This week I published an article Why You Should Create Your Own ‘Failure Resume’ for the career blog Brazen Careerist. In the article I suggest that we all need to move beyond our fear of failure, as individuals and organizations, and that by creating our own Failure Resume we can take the first step. I have included an excerpt from the article [FULL ARTICLE LINK] that explains the what, why, and how of the failure resume:
Back in 2011 I was researching the topic of failure within businesses and came across the story of Jeff Stibel, the CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. Jeff had written an article for HBR titled “Why I Hire People Who Fail” where he had described how he created a “Failure Wall” within the company. Jeff sees failure as a great way to learn how to succeed and personally he had always felt that he learned so much more from his failures than from his successes. When Jeff would recount his successes he was never sure if they were just good luck but with failures he knew where things went wrong. One evening while he was celebrating a one of his company’s successes Jeff had gotten an idea for how to shape the company’s culture towards failure. He went in into the office that night and with the help of his assistant he set out to create a Failure Wall. They picked the biggest wall that they had, painted it white, and then started stenciling some of their favorite failure quotes. Employees returning the next morning were encouraged to use a permanent marker to write down one of their failures, comment on what they had learned, and put their name to it. Jeff led by example by sharing one of his personal failures – he felt that he and his wife had waited too long before starting to have children.
So everyone is talking about the importance of “transparency” in business these days – customer transparency, financial transparency, even radical transparency. Do you think you organization is open and transparent? Maybe your company uses social media to continually engage your constituents in every possible social media vehicle or maybe your CMO has been a little “overly transparent” when on more than one occasion he shared a corporate secret via his new blog. Sure you’ll talk about your wins, your new strategy, or your latest promotions but have you ever been transparent with your failures? Have you ever published an annual report that detailed your failed initiatives and the failures in your operations?
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.
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.
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?
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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