The Secret to Success — Fail.

My daughters have been crazy about Harry Potter books for a few months now. They’re of the age where we can read them together, and we all thoroughly enjoy the story of Harry and his magical world. We enjoy them so much in fact, that my wife and I have had to endure many challenging nights of getting them, or (*ahem) one of us, to put their books down; to put the magic of the books on the bedside table, and Go the F**k to Sleep (another book worth reading for a big laugh).

It’s been said that creating her book series was also a significant challenge for author J.K. Rowling. After sending her book to over a dozen publishers, and getting rejected by every one, Rowling finally got a publisher who agreed to release her first novel. But Rowling was left with a warning: The unemployed, single mother should get a day job because she wouldn’t make any money writing children’s books. Once Harry Potter was published however, children such as my own proved to every one of those publishing executives that they had made a significant mistake, and had failed to see how Harry Potter would disrupt children’s novels forever.

Failure has traditionally been a taboo topic; everyone and their uncle has tried to deflect mistakes that were made in the name of smart business. That’s understandable; Since we were young, we’ve all been programmed to perceive failure as a negative, something we should be feel ashamed for and don’t want to admit. But in the age of digital disruption, I see companies turning a new leaf.

Now, more than ever, companies are realizing that failure is imperative to business success. It creates innovation by giving us freedom to think outside the traditional “box.” It has the power to transform our business, and make us better leaders, and contributors, for it. Many successful companies have made failure a critical part of their corporate culture.

I also believe that if you never fail, it just means you aren’t aiming high enough. Leaders must aim high, take risks, and accept failure. Without failure, there can be no learnings to drive meaningful next steps.

Being an effective leader starts with the ability to face fear to move the organization further.

In my role as Managing Director of a digital consulting and execution firm, I’ve seen first hand the mistakes that we can make when we cave into fear.

We’re all accountable for results. And change — or managing change, can be terrifying now in the time of Digital Darwinism 2.0. But in my experience if we always hold ourselves accountable, we can learn so much along the way.

1. Failure foils success, but it’s also its counterpart. In my mind, the difference is between failing, and failing fast. Failing is a surefire way to determine what doesn’t work so we can learn what does work. The key is in the timing. Consider, for example, the last time that your company faced a challenge to meet business objectives. Did leadership opt to put all of your eggs in one basket with one option, hoping it would resolve the issue? Or did you try a series of trial-and-error options to avoid a catastrophic error? Although I suspect most of us would say the second approach is smarter, having been in this business, and in consultancy for long enough, I recognize option 1 is the one that many companies stick to out of fear. But when you look objectively at this outcome, doesn’t it seem that we’re predisposed to fail forever (which is, of course, not acceptable)?
2. Nurture change when it means growth. Recently, during the implementation of a strategy and technology roll-out, our team partnered closely with business units of one of our clients’ firm. To execute efficiently, our business team worked closely with their entire IT team to avoid stop-gap solutions amidst hard timelines, focusing instead on long-term holistic delivery. The accountability had been reinforced through an adherence to a DevOps, agile methodology. But changing methodology in practice took a lot of time — both in leadership’s willingness to change execution tactics, and in implementation. From my perspective, the result once permitted, was like watching — I hate to use the Potter-esque term “magic” — but the magic happened as a result of accountability, ownership, and skin in the game. Everybody could see that our and our client’s development team, strategy, management, and subject matter experts were committed to this approach and the outcome. Any any issue that came up was resolved because of it. The struggle was the six months spent planning, and pressing benefits of of a changed methodology — not only senior leaders, but to the tactile middle management. Change is hard — but it’s necessary!

Accepting failure as part of innovation may seem counter-intuitive, but we’re all naturally inclined to fail sometimes. I believe that the acceptance of this idea is essential to any company that will thrive, not just survive — in the second half of 2017 — and well beyond.

About the Author:

Please do not hesitate to contact me at Lawrence.Tepperman@gmail.com or on LinkedIn

Lawrence Tepperman is a serial entrepreneur, having successfully grew and exited two startups, 80/20 Solutions and K2 Digital, and is now Proprietor & President of Berkeley Payment Solutions Inc.