In my post ‘The Death of Dreams’, I delved into failure at a deeper, more fundamental level. Hugh recently tweeted Elisabeth Gilbert’s TED speech ‘Nurturing Creativity’.

Gilbert, author of mega-best seller ‘Eat, Pray, Love” talks about the emotional and other challenges of having seen exceptional success and knowing, as I described in my post, ‘this is as good as it gets.’ She describes...

“It’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Jesus, what a thought. That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9:00 in the morning and I don’t want to go there. I would prefer to keep doing what I love. And so the question becomes how....The tricky bit comes the next morning for the dancer himself when he wakes up and discovers it’s Tuesday 11:00 am and he is no longer a glimpse of god. He is just an aging mortal with really bad knees and maybe he is never going to ascend to that height again and maybe no one will ever chant God’s name again as he spins and what is he then to do with the rest of his life. This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life.”

Gilbert espouses a coping approach which segregates the exceptional accomplishments of the past from ‘one’s being’ and are thought about as ‘being on loan to you.’ Essentially, she is advocating taking ego out of the mix. First of all, taming the ego itself is as harsh a challenge as anyone will face in life. But, the approach seems similarly applicable to those whose dreams have not materialised in a ‘glimpse of the Gods’, but appear forever out of reach. A big part of the pain here too is the impact on the ego of feeling the failure personally.

Her parting advice is the gem of the speech which provides the truly pragmatic and inspirational direction to how to persevere and thrive regardless of how limited the future appears...

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case [referring to a creative muse she talks about earlier], decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then ‘Ole’. And if not, then do your dance anyhow. And ‘Ole’ to you nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ‘Ole to you nonetheless’ just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.”

The New York Times’ Adam Bryant interviews Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about leadership. Ballmer faces constant competitive pressures, new markets, new technologies, ever changing landscape, shareholder expectations and what does he say his biggest challenge is...

Q. What’s the most challenging part of your job?

A. Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. So I can get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles when progress doesn’t match my expectations.

Balancing upside and downside is one of the core executive issues requiring leadership (more upside) and management (less downside). 

I started this blog with a poem, but have not ventured into the lyrical explorations of failure since.  Last week, I watched the stunning Bollywood film Devdas (thanks Nina) with a script as richly crafted as its dazzling shots. In an inevitable moment of despair, the courtesan Chandramukhi speaks this lyrical line embracing the adversity (and Bollywood sure knows how to do adversity)...

“If sorrow be joy’s harbinger, every loss signals what gain shall be.”

Dan Gilbert’s memorable TED presentation talks about what really makes people happy and not happy with a special note that ‘failure’ has much less impact than everyone expects.

“From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test and on and on have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration, than people expect them to have. In fact a recent study – this almost floors me – a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggest that if it happened over 3 months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.”

He shares a range of stories of people who suffered astounding set backs and yet report great levels of happiness...

· Jim Wright – disgraced congressman who “lost everything” yet said “I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally, and in almost every way.”

· Moreese Bickham – 37 years wrongly incarcerated yet said “I don’t have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience.”

· Harry Langerman – missed out on the first McDonald’s franchise yet said “I believe it turned out for the best.”

· Pete Best – dropped from the Beatles and yet said “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles.”

He ascribes this paradox to our “psychological immune system” which can generate “synthetic happiness” - “We synthesize happiness, but we think ‘happiness’ is a thing to be found.” Synthetic happiness seems like a fancy term for ‘positive mental attitude’ or simply choosing happiness even in the face troubles. He does go through a number of curious scientific experiments dissect how this happiness generation takes place which does underpin the lofty claims with some impressive empirical evidence.

My interpretation is that the Impact Bias is linked to the 'Endowment Effect'.  In short, given two things, in this case 'lives' people will bias towards the one they have over the prospect of an alternative.

