Archives for January 2013

Doctors Make Mistakes: They Need to Admit Them and We Need to Tolerate Them

As a follow up to my post last year about how we need to “learn to tolerate failure… even in the medical profession” I wanted to share this TEDx presentation (Doctors make mistakes. Can we talk about that?) from Dr. Brian Goldman (@NightShiftMD).  In it Dr. Goldman captures perfectly the flawed logic of how we all try to portray perfection in our work, especially those god like creates called doctors.  In business our failures can cost money or even jobs but in medicine our failures can cost lives.  And not just the life of patient who suffered from the original error but the lives of other patients based on the repetition of that same error because it is never shared and thus never learned from.

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Taking More Than I Gave: Lessons in Entrepreneurship

Last week I had the opportunity to address a group of entrepreneurs and would-be-entrepreneurs at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO (@Mizzou).  Several times in my life I have come away from an event feeling that I had taken far more that I gave, this was one of those times.  My presentation was to cover “Fear, Failure, and Entrepreneurship” and while I am pretty well versed in the “Fear and Failure” part I am still a novice on the entrepreneur side.  Sure I have launched new business platforms and driven new concepts stores, and build strategies for new product categories for large corporations but the amount of pure entrepreneurial talent at that event far surpassed me.

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To Drive Innovation, Organizations First Need to Learn How to Fail.

HR.com – Developing Organizational Leadership Capabilities Conference (January 28 and 29)

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The Fallacy of the Pre-Mortem in Preventing Failure – A Distinction on Avoiding vs. Managing Failures

I will admit that I definitely have earned the moniker of “The Failure Guy” with my incessant ramblings on the topic of failure: our fear of it, the importance of learning from it, and the necessity of preparing for it.  So I wasn’t surprised when a friend had forwarded me a LinkedIn post titled “The PreMortem: Preventing Failure Before You Fail.”  To be honest I had read the article and thought that it sounded quite ridiculous; the idea that we could simply avoid failure by just preparing more for it seemed tragically flawed.  How much preparation would be required to completely prevent failure on a project of any reasonable complexity?

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#Boom Entrepreneur Conference – Entrepreneurship, Fear, and Failure.

#Boom Entrepreneur Conference – Columbia, MO

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MattHunt.co Blog : Leadership, Innovation, and Failure – Most Popular Posts of 2012

So last week the MattHunt.co Blog officially turned six months old and I wanted to offer a quick thank you to everyone for your support and encouragement along the way.  It will be a busy next few weeks in January with a couple of events and a slight redesign to the blog (there will be more details coming shortly).

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Lovie Smith Failed to Get the Chicago Bears Into the Playoffs, But Was He a Failure?

The measure of success for most NFL coaches is did they get their team into the postseason playoffs.  This year the Minnesota Vikings had a regular season record of 10 wins and 6 loses, the exact same record as the Chicago Bears.  Even though the Bears had the same numbers of wins, the Vikings made it the playoffs and the Bears didn’t.  This was based on the Vikings winning one more division game than the Bears.  The Bears season is over and so is coach Lovie Smith’s era when he was fired last Monday.  How different the feeling is for Vikings coach Leslie Fraizer.  He is being lauded for bringing his team back from a 3-13 record last season and getting his team to the playoffs this year.

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