Everyone will experience failures during their life. There is no magic formula that says after _____ number of failures you will succeed. You need to believe in your goals and vision but at the same time adapt and be agile as you go. Take Thomas Edison, for example. He invented the electric light, the central power station, the phonograph and recorded 1,000 patents, but his effort to extract low-grade iron ore from sand cost him millions of dollars and was dubbed “ Edison’s Folly” in the late 1800s. Agility is the only sustainable edge in business.
It’s important to talk about and even celebrate failure. It’s the only way to learn from our mistakes. Take Intuit, for example. A few years back they launched a site called RockYourRefund.com to take the drudgery out of filing your tax refund. It was a complete failure. Scott Cook, the chairman of Intuit, gave the creators an award, stating “It’s only a failure if we fail to learn.”
Take a company like Coca-Cola. Remember products such as Choglit, OK Soda and Surge? How about New Coke? All of these products were complete, utter failures. Coca-Cola’s chairman Neville Isdell embraces risk. “You will see some failures. As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process.” He wants Coca-Cola to take bigger risks, and to do that, he knows he needs to convince employees and shareholders that he will tolerate the failures that will inevitably result. That’s the only way to change Coca-Cola’s traditionally risk-averse culture. And given the importance of this goal, there’s no podium too big for sending the signal. “Using [the annual meeting] occasion elevates the statement to another order of importance,” Isdell said in an interview
As a leader of a company, it is critical to design ways that measure performance and balance accountability with the freedom to make mistakes. Most people may fear failure, but they fear the consequences of it even more. Few executives are able to successfully balance these two disparate components.
Some organizations have tried to measure performance in a way that accounts for these opposing pressures. IBM, for example, measures performance over a three year time period. So if you have one bad year due to heavy experimentation—or whatever is the case—it doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on you. The bottom line, however, is that you never should reward someone for repeatedly making the same mistakes. At the end of the day you need more wins than losses. Remember the words of Thomas Edison. “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.