Posts Tagged As Fail

Innovation & Risk-Taking: Why Social Learning Theory Matters in Business and in Golf

Last week I spent four days playing eight rounds of golf in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with 19 other guys.  That is 144 holes in just over 96 hours.  Before you ask the question the answer is yes!  Yes, we are absolutely a little crazy!  We are also equally passionate about the game of golf.  Through this marathon of golf I noticed that something happened to us all when we are playing.  On the golf course, just as in the office, we were adjusting to our environment and influencing each other’s behavior.

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To Succeed in Business, Act Like a Child. My article in The Washington Post.

My article titled To Succeed in Business, Act Like a Child got published on The Washington PostOn Small Business Blog today.  In the article I describe how if we want to encourage innovation in business we should follow the examples set by our children with their creativity, ambition, and fearlessness. As we get older we lose our tolerance for risk-taking and failure. We become conditioned to mitigate risks to preserve our wealth and egos. But there are ways that business leaders can promote risk-taking and failure: 1) intentionally hiring risk-takers, 2) creating policies that retain innovators, 3) purposely addressing risk-taking and failure, and 4) demonstrating transparency.

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Gaming: A Refuge Where Kids Can Learn How to Fail in an Interview with Game Producer Omar Abdelwahed

Last year I was amazed by a couple of stories that had hit the media about kids who had made amazing scientific discoveries.  Jack Andraka, who was 15 at the time, had discovered an inexpensive and accurate test for pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancers.  Check out his seven minute video from the TED Talent Search.  Another innovation teen Catherine Wong, who was 17 at the time, had created a prototype of a portable electrocardiogram (EKG) that can connect to a cell phone via Bluetooth and transmit the results over a cellular network.  As both told their stories it was remarkable how they were undaunted by the trial and error process.  They were not deterred by failure or setbacks and they simply kept trying.  But where do kids learn not to fear failure and develop the courage to pick themselves up and keep moving forward?

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Decision Making in a Complex System: Why Your Flu Shot Likely Failed This Year

A high fever, night sweats, periodic chills, and bouts of delirium can seem like pure hell.  My recent bout with this year’s flu (influenza virus) had completely knocked me out of commission.  Like so many others that were infected this year it was a long road to recovery.  It has been more than a week since I came down with the flu and I am just now finally feeling like I am back on my feet.  Through the whole ordeal I had one lingering question: I got my flu shot this year so why did I still get so sick?

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Overcoming Our Fear of Failure by Writing Our Failure Resume

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:

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An Example of Good: Non-Profit Embraces Transparency, Publishes Fifth Annual Failure Report

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?

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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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