Posts Tagged As Eric Ries

Failure Forums: Lessons Learned From Failed Startup inSphere

Most startups will fail. Everyone in the startup community knows that failure is a more common occurrence than success. Silicon Valley has become so enamored by the “value of failure” that rumors suggest they are considering handing out merit badges for failed entrepreneurs.  Just how common is startup failure? Harvard researcher Shikhar Ghosh cites that 75% of VC funded startups fail to return a single dime to their investors. So why do we hear so little about failed startups in Minnesota? Are we too “Minnesota nice” to brag about our failures?

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Build a Learning Organization: Embedding Failure Into the Culture

For the longest time business and military leaders wouldn’t dare utter the word failure in front of their organizations.  For many the credo was that failure wasn’t an option.  Times have certainly changed but many organizations are just scratching the surface in addressing the difficult issues surrounding failure.

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Innovation Excellence: Using the Innovation Pipeline to Drive Growth & Address Failure

In business we often launch new initiatives without thinking through the “what if’s?” of the project failing.  Instead we get to the end of the road and the initiative didn’t turn out as planned.  Rather than chalking up one big failure at the end you can break the initiative up into pieces and evaluate each stage along the way.

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Connecting the Dots on Innovation: It Must Be Part of a System and 3 Out of 4 Projects Fail

Last month consulting firm Accenture released a report (“Why Low-Risk Innovation Is Costly“) on the state of innovation at big companies from the U.S., U.K., and France.  Their survey of 519 executives at large companies concluded that most were disappointed with the return on their innovation investment.  Many of these companies cited that they were scaling back their disruptive innovation efforts and settling for more incremental innovation like product line extensions.

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FailCon: Silicon Valley comes out of the closet… on failure.

There won’t be any floats or parades in San Francisco today but there will be a similarly strong debate on fear, emotion, and failure.  Today is the fourth annual FailCon conference being held in San Francisco, California.  The goal of the conference is to “Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it” and it is targeted at Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers.  The thought is that by talking about our failures and learning from the failures of others we can move beyond our fear of failure toward our path to success.  Sound familiar?

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How do you handle failure at home, at school, or at work? Do you plan for it?

Today Peter Sims wrote about my favorite topic Failure in an article for the HBR Blog titled “The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure.”  Sims comments on how parents, teachers, and bosses all push us to prevent errors and mitigate risks.  He points out how entrepreneurs and designers have a different frame of mind toward failure seeing “mistakes” as part of the trial-and-error processes of driving innovation.  Sims calls for each of us to revolt against this thinking and to no longer be “shackled by these norms.”

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Silicon Valley has moved from tolerating failure to embracing it. When will the rest of us?

Last month Inc. magazine ran an article titled “Why Silicon Valley Loves Failure” about how failure has moved beyond a buzzword in the land of Internet startups. The author (Eric Markowitz@EricMarkowitz) shared the story of mid-’90s entrepreneur Kamran Elahian. Elahian had custom plates for his Ferrari F355 made with the word “Momenta.” Momenta was the name of a company that he founded in back 1989. Great, so what you say? There are thousands of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who drive around with their company’s name on the vanity plates. The interesting point was that Elahian chose the name of his previous company that had already gone bankrupt back in 1992. When ask why he chose his failed company, Elahian responded with “It’s to remind me not to be too proud. Unlike other entrepreneurs who put the names of successful companies on license plates, I decided to put my biggest failure. That way, I have to be reminded of it every time I get in the car.” He had moved beyond accepting his failure to being proud of his failures (see my post on the idea of a having a Failure Resume).

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