Fail Often to Succeed Sooner!

I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process. –  Thomas Alva Edison

Canadian inventors Chris Haney, Scott Abbott and John Haney struggled with the board game Trivial Pursuit. While it only took them 45 minutes to create the conceive, they lost $45,000 trying to market it in over four years before it finally became a hit.  Unemployed artist Michael Wurstlin had designed the board and logo for five shares in the company. Despite the early failure his shares were valued at $2,500,000 by 1986.

In 1959, Honda Motor Company made an inauspicious entry into the US market with their range of low powered motorcycles.  What they failed to anticipate was the American thirst for size and power that the little bikes from the Tokyo suburbs failed to satisfy.  They eventually developed a range of more powerful bikes and Honda became a household word. Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda said, “Many people dream of success. Success can only be achieved through repeated failure and introspection. Success represents the one percent of your work that results from the 99 percent that is called failure.”

In many instances, the best way to test an idea is not to analyze it but to try it. While trying lots of ideas will increase the number of failures, the chances are much greater of achieving success. By trying numerous initiatives we improve our chances that one of them will be a star. As Tom Kelley of IDEO puts it, “Fail often to succeed sooner.”

Silicon Valley is the embodiment of high-tech growth, but it is the Darwinian process of failure that drives its success. Author Mike Malone puts it like this, “Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success, but it is, in truth, a graveyard. Failure is Silicon Valley’s greatest strength. Every failed product or enterprise is a lesson stored in the collective memory. We don’t stigmatize failure; we admire it. Venture Capitalists like to see a little failure in the résumés of entrepreneurs.”

Penn State University is such a believer in the benefits of failure that they have created a course for their engineering students called Failure 101.  In the course, students do experiments and take risks.  The more failures they have, the better the grade!

Many great successes started out as failures. Columbus failed when he set out to find a new route to India (but he did find that little place called America).  3M invented glue that was a failure because it did not stick. But it became a huge success when someone came up with the idea of the Post-it note. Champagne was discovered by a monk called Dom Perignon, when a bottle of wine accidentally had a secondary fermentation.   And lets not forget the little blue pill, Viagra.  It was originally developed to relieve high blood pressure until men in the test group reported a pleasant side effect.  Viagra went on to become one of the most successful failures of all time!

How many failures make a success?

Another way to look at failure is from the perspective of the traveling salesman.  How many doors does he have to knock on before he makes a sale?  Over time, he will come up with a statistical average of lets say 1 in 100, hypothetically speaking.  Now there are two ways that he can approach the next door he approaches.  The first is to think to himself that he has a 99% chance of failure when he knocks on that door, in which case he will be predisposed to failure.  The second approach is to view that door as the next one of that 99 he must knock on to achieve success.  This breeds a positive approach which will actually lend itself to supporting that success.

Every failure is a stepping stone to success. When asked why so many of his experiments failed,  Thomas Edison explained that they were not really failures. Each time he had simply discovered a method that did not work.

Tom Watson Jr., the legendary President of IBM who led them through the high-growth years when they were the most admired company in America. He encouraged what he called “wild ducks,’ people with unconventional ideas. One Vice President lost the corporation $10 on a failed experiment.  When called to Watsons office, he was so certain that he would be shown the door that he took his resignation letter with him and presented it.  Watson refused the resignation letter saying “Why would we want to loose you?  We’ve just given you a $10 million education!”

Everyone remembers Coca Cola’s experiment with “New Coke”.  when they rolled out a well researched, taste-tested new formula to energize its lethargic brand, they were met with a firestorm of consumer criticism.  While it had fared well in consumer tests, it was a marketing disaster and they were forced to bring the original back after just 79 days, under the new banner of “Classic Coke”.  Did this marketing boondoggle hurt Coca Cola? No.  In fact there are some that now say that it was a brilliant marketing move as it brought about an increase in market share.  As the great philosopher Nietzsche put it, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

When Bill Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, one of the things he directed his focus toward was Microsoft Research, the think tank he established to push the envelope of software technology.  Microsoft is now coming out with new innovations in user-interface design, speech recognition and computer graphics.  As one of his colleagues put it, “Bill isn’t afraid of taking long-term chances. He understands that you have to try everything, because the real secret to innovation is failing fast.”

Celebrate your failures

An innovative organization encourages a culture of experimentation. People within that organization must believe that each failure is a step along the road to success. For an organization to be truly agile, it must give people the freedom to innovate and experiment to succeed. That means celebrating a few failures along the way.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. –  Thomas Alva Edison