I finally had a chance to watch some of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by by Microsoft Research Chief Research Scientist Chris Bishop that Steve recommended. Wonderful examples of demonstration and illustration of some quite complex and abstract notions (the best illustration, or should I say ‘portrayal’ of shared secret key encryption that I have ever seen).

One notion popped up in the description of Internet routing was Braess Paradox which showed how the failure in the system can make the system stronger overall. With both a colourful illustration of some road traffic as well as a striking demonstration with a weight suspended by linked bungee chords (minute 25:30 of the webcast which requires ‘buying’ the zero cost webcast, registering, checking out and then watching). In short, Braess Paradox states that in a given network (like a road system or the Internet), the route to take is affected not only by distance but also by congestion.

It is quite understandable that if every driver on the road follows the ‘most favourable’ path for them (without consideration of the impact of their decision on the overall traffic in the area), then there will likely be traffic jams around bottleneck in the most advantageous route. The paradox comes in as traffic can actually be reduced by eliminating roads. One would think that the more road capacity the better, but actually sometimes a road failure can actually increase traffic flow overall and reduce everyone’s journey.

Bishop actually cites a real life example where a tunnel was closed down and traffic actually improved:

“This strange effect can actually happen in real life. In Seoul, in Korea, they closed one of the three tunnels through the city and they actually found traffic flow improved.”

A colourful and curious example of a failure of a rope, road or link making the overall network stronger.

Poems, videos, essays, commentary all on the subject of embracing failure, and now art. The Spacex gallery in Exter featured an exhibition by Canadian artist Laura Kikauka titled ‘Celebrating Failure’ (thanks Isley).

“Kikauka works with the things that others throw away creating spectacular interiors from disposed and superfluous things. Kikauka mainly relies on found objects to transform her life and surroundings into thematic environments. She regards and appreciates supermarkets, thrift and surplus stores, flea markets and rubbish dumps as contemporary cultural ‘museums’ and carefully sorts the chaos of her finds...Kikauka’s ‘excessive aesthetic’ addresses issues of consumer culture; the question of good and bad taste; and celebrates failure in a humourous and ironic manner.”

I recently attended Microsoft’s executive planning session in Redmond which always serves up a rich vein of insights into Leadership and Management as we chart the stewardship and direction of the company for the approaching fiscal year (Microsoft Senior Leadership, Innovations and Operations).

This year’s gem came from our Enterprise Vice President Simon Witts (also the person who hired me into Microsoft 15 years ago).  He talked about the need to balance ‘break through’ with ‘build on’.  Sometimes you need to take new approaches to go after an opportunity and other times you need to diligently preserve what you have built as a foundation for further growth. The parallel begs another Bennis-like parallel...

Leaders ‘break through’, Managers ‘build on’. Both together drive integrated innovation. 

The Washington Post's piece ‘Ever-Changing Virus Challenges Drugmakers’ provides a prominent example of nature turning failure to advantage with the headline grabbing Swine Flu...

“While the flu is unpleasant and potentially deadly, the virus that causes it is an elegant demonstration of a central tenet of Darwinian evolution: The fitness of an organism is tied to its niche. What is superior in one niche can be inferior in another, and vice versa. Natural selection is interested only in what works.”

“The tendency of the flu virus to mutate rapidly stems from its inability to accurately copy itself. But what ought to be a flaw turns out to be a virtue (for the virus): While most mutations lead to dead ends and death, a few variants are successful because human immune systems do not know how to guard against them. In short order, those strains become dominant in the next outbreak.”

"Last year's virus can evade today's immune response," said Peter Palese, an influenza virus expert at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. "We have all been infected with influenza and have a certain immunity, but the virus has changed enough so many of us can get sick again."

While this blog primarily focuses on the practical and pedestrian aspects to embracing failure, one can easily get properly philosophical about the whole concept.  One of my favourite writers, Chet Raymo, explores the interplay of science and religion and gets into some fairly philosophical areas.  His post on the ‘Problem of Good’ entirely echoes the spirit of ‘embracing failure’.  He points out that many religions paint a picture of a deity crafted world which creates the conundrum of how a perfect and good being created so many terrible things...

