ask oneself what one wants to be remembered for. Second, that should change. It should change both with one’s own maturity and with changes in the world. Finally, one thing worth being remembered for is the difference one makes in the lives of people.”