Embrace Your Failure

Embrace Your Failure

Here’s the secret to life. Embrace your failure. Enough said?

Human instinct and that all knowing human ego seem to make this logic counter intuitive. Survival of the fittest means that all humans should avoid too much failure! Everyone acknowledges that humans are not perfect but many of us are harder pressed to harshly evaluate ourselves and few get excited when they spot a failure.

I worked for a successful Fortune 500 technology company a long time ago and proposed doing a market research project to ask customers why and how they use our products. Amazingly this company had never done any market research in the past and, from my perspective, was flying blind. After finally getting approval to do a series of surveys, I found the results to be startling. So, I called a meeting of all the important people to present my results.

After the presentation I turned to the senior product manager in the room and asked, “What did you think?” and he said, “That’s about what I would have expected.” He went on to say that he didn’t plan to take any dramatic action as a result of this research.

I was convinced he was full of it. As the senior product manager he was expected to be an expert in the customer even though no one had ever funded a research study before. So for him to say, “Wow, that really surprised me” would have required him to embrace his failure. And if he wasn’t surprised then he couldn’t make any strategic changes.

The following quarter I conducted another survey. The results were equally startling. This time, however, before presenting the results I made everyone guess what they thought the answers would be to a handful of the questions. This time when I asked, “What did you think?” I got a very different response. He couldn’t hide from the fact that he couldn’t guess the response and the result was significant strategic change.

Is it an unbridled ego? Is it fear of punishment? I was in a Sales meeting once complaining about our poor performance and quoting my friend Albert Einstein who I think said that the definition of “insanity” is doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. I was asking what they would do differently and the response was, “We professionals. We know what we’re doing. It’s worked before and it will work again.” While it’s nice to have a Sales team with confidence, that attitude prevents the Sales Rep from making any change or adjustment.

I often say that as a Marketer I have advantage over most other professions. Someone smart once said that “half of all marketing is wasted but we can’t figure out which half.” While that gets less and less true each year, there is the general perception that Marketing is never perfect and thus it’s acceptable to make mistakes (just not too many). There has been many a time I’ve stood in front of room of important people talking about Marketing’s failure on a given project. I try to get excited about my failures because at a minimum I’ve learned what doesn’t work which is often an important clue toward discovering what does work.

In a nutshell you’ll never get better if you can’t embrace your failures. Ignored failures means you are destined to wallow in your unfulfilled potential.

Greg Harris

July 24, 2009