“I put the book down with that age-old question on my mind -- why do bad things happen to good people? Why cancer for a child? Why beauty at all if beauty is so vulnerable to arbitrary obliteration?  The Problem of Evil, it is called in the long history of philosophy: If God is omniscient, all-powerful, and loving, why are innocents afflicted? The answers to the riddle have been various, and never satisfying.”

Raymo’s solution is to turn the ‘Problem of Evil’ on its head, by instead embracing the concept of Evil (certainly a conceptual sibling to ‘failure’) in the universe...

“Violence and death are the engines of life. To persist, living creatures must take matter and energy from their environment. As life proliferates, competition for resources becomes inevitable. Aggression is advantageous, even necessary. If nature were not cruel (a human concept), conscious creatures such as ourselves would never have evolved. As Loren Eiseley wrote: "Instability lies at the heart of the world."

In Raymo’s eyes, it is only when we embrace the concept of ‘evil’ being alive and core to our universe can we more effectively turn our attentions and energies to a more interesting and productive ‘problem’...the ‘Problem of Good.’

“But our brains are of sufficient complexity to give rise to that mysterious thing known as self-awareness -- and to notions of love and justice. What humans uniquely face is the Problem of Good: How to create on this tiny planet an oasis of peace. Food for the hungry. A cure for cancer. An end to intraspecies violence. Solicitous stewardship of the planet.”

Steve Clayton’s post on the book ‘Showing up for Life’ by the father of Bill Gates...Bill Gate Snr. alludes to the edifying adversities of running afoul of the ‘demo gods’ (not demi gods).

“It’s a good lesson for geeks out there…not matter how much you prepare, the demo Gods have to be shining on you. When they don’t, it’s not the end of the world…as shown by one Chris Capossela with one of the worlds most famous demo failures of Windows 98. I remember thinking at the time “uh oh…he’s toast”….turns out he did okay afterwards.”

If you want to see the Capossela (now Senior Vice President for products like Office, Exchange and Sharepoint) ‘toast’ moment, check out the video above.

For a perspective behind the scenes of when the Billg demos do go all wrong, check out my earlier post ‘Unavoidable Pain’.

Fine piece titled “Achieving executive balance: Nine ways leaders and managers work together” by Shannon T. Kalvar in TechRepublic on the balance and complementarities of Leadership and Management in the style of Warren Bennis and my own take...

1. Leaders inspire; managers measure
2. Leaders guide, managers navigate
3. Leaders envision, managers maintain
4. Leaders talk, managers listen
5. Leaders support, managers teach
6. Leaders hope, managers analyze
7. Leaders authorize, managers direct
8. Leaders rally, managers retrench
9. Leaders expect, managers demand
   Success requires both

Sterling video by Honda called “Failure: The Secret to Success” (thanks Steve) featuring a collection of Honda racing team members sharing their personal enriching experiences in embracing failure.

“Failure is the product of pushing the envelope.” – John Kessler, Honda Performance Development Engineer

“Edison is trying to do the light bulb and he said, ‘I never failed...it just didn’t work 10,000 times...and that 10,001, it lit up...’” – Dave Marek, Director Advanced Design Studio

“All the demands from Soichiro Honda were to take risks and fail. The idea is that you can fail 100 times as long as you succeed once. ‘Trial and Error’ sums up Soichiro Honda’s ideas. We can only make fantastic advances in technology though many failures.” – Takeo Fuki, President and CEO Honda Motor Company

Much as I lamented Godin’s treatment of the ‘Leadership/Management’ subject in ‘Tribes’, I enthusiastically applaud his perspectives on ‘failure’ which often weave their way into his work (his book ‘The Dip’ focused entirely on this perspective).

