再Fail often, fail well, April 16th 2011 P63 N4P59゛失敗は成功のもと
Business writers have always worshipped at the altar of success. Tom Peters turned himself into a superstar with ゛In Search of Excellence゛. Stephen Covey has sold more than 15m copies of ゛The 7 Habits of Highly Effective people゛. Malcolm Gladwell cleverly subtitled his third book, ゛Outliers゛, ゛The Story of Success゛. This success-fetish makes the latest management fashion all the more remarkable. The April issue of the Harvard Business Review is devoted to failure, featuring among other contributors A.G.Lafley, a successful ex-boss of Procter & Gamble (P&G), proclaiming that ゛we learn much more from failure than we do from success.゛ The current British edition of Wired magazine has ゛Fail!Fast.Then Succeed. What European business needs to learn from Silicon Valley゛on its cover. IDEO, a consultancy, has coined the slogan ゛Fail often in order to succeed sooner゛. There are good reasons for the failure fashion. Success and failure are not polar opposites：you often need to endure the second ??enjoy the first. Failure can indeed be a better teacher than success. It can also be a sign of creativity. The best way to avoid short-term failure is to keep churning out the same old products, though in the long term this may spell your doom. Business cannot invent the future - their own future - without taking risks. Entrepreneurs have always understood this. Thomas Edison performed 9,000 experiments before coming up with a successful version of the light bulb. Students of entrepreneurship talk about the J-curve of returns：the failures come early and often and the successes take time. America has prove to be more entrepreneurial than Europe in large part because it has embraced a culture of ゛failing forward゛as a common tech-industry phrase puts it： Germany bankruptcy can end your business career whereas in Silicon valley it is almost a badge of honour. A more tolerant attitude to failure can also help companies to avoid destruction. When Alan Mulally became boss of an ailing Ford Motor Company in 2006 one of the first things he did was demand that his executives own up to their failures. He asked managers to colour-code their progress reports - ranging from green for good to red for trouble. At one early meeting he expressed astonishment at being confronted by a sea of green, even though the company had lost several billion dollars in the previous year. Ford's recovery began only when he got his managers to admit that things weren't entirely green. Failure is also becoming becoming common. John Hagel, of Deloitte's Centre for the Edge (which advises bosses on technology), calculates that the average time a company spends in the S&P 500 index has declined from 75 years in 1937 to about 15 years today. Up to 90% of new businesses fail shortly after being founded. Venture-capital firms are lucky if 20% of their investments pay off. Pharmaceutical companies research hundreds of molecular groups before coming up with a marketable drug. Less than 2% of films account for 80% of box-office returns. But simply ゛embracing゛failure would be as silly as ignoring it. Companies need to learn how to manage it. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School argues that the first thing they must do is distinguishing between productive and unproductive failures. There is nothing to be gained from tolerating defects on the production line or mistakes in the operating theatre. This might sound like an obvious distinction. But it is one that some of the best minds in business have failed to make. James McNerney, a former boss of 3M, a manufacturer, demanded the company's innovation engine by trying to apply six-sigma principles (which are intended to reduce errors on production lines) to the entire company, including the research laboratories. It is only a matter of time before a boss, hypotised by all current talk of ゛rampant experimentation゛, makes the opposite mistake. (後略)
