Trigger Question #104:
The universe is littered with dippy success jingles linked to failure. You know the ones I mean. Failure is life’s greatest teacher. Turn every failure into your success. Fail your way to success. The secret to success is to fail fast and often. And so on.
Why, I wonder, is it necessary to state the obvious so repeatedly and earnestly? Surely, we intuitively understand the advantages of (some) failures. After all, we, now confident strollers, once failed as crawling infants.
So, why state the obvious? Because I suppose some of us crawlers fail. And then fail to try again.
Or we fail and fail again and again. Until we are so used to failing that failing becomes our norm. Our comfort. And along the way we develop a fear, not of failure, but of success.
Which is why some of us need reminding that failure does not have to be a stepping stone to… failure. We need reminding that failure can buy us time, that one who tries and fails today lives to try another day. (My apologies to Bob Marley, who gave us The Heathen: “‘Tis he who fight and run away live to fight another day.”)
And yet, some failures should be just that. Failures. Stomped on and left for dead in the dust of the past.
Your job as a manager, and in life, is to judge which failures to stomp and which ones to spin. Spin? Yes, spin. Because you cannot go from failure to success without tweaking what went wrong until it goes more right than wrong. Spin is what you must do to convince your troops that this new tweak is enough of a change in the right direction.
Which is why a huge part of being an effective manager is the ability to change direction when required without losing momentum. Don’t forget, momentum comes as morale or progress or both.
Did I use the word troops earlier? Yes, and here’s why. Early in the Korean War, Major General Oliver Smith realized that the only way to save his Marine Division from a trap was to retreat rapidly and orderly. Asked whether retreat was the Marine thing to do, he replied, “Retreat, hell! We’re not retreating, we’re just advancing in a different direction.”
Still, I cannot help but feel that many of the success jingles I find foolish fail to hook me because they try too hard to put a positive spin on advancing in a failed direction… without clarifying how that will lead to success.
Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.
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Quote of the Moment:
“There is nothing wrong with failure, as long as it happens to someone else.” The Chief Nonsense Officer.
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