Tribe’s has a section called “Fear of Failure is over rated” where he describes how most fear of failure is actually fear of ‘criticism’....

“Constructive criticism, of course, is a terrific tool...I admit it. When I get a bad review, my feelings are hurt. After all, it would be nice if every critic said a title of mine was a breakthrough, an inspirational, thoughtful book that explains how everything works. But sometimes they don’t. Which is about enough to ruin my day. But it’s not enough. It’s not enough to ruin my day because I realise that my book got noticed. Most people loved it. A few hated it. But by and large, most books are ignored.”

His positive outlook evokes the Oscar Wilde quote “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

Another section is called ‘How to be Wrong’ where he provides great example of prominent failures...

• John Zogby, pollster who “was completely wrong about Al Gore in Florida. By ten points. And he was wrong about John Kerry, and wrong about his prediction for the New Hampshire primaries...If he wasn’t willing to be wrong, he’d be unable to be right as often as he is.”
• Isaac Newton was “totally, fantastically wrong about alchemy, the branch of science that he spent most of his career on. He was as wrong as a scientist could be.”
• Steve Jobs was “wrong about the Apple III, wrong about the NeXt computer, wrong about the Newton. Insanely wrong.”

But my favourite bit of all is...

“The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realising that wrong isn’t fatal. The only thing that makes organisation great is their willingness to not be great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.”

You will find Seth Godin in my rather select list of ‘thought leader heroes’ on the left hand column so you can imagine my anticipation of his latest work ‘Tribes’ which extensively explored my favourite topic of Leadership and Management. Unfortunately favourite writer plus favourite subject did not result in favourite book. So how did all go so wrong in so many ways?

Godin’s easy reading, illustrative style has become too shallow and glib – sort of a Big Mac of punditry. His points are a stream of consciousness diatribe that he doesn’t seem to have wanted to take the time or bother to structure. His passion is edging on fanatical. But most importantly, a substantial portion of his book falls into the classic trap - that this blog spends much effort decrying – that ‘Management = bad Leadership.’

Some of the prominent examples of his Management slander include...

· “Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done...Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change you believe in. My thesaurus says that the best synonym for ‘leadership’ is ‘management’. Maybe that word used to fit, but no longer. Movements have leaders...Leaders have followers. Managers have employees. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.”

· “Managers manage by using authority the factory gives them...A manager can’t manage change because that’s not his job...Leaders, on the other hand, don’t care very much for organisation structures or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people, as opposed to using threats and bureaucracy to manage them.”

· “In unstable times, growth comes from leaders who create change and engage their organisations, instead of from managers who push their employees to do more for less.”

· “Leadership almost always involves thinking and acting like the underdog...It requires bravery. Managing doesn’t.”

· “Managers are the cynical ones. Managers are the pessimists...Leaders, on the other hand, have hope.”

· “Managers stamp out deviants...Leaders understand that change is not only omnipresent, but the key to success.”

Geesh, Seth, did an MBA traumatise you as a child or something?? You’ve got some kind of chip on your shoulder for ‘Management’.

Seth’s wholesale bias toward one over the other is particularly as hazardous as it is imbalanced. It’s like Godin is still stuck in the Dot-com bubble-blowing mentality where everything is all sunny and upside. You would think after two major bubble bursts (Dot Com, Credit Crunch), folks like Godin would start to be a bit more balanced in their consideration of possible downsides. The book is copyrighted 2008 which meant was written sometime before the current crisis really came to the fore. Maybe today he would have a different perspective on the prudence of balancing against the downsides. But really, too many of problems of the world today stem from an overdose of this sky’s-the-limit, damn-the-torpedoes, upside-upside-upside, just-do-it, can-do, if you build it they will come attitude.

I realise that Seth is possibly exaggerating to either make a point or to shake up the plenty of complacent people out there. My fear though is that most of those lagard people are not his readers. Most of his readers will already been leaning towards the sentiments his espouses and the unbalanced polemic will only serve to shift them unhealthily of any appropriate balance.

