In Praise of Failure

You don’t hear about failure very often. And I’m not just talking about innovations that don’t see the light of day. I’m talking about people too. Why is this? What are we afraid of? After all, it’s not as if it’s unknown. Most companies — indeed, most people — fail more often than they succeed. Life is a series of experiments and a great many, if not most, fail.

Failure is the proverbial elephant-in-the-room. And yet by being scared of failure, we are missing a great opportunity.The point about failure is not that it happens but what we do when it happens. Most people flee or pretend it didn’t happen. Or they find a way to be “economical with the actualite” as a former British Government so elegantly described it.

“We launched too late.” “Consumers weren’t ready for it.” “She was never right for me.”No. You failed. Own up to it. Own it. This is a beginning, not the end. Learn and move on.

The problem, and it’s a big one, is this: Most people believe that success breeds success and they believe that the converse is true too, that failure breeds failure. Says who? There are plenty of people who fail before they succeed, some of whom are serial failures. Indeed, there is rumoured to be a venture capital firm in California that will only invest in you if you’ve gone bankrupt twice.

Take James Dyson, the inventor of the bag-less vacuum cleaner. He built 5,127 prototypes before he found a design that worked. He looked at his failures and learned. He then looked at his next failure and learned some more. Each adaptation led him closer to his goal. As someone once said, there’s magic in the wake of a fiasco. It gives you the opportunity to second guess.

None of this is to be confused with the mantra of most motivational speakers who urge you not to give up. Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration they say, and if you just keep on trying, it will eventually happen. And if it doesn’t, you’re just not trying hard enough. This is a big fat lie. Doing the same thing over and over again in the hope that something will change is almost the definition of madness. What you need to do is learn from your failure and try again differently.

All of this brings me to my first point. It is what you do when you fail that counts. Remember Apple’s message pad, the Newton? This was a commercial flop, but the failure was glorious. Indeed, who is to say that the tolerance of failure that is embedded in Apple’s DNA is not one of the reasons why Apple has evolved from a near bankrupt basket case to one of the most valuable and admired companies in history.

Does this mean you abandon your failures? Yes and no. Your idea could be right but your timing, delivery, or execution could be wrong. Who could have guessed that the one-time AIDS wonder drug AZT had been a failed treatment for cancer or that Viagra was a failed heart medication that Pfzer stopped studying in 1992?

As Alberto Alessi once said, anything very new often falls into the realm of the not possible, but you should still sail as close to the edge as you can, because it is only through failure that you will know where the edge really is. The edge is also where real genius resides.

So what I’m interested in promoting are the people whose ideas never get off the ground or rather get somewhere other than where they intended. These are the people who fail on our behalf. The unknown innovators that push things so far to the edge that they fall off. The unlucky or naïve few who open up a new trail — and get scalped — before someone else can see a way through with the wagons. (How’s that for a new historical definition of second-mover advantage?)

There’s a great quote by the writer Douglas Adams that does something like” “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” But an even better quote is by the English sculptor Henry Moore that sums this up pretty well: “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.”

So, here’s my idea. Rather than putting up statues to people who did something that was successful, which to be brutally honest is all statues, let’s build monuments to the people who didn’t. Let’s celebrate the lives of people who invented things that didn’t work or tried to do something that was just plain crazy or ahead of its time. A monument to the unknown innovator in pursuit of an impossible dream. The people we watch with perverse envy when we are too scared, too self-conscious, or too constrained to fail ourselves. Because without these wonderful people, there would be no progress or success.

Here are my top tips for failing with greater frequency and style:

• Try to fail frequently, but never make the same mistake twice.
• Set a failure target as part of each employee’s annual review.
• If projects are a failure, kill them quickly and move on.
• Create a failure database as part of knowledge management.
• Keep things in perspective. Something failed. Nobody died.
• Set up annual failure awards. If this gets successful, stop it*

*Stephen Pile’s Book of Heroic Failures spawned the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain. Unfortunately, the club received 30,000 membership applications and had to be closed down because it was a failure at being a failure.

