The Failure of Successes

By all accounts, my father was a success in life. Successful entrepreneur, happy family, generous spirit. He was indeed a very successful man. Some believed he had the "Midas Touch". Many observers might thought his success came easily...or that he had always been succesful.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

To see him in action did not inspire. I found myself looking down my well-healed Fortune 100 trained nose. In fact, I would wonder how he did so well. He was not a polished speaker. He blurted out thoughts that were undeveloped, unrefined, and sometimes, unnerving. His constant flow of ideas ranged from the terrifying and terrible to the clumsy and mundane. I would guess his ideas had a failure rate of about 99%. But his 1% made him a pillar in the community, and a force in his industry.

What drove his success was that he relentlessly pursued an objective. He didn't acknowledge failure like most timid souls. Stone walls were simply that...walls to be torn down, climbed over, or busted through. As he grew older, he grew wiser. He learned that that there was always another path to the prize.

There was one area where failure mattered to him, and that was with people. He would never fail a friend. It is still an honor to have his old industry pals come up to me to remind me what kind of man my father was and share the depths of their love and respect for him.

Seth Godin's Blog on "A hierarchy of failure worth following" reminded me of all that was great about my father. Particularly about his approach to failure. I commend his blog post to you.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/

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"A hierarchy of failure worth following" by Seth Godin

Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!

FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.

FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.

FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.

FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.

FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.

The thing is, in their rush to play it safe and then their urgency to salvage everything in the face of an emergency, most organizations do precisely the opposite. They throw their customers or their people under the bus ("we had no choice") but rarely take the pro-active steps necessary to fail quietly, and often, in private, in advance, when there's still time to make things better.

Better to have a difficult conversation now than a failed customer interaction later.