Godin talks about a senior manager at Yahoo named Brad Garlinghouse who wrote a challenging memo that ended up with a Hollywood happy ending of him being promoted:

“[Brad] had the chutzpah to share his honest appraisal with the bosses. If Brad had gotten fired, there were dozens of other...companies that would have given him the opportunity to work with them instead....The media love to glamorize the rare downfall of the heretic who doesn’t quite make it...who lost his job, his house, his family – his happiness – because he had the hubris and audacity to challenge the status quo.” Actually, there is nothing glamorous about these very real downsides.

I would argue that the opposite is the case. Media, and pundits like Godin, love to glamorize the guy who hit it big ostensibly because he simply had the belief, and the guts. For every Brad who challenges and gets promoted, there are many others who do so and their lives up ended. Sure Seth can pepper his little white book with scores of colourful and aspirational tales of people who achieved great things with what his accounts describe as little more than PMA. Little regard is given to the hard work, the averted crises or the sheer good fortune.

The boundless optimism reminds me so much of so many DotCom business plans who all had the same visionary PowerPoint slides with hockey-stick inflection points several years in the future. And yet as things panned out, a similar story prevailed  Those who succeeded were the ones who figured out how to take the initial steps that paid the bills, but bread on the table, averted the minefields and step by step built a path to the future. Minimising the downside (ie. going out of business) which is what good Managers do so well, while pursuing the Leadership upside. The vision, the belief was not enough. In fact, it was the seduction and downfall of too many innocent workers and investors when not counterbalanced by good management.

Godin concludes - “The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.”

The ‘secret’ of leadership is not so simple. Do what you believe in and work your tail off to be damn good at it. Head there, but be mindful of the pitfalls along the way. Be ready to cope with the inevitable bad luck and make the most of the occasional good luck. People may follow.

I had the chance to listen to business management gurus C.K. Prahalad and Marshall Goldsmith at the recent London Benchmark for Business event (thanks Katie).

C.K.’s presentation on ‘Realising the Opportunity’ talked about embracing the positive potential of the economic turmoil. He sees a need for dramatic changes in the way businesses operate and are managed that has been building up for years. The current economic challenges finally provide a compelling event to shake organisations from their inertia and old ways. In his words...

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste...”

Goldsmith is an expert on coaching and provided a workshop on the subject with lots of lessons on embracing failure. For starters, he talked about being self-development and being open to feedback. He covered extensively the walls people put up to good feedback with defensive rejection and ‘yes, but...’ responses: “Someone gives you feedback even if it is the stupidest idea in the world say 'thank you'.” He also talked about risk taking with the reflection...

“Old people seldom regret the risk they took and failed. They almost always regret the risk they failed to take.” 

Hugh MacLeod has anointed a ‘tribe’ for his digital connected band of like minded netizens seeking satisfying pursuits in the face of futile odds.

“A CrazyDerangedFool [CDF for short] is, like me, somebody who has the temerity to aspire to work in a way that produces both joy, meaning and contribution for both them and others, while also paying the bills. It's about creativity, it's about finding meaning, but it's also about living in the real world. That's the reality I want to live in, and from the vast quantities of e-mails and comments I get from y'all, that seems to be your game plan, as well.”

One of his poster children for the movement is Founder’s Brewing in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“To bring you truly great beer, we have focused our efforts to one simple pursuit...ignore mainstream. We brew the beer we want to drink. In this pursuit we have found lower efficiencies, higher cost, less yields and smaller market share. This may seem like an unsound business model, but in our pursuit for bigger and better beer we have discovered a subculture of microbrewery aficionados. People like you, who enjoy beers that push the envelope of creativity.”

‘Unsound’, ‘push the envelope of creativity’...’lower efficiencies...less yields’ and ‘embracing foolishness’...all characteristics of embracing failure.