The Future of the Self

There’s something interesting going on with the self and, like many good trends, it appears to be in conflict with itself. On the one hand we take offence so easily nowadays. We are so easily offended by something said or done by people we don’t even know. On the other hand we say or do things that offend other people and when this blows up in our face they can’t see what all the fuss is about. Is it networked freedom of expression mixed with fragility caused by underlying anxiety caused by exposure to too much information? You tell me! Maybe throw in a bit of post-modernism and political corfectness into the mix too. I certainly don’t think that we are as mentally robust as we used to be and the culprit is most probably externally created and curated identies.

Digital Trust

Michael Wolf, writing in USA Today a few years ago, said that trust could be the next big thing. The theory goes that trust used to be what most individuals and institutions were selling. Trust was built up, consistently, over many years and once acquired, you had the ultimate scalable asset on your hands. Brands, in particular, traded upon this inteangible asset.

Nowadays most major brands have the opposite problem and so do many of our institutions. Nobody trusts them any longer. This is true of the entire financial services industry, all but a handful of politicians, most journalists, the police, the church, a number of scientists and just about any global multinational you care to mention. This lack of trust also applies to the global branding industry, which tries its best to create the illusion of trust for others, but most people don’t trust them either.

In theory, the internet should be able to solve this problem. Millions of online voices rate their satisfaction with just about everything that matters. But, as we saw with Amazon a while back, user reviews can be untrustworthy too. Many are written anonymously, sometimes by someone related to someone trying to sell something, and even when not there’s a tendency to write negative comments more than positive ones. Fake News and the recent Facebook debarkle haven’t helped much either.

So what’s to be done? On one hand it’s a serious crisis of confidence in both capitalism and democracy. On the other hand, perhaps we are missing the power of feedback loops and cycles. If and when something tips too far in one direction, this creates an opportunity for someone, or something, to move off in the other direction.

Perhaps someone will eventually devise a way of getting everyone on the planet to rate everything – a global reputation index if you like. If someone refuses to take part this will indicate they have something serious to hide. But surely this is a new form of sanctimonious conformity? No. What we need here is not more information, but less. Information is the problem, not the solution. There is too much of it to analyse properly and we no longer trust anyone to filter or analyse anything for us.

Enough already

Seems the BBC is now acting like a tabloid newspaper. How about a bit of proper context and analysis. Enough of this scaremongering. Yes it’s a concern that the US and Russia are led by ultra-nationalists and there are far too many actors on the world stage. And yes there are too many things happening at once.A major miscalulation is possible. But Putin isn’t stupid. All he wants is his old sphere of influence back. Maybe a buffer against the US and NATO too.

This is a bit of a jump, but expect to see ultra-nostalgia kick off anytime soon. Comfort foods, comfort films, comfort TV, comfort decor. It’s back to the future folks. As I said in one of my books, in the future the past is always present. Never truer than right now.

Full image here.

Out of the pool thinking

Have you ever noticed how adults in infinity pools tend to swim over to the drop-off with the view and look at whatever is beyond? No? Me neither, but I’ve been beside a couple of swimming pools recently and I noticed it. The better the view the more this tends to happen. But why does this happen and why don’t more people notice it happening? I think the answer to the second question is that when you are beside a pool in a hotel you are more relaxed and hence more perceptive. Your mind is on holiday and apt to wander.

The answer to the first question might be that we are drawn to views, partly out of curiosity to see what lies beyond and partly because expansive views elevate our thinking.

Consider the opposite point of view. You are at work, in a basement lit by florescent lighting. The space is enclosed, sterile, oppressive. How can you possibly think ‘outside the box’ if you are sitting in one?

…that’s a better pool…

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

I’ve been in Bangkok for a while and for no conscious reason decided to take along an old copy of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, which rather charmingly has a paper till receipt inside dated the 10th March 1993 (it’s hard to even read this now it’s so faded). This is certainly when I bought the book, although whether I actually read it then is debateable. Anyway, it’s a really great book and if you’ve not read it you should.

The above is from the opening pages and remember this was written in 1974. There’s also a lovely bit about romantic versus classical thinking, which partly explains Brexit (OK, I may be stretching this way too far). The romantic model is also about feelings and may possibly explain why identity and nostalgia can trump econimics. The classic model is all about rational arguments about measurement, money, GDP and money. One can be proven, the other cannot and the two cannot be resolved.