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Skye Marketing Ltd Investigates

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.’