Blogging icon and maven Hugh MacLeod has coined a new twist in his irreverent take on marketing – ‘Futile Marketing’ – which is a brilliant illustration of ‘embracing failure’ at its heart.

“Conventional Wisdom dictates, if you're trying to market something, the last thing you want your marketing campaign to be is "An Act of Futility". But...are you REALLY sure about that? I was thinking recently how most of the stuff I'm most proud of, started off as acts of futility.
      · Drawing cartoons on the back of business cards started off as an act of futility.
      · Getting an English tailor to blog in the hope of selling more $5,000 suits started off as an act of futility...
And if you think about it, the world is full of other, similar examples.
      · Getting people to pay $4 for a cup of coffee started off as an act of futility.
      · Getting people to give up their horses en masse in exchange for an internal combustion engine started off as an act of futility.
      · Getting people to pay for software without any hardware attached to it started off as an act of futility...”

Taking risks, accepting the downsides, building on the adversity for untold and unanticipated opportunity. 

Motivational Speaker Nigel Risner recently spoke at eCademy on the topic of ‘Vision and Routine’ whose title itself paralleled the two sides of ‘Leadership’ and ‘Management’.

"I actually did my vision for about 3 hours through the whole of that week. What was I spending most of my time doing do you think?...Routine shite!...That is the stuff that you got to get good at because that's the stuff that get the work that you want to do. But most of you are so busy working on your vision thinking how you are going to change the world that you are not doing the steps that need to take place."

Leaders work on vision to change the world; Managers do routine ‘shite’ that need to take place to change the world.

Nigel also had some great messages about embracing failure...

"My job is to teach people to be uncomfortable...You are not to come back to me until you get fifty ‘No’s."  

The final piece on ‘embracing downturn’ is looking to the silver linings of personal life balance. The financial excesses of prior years that have built up to this crisis have also driven an imbalanced focus on consumption and consumerism. The drive at work and at home was more, more, more. The ‘new economic reality’ is likely to adopt a more balanced, long-term view that creates more balance between work life and home life, development and ecology, growth and sustainability.

MSNBC ran a good piece on these silver linings, ‘Some unemployed are making the most out of their suddenly free time’. “The unemployed are stressed out about unpaid bills, dashed retirement plans and the loss of workplace camaraderie. But many say life minus work also has its bittersweet upsides, including more time with family and friends, learning new skills, focusing on their health and pursuing hobbies.” 

 

The third opportunity to turn the adversity of economic downturn to advantage is Innovation.  Necessity is the mother of innovation.

One of the other topics that I blog about is ‘Dynamic Work’ – how the nature and structure of work is changing with new technologies, new principles, but also new demands on the both the workplace and the workers not the least of which is economic. Dynamic Work is a revolution in new ways of breaking up old linear, assembly-line modes of production into more versatile and flexible approaches to asynchronous and geographically dispersed work.  The new economic pressures are bringing more consideration and adoption of these new ways to work.

Innovation is most often associated with technology, but MSNBC ran a piece on Obama’s opportunity to innovate politically both driven and enabled by the economic crisis - ‘In this global crisis, the U.S. has opportunity’: “The financial crisis drives home to other nations that without an America that is successful financially, economically and therefore also politically, they're not going to be successful...we have the chance again to establish our legitimacy internationally."

Finally, a great outline of the potential is features on the management website BNET interviewing Dave Allan, co-Founder of the company ?What If! which specialises in consulting on innovation (tag line – ‘The Innovation Company’). Allan discusses the distinct opportunities for innovation in the downturn: “There was that great phrase from Obama’s advisor ‘why waste a good crisis’...There is a willingness to try new things...Their company’s valuations are probably not as high as they want them to be. So actually, their cash flows are not being valued that highly so it is actually a very good time to use that cash flow to try new things...I think that what a recession gives you is a chance to rally people that perhaps doesn’t exist in general circumstances and can be used to advantage.”