Success makes the business world go round. Or Does
it? History suggests that little failures, often, might be the way to long-term
success. Skye Marketing Ltd looks deeper into the growing trend of embracing
failure.
If you wander down the business self-help aisle in
a bookshop you’re guaranteed to see hundreds of books encouraging you to wave
goodbye to failure and welcome success with open arms. If you look at the top
50 best-selling business books on Amazon.co.uk there is a glut of books based
on success from ‘The New Psychology of Success’ to ‘The Story of Success’ via
‘The Success Principles’. Schumpeter, blogger for The Economist, believes that
behind every ‘success’ story there is failure, and sometimes it is spectacular.
Take Thomas Edison who performed around 9,000 experiments before he perfected
his light bulb.
Culturally there are huge differences between
Europe and our American counterparts. Schumpeter writes ‘in Germany bankruptcy
can end your business career whereas in Silicon Valley it is almost a badge of honor.’
The reason that America has shown itself to be more entrepreneurial than Europe
is because it has adopted a policy of “failing forward”, the idea being that
from every failure you learn something and move forwards to make your business
even stronger. Rebecca Faherty, CEO of Skye Marketing Ltd believes ‘in our
society, the word failure has very negative connotations. Perhaps a better way
of putting it would be trial and error. You try something, if it doesn’t work,
you make note of it, and try again until something sticks.’
Owning up to your failures is the first step to
learning from them. Schumpeter points to the case of Alan Mulally who took over
as the head of a sluggish Ford Motor Company in 2006. His first order of
business was to demand that all of his executives colour-code their progress
reports, green for good to red for disaster. Through this he hoped to get them
to admit to their failures and flag up the problem areas on the company.
Mulally was dismayed to find that almost all of the
reports sent to him over the first few weeks were flagged as green, despite the
fact that the company had seen billion dollar losses in the previous year. It
wasn’t until orange and red reports started to trickle through that Ford really
began to take steps forwards. Simply admitting failure, but not learning from
it, won’t see your business surging forwards either. Some major company have
started to take this on board with India’s Tata group awarding a prize for ‘the
best failed idea’ and Eli Lilly, a pharmaceuticals group, holding “failure
parties”. In promoting their failures to the whole company they ensure that
everyone knows where things haven’t worked, and don’t do the same themselves.
Rebecca Faherty feels that ‘without accountability
and honesty businesses have a tendency to brush their problems under the
carpet. That benefits no one. We pride ourselves at Skye Marketing Ltd on the
fact that we have an entrepreneurial spirit. We are constantly trying new ideas
to keep our campaigns fresh for our clients and accept that sometimes those
ideas don’t quite fit. We would rather have tried and ‘failed’ than avoided
short-term failure by churning out the same thing week in and week out. The
only thing that will guarantee is long-term failure.’
