by Jevon MacDonald
September 1, 2008 at 1:01 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was taught one of the most valuable lessons I have learned yet. Someone who I would call a mentor told me that his secret to life was that he was just really good at screwing up. He married someone who understood that and he was sure to always learn from each failure.
This advice has served me well over the years. I married someone who is the first to tell me when I do something stupid, and she’s the first to move on from it. I have business partners who are often even more forgiving, and friends who are not only forgiving, but who I think take a perverse pleasure in each other’s mistakes. I guess you have to be able to see the humor in things!
In working with a potential customer a few weeks ago, we had come to that bad place in social computing. He was fixated on mitigating risk, I was fixated on keeping the project in a box that he could sell in to his company, and we were both generally just losing faith.
J.P. recently wrote “Now we come to Enterprise 2.0, a term that is many things to many people. There was a time when I thought I knew what it was, a time long since past.“. I found my self screaming “preach it!” from the pews. I have stopped trying to define Enterprise 2.0, and so have most people who have had to wade through board meetings, pitches and proposals to try to get social media initiatives underway inside the enterprise.
Like JP, I am not really sure what Enterprise 2.0 is, but if someone were to ask me, I would say that one of the secrets of Enterprise 2.0 is in being really good at failure.
The ability to fail isn’t exactly a widely acclaimed business strategy. CEOs do not get bonuses for good failures, and the quality of a failure is rarely measured in an organization, as opposed to successes which are regularly measured and then paraded around.
Google is a good example of a company that seems to recognize failure as an acceptable part of business. In the slew of projects and products that Google regularly launches, they regularly allow products to fail in the market. The incredible thing is that Google has taken a liability (public failure) and they have turned it in to an asset (the perception that Google is cutting edge, innovative and execution focused).
Identifying, chronicling and reacting to failed initiatives is a crucial competency of large organizations, but it is overlooked in place of an obsession with engineered success, highly managed systems, and governance-driven benchmarks.
A Failure Economy is one of the major strategic opportunities of the use of Enterprise 2.0 tools and strategies.
How does Enterprise 2.0 change the way we should perceive failures?
- Identify failure earlier. Your entire organization can monitor the project, surface key data points and offer analysis of the health of the project.
- Chronicle and catalog failure. Was this project attempted unsuccessfully before? What were the environmental factors that influence the failure? Was it an internal failure, or a market-driven result.
- Understand the innovator’s mindset. Who drove the project forward and what was their rationale? Their blog entries and wiki articles from the project will provide valuable insight.
- Identify successful components. What parts of the project were successful, even if the entire project was not successful?
Today Google is launching Google Chrome, an open source browser project, and a few months ago it was Google Knol. I won’t begin to catalog all of Google’s failed projects, but there have been many. In the past we would have judged a failure rate like Google’s as dismal and a commentary on the health of the organization, but instead we judge Google as innovative and capable.
How different could the public perception of your business be if you allowed the same level of innovation and risk?
Social software and strategies are the first steps towards getting good at screwing up. Until now there was far too much risk in allowing projects to fail in the marketplace. This was because there was no ability to identify the failure early enough, and there was also very little capability to have that failure inform future effort. We now have these capabilities, and it is time to revisit failure as a strategic capability rather than an organizational liability.
This is the sort of thing someone should write a book about.
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Another article claiming that Google’s failures are seen as indications of “cutting edge efforts.” Creating another browser, especially when there is an extreme lack of demand for same, and it is transparently an attempt to garner more money from web user’s pockets,
will not be viewed as advancing the technology. Advancing the technology means creating a set of standards so that crappy monopolies like Mcrosoft and Google simply cannot occur.
What’s astounding is to hear those who have basjhed MS for comprising a restraint of trade getting behind Google, a clear monopolistic enterprise that only can afford all those failures because they have the pot locked for web browsing ads. Google has contributed zilch to the technology and deserves zilch. It’s a sad commentary on the immaturity of the computer and web business. We deserve better than the xrap that’s out there now, and we DON’T need Gooogle to steal Firefox and then claim they’ve created “from scratch” (!!!) yet another web browser.
The article was about screwing up - not an opportunity for the old monopoly MS rant. The point of the importance of failure is well made and mainly overlooked.
The vast majority of “inventions” and “Innovations” fail. Not in terms of they don’t work but in terms of significant market success - the only measure of business success.
The success rates of “Innovations” or new business ideas in the marketplace is worse than 1 in 200. In the food industry I have heard quotes of ~1 in 5000 make it good.
Most businesses don’t have a KPI for failure and as pointed out, most CEOs don’t use failures as drivers for their business. Unfortunately, one of the best modes of learning is failure. and it is important to remember the mantra: that if you want to succeed, you must do everything possible to avoid failure. Too little planning is done for Innovation, - we get too excited and passionate about our new ideas, we don’t want to wait and plan - we”know” that it will work and rush ahead like headless chickens ad delude ourselves that it has been successful, denying any failures. With business planning (due diligence) , you can identify any potential trip-wires & hurdles that may precipitate a failure and make sensible decisions on the ideas commercial viability.
Repeat the above mantra for every new idea you have and you are more likely to be innovative & rich.
I can’t believe what I read on kerry’s comment. Come on, no one should buy anyone’s kool-aid, but to equate MS to Google is insane. MS profits from monopoly where competition was destroyed by that same company. Since the beginning (copying Xerox’s GUI interface from Apple, betraying IBM in the OS/2 development, betraying QuarkExpress by telling them future was OS/2 when they were building win95 with office 95, the NetScape destruction, DRM quagmire, etc., etc.) MS has done nothing but buy innovation, patent it, destroy competition using its own monopoly, tax consumers with its “inevitability”, and stiffle all breakthroughs.
I can cope with Google being a “corporate mega-evil capitalist pig house of hell”, whatever that means, but their business is simply unable to do the bullyisms that MS was able to do. Google.com is as accessible as Yahoo.com or Live.com. If people use it, its because they have chosen it, not because google somehow “owns” your computer. People use Gmail because they like it. And yes, they also buy things, but YouTube wasn’t exactly profitable, so it had to be bought, same as Blogger and Google Earth (GE before being google’s was not going to be free, I fail to see its offering as something bad, but that’s probably the sheep inside me).
Chrome is everything IE isn’t. It’s OPEN SOURCE, which means anyone can take it and improve it without asking for permission. Try doing that with IE and you’ll be in jail before you even press “compile”. If it’s open source, it means that Google will simply be unable to monetize from doing irritating things to users (if chrome is irritating, it won’t be popular, and someone will just grab the source code and build a less irritating “Chrome”, that’s the power of open source). And it’s going to innovate in good ways. I like the multiple thread, the security characteristics and the ability to form net apps. It also doesn’t seem particular-apps oriented. Google Gears is based itself on AJAX and it develops open standards, so that’s another non-issue.
The claim that Google steals from FIrefox is stupid and unwarranted. Google is the major contributor to Firefox (d’oh!!), and Firefox is open source, so it is meant to be “stolen”, that’s the purpose of it! By making Chrome Open as well, it means that Firefox team can also “steal” from Chrome as well, so there.
I can only see innovation and good stuff in here.
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AngelSeptember 5th, 2008 at 5:42 pm |
Thanks for the article, I enjoyed reading it. You are right, it does feel like there should be a book about this…there probably is.
I think success and failure are relative terms. An undesirable outcome may be defined as a failure, yet the experience or knowledge gained could be a potential benefit for future improvement. For this reason, most successful endeavors are built upon earlier failures.
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