#37 Failure breeds success
Here’s an older article from Businessweek. It’s not about international business failures, but the general message is very fitting: good companies embrace and learn from failure. I am just wondering if embracing failure sometimes doesn’t only promote creativity and risk-taking, but also ignorance and stupidity. That failure is tolerated could easily mean that companies don’t bother to go the extra mile and weigh all alternatives and scenarios, but blindly rush in.
November 24, 2009 @ 9:50 am
I guess it all depends on how you ’embrace’ failure. You can embrace ‘steak and potatoes’ for a healthy life to build strength and fitness, but if you embrace them too much or without the right exercise, they could lead to heart attack and obesity. Yes, there are two sides two every coin, including failure. It’s just that the ‘upsides’ from ‘failure’ is a more interesting story and counterintuitive subject to look at than the downsides because everyone ‘gets’ and understands those aspects to failure.
September 27, 2017 @ 1:16 am
The United States has created a platform where successes are celebrated and failures are punished-in line with the culturally popular but problematic catchphrase, “failure is not an option”; policy often builds a negative view toward failure; research identifies a difference in individual mindsets, “fixed” versus “growth”, individuals with a fixed mindset tie success with performance and find discomfort in failure, individuals with a growth mindset view failures as a positive learning experience and an opportunity for improvement. (Smith, S., & Henriksen, D., 2016). Organizations that embrace and learn from their failures are exceptional because they understand the value of their losses and the importance of implementing new and improved processes. It is said that organizations remain competitive because they are able to support and implement continuous and transformational change; it has been suggested that the rate of failure to deliver sustainable change reaches 80%-90%; unsuccessful implementation of change stems from an organizations inability to remain flexible and adaptive to a dynamic business environment; organizations that are able to anticipate, adapt to, and execute change successfully experience increased long term viability (Gilley, A., Dixon, P., & Gilley, J., 2008). In order for an organization to experience sustainable globalization it is critical for leaders to learn from their failures and implement change. There is clear and growing evidence that the role of leaders in the change process does affect the success of change; the beliefs and mindsets of leaders influence their approaches to problem solving, change, and implementation (Higgs, M., & Rowland, D., 2011). These studies would imply that it is not failure itself that impacts the organization its leadership’s inability to learn from these failures and execute change that impacts the success of an organization.
References:
Gilley, A., Dixon, P., & Gilley, J. (2008). Characteristics of leadership effectiveness: Implementing change and driving innovation in organizations. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 19(2), 153-169.
Higgs, M., & Rowland, D. (2011). What does it take to implement change successfully? A study of the behaviors of successful change leaders. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(3), 309-335.
Smith, S., & Henriksen, D. (2016). Fail gain, fail better: Embracing failure as a paradigm for creative learning in the arts. Art Education, 69(2), 6-11.