There’s a Right Way and a Wrong Way to Fail
The options are: openly examine past mistakes and learn, or avoid a reckoning and repeat them.
Worried?
Photographer: Thierry Dosogne/Stone SubI have been thinking about errors, mistakes and failures ever since I traded my first stock decades ago. Good traders expect to be wrong, but that attitude is surprisingly rare in business. That is a shame, because having a healthy outlook on failure would benefit corporations, governments — just about everyone.
We shall dispense with the usual tired tales — yes, we all know that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was picked in the sixth round of the National Football League draft, and that all-time basketball great Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school varsity team. Instead, let’s consider how we can better incorporate data into our processes, open versus closed approaches, and how we can learn to fail better.