Always examine your mistakes

Successful companies relentlessly study their underdog products or services, failed marketing programs, and missed forecasts. This is not to assign blame or prove why it was someone else’s fault. Many of your best lessons as a leader would come from failures. So failures are assets, not liabilities. They are advantages, not disadvantages. It is the culture of successful companies to learn after losing some money and market share. Let it become a culture in your leadership to always learn from your mistakes.

A manager returned from a trade show and joyously sent out a piece of e-mail to his team, announcing their product had won nine out of ten possible awards. Within a day, he received 40 e-mails back asking which award they had not won, and why. Such is the intensity of the company’s focus. Each time you fail either in business or leadership, always find out why and pick one or two lessons from it. Remember, your mistakes are your assets.

Many years ago, while I was finding out the major secret behind the success of a giant company in the United States of America, I was able to find out that after each new software product ships, a “postmortem” is held. From its Latin root, postmortem means “after death.” Therefore, in business a postmortem is an analysis of what went wrong and what went well during the life of a project. People are interviewed, reports written, actions and decisions analyzed, and the results are published so any lessons learned can be disseminated around the company. The same is done informally with marketing programs as results and measurements are available. And these reports show the warts of the team, the product, and the process, they shared.

When either a product or service does not meet its goal, successful companies try to figure out why. The implementation may have been flawless, but the basic premise may be wrong. Such was the case with Microsoft’s Trial Plus program, which gave corporations free Word and Excel software to try for 90 days corporate users, sent out software, followed up at prescribed times to see if their charges had installed the software, were training others, and so on. In the end, they expected those who had tried Microsoft software to switch over and buy it for their whole office. What they found was a very high-satisfaction level with the program and the products but a low translation to sales.

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The program was later called the Piracy Plus because it seemed some of the businesses who were trying the software were just keeping it and copying it onto their network. The Trial Plus program was canceled, but the team retained its solid reputation based on their work with customers.

Also, successful companies examine people’s mistakes than punish. Hear what the vice president of a successful company said some decades ago: “If you fire the person who failed, you are throwing away the value of the experience.” As an entrepreneur, you need to learn from this proven business principle and apply it to your own business. This is important because in this part of the world, we do not value those who fail while trying and over the years, we have been throwing away the value of their priceless experience, hence where we are as a people.

A world-class successful company has a great tradition of promoting people who are in-charge of failed projects. They are not promoted because they are ‘blockheads,’ they are promoted because they are intelligent people who failed on the job. Kindly understand that people fail on the job, not because they are unintelligent, they fail because they are intelligent. Hear what an intelligent vice president of a successful company said: “I worked on the marketing for LAN manager. It was a flop. They promoted me to be in charge of marketing of Windows for workgroups—it got off to a rocky start. I was promoted to be Bill’s (Gates’) assistant, investigating the on-line service, and was put in charge of creating Microsoft’s on-line service. That got off to a rocky start too and they made me a vice president. Imagine if I had been on successful products!”

When the product manager of Microsoft’s spreadsheet software came to Bill Gates in 1984 and told him there was a major bug in the product and it would have to be recalled from retailers, Bill told him, “well, you came in to work today and lost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Tomorrow, you will hope to do better.” Today, that product manager, Jeff Raikes, is a member of Microsoft’s Office of the President.

It is said that at Microsoft there is a company-wide commitment to accepting mistakes as part of the process because so many new areas are being explored. Allowing people to fail with impunity (on the right occasions) paves the way for those people to take risks again in the future. And the rest of the company, watching from the sidelines, will feel emboldened as well. They will be freer with their ideas. They won’t shy away from a project that has a chance of going under. The freedom to fail helps move the company forward. The saying, “whenever you screw up, you get promoted,” has been known to come up laughingly at Microsoft meetings.

In your company, ministry, etc learn not to punish intelligent people when they make mistakes (not repeated mistakes). Give them the freedom to fail. This will help your company, ministry, etc move forward. Lastly, always teach them to turn their mistakes to school and never you fail to keep those who fail while birthing a new thing on the inside of either your company or ministry. They are your priceless products!

See you where successful people are found.

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