2 minutes
Learn From Failure
“If we’re not making mistakes, we’re not trying hard enough”, James Quincy CEO of Coca-Cola
“Our hit ratio is too hight right now, We have to take more risk..to try more crazy things..we should have a higher cancel rate overall.”, Reed Hastings worried that Netflix had too many hit shows and was canceling too few new shows.
“If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments, And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.” Jeff Bezos
If you are not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn. And unless people and organizations manage to keep learning as fast as the world is changing, they’ll never keep growing and evolving.
Patric Doyle (CEO of Domino’s Pizza): two great challenges that stand in the way of companies and individuals being more honest about failure:
- “omission bias”: most people with a new idea choose not to pursue the idea because if the try something and it doesn’t work, the setback might damage their career.
- “loss aversion”: The tendency for people to play not to lose rather than play to win, because for most of us, “The pain of loss is double the pleasure of winning”
Creating permission to fail is energizing. There is no learning without failing, there are no successes without setbacks.