The July 10 issue of BusinessWeek has a great cover story up on "How Failure Breeds Success", and particularly focuses on the challenges of launching new products. This cuts close to my own experience (see here) in launching Fit Fruit and Vegetable Wash.
The article covers key points that I agree with wholeheartedly:
- Realize that swinging for the fences (i.e. going for big gains) means you will have more strikeouts.
- Try to fail early and inexpensively.
- Bring in outside perspective throughout the project, as long-term team members lose their impartiality.
- Get feedback from consumers and customers as early as possible.
- Use post-mortems or "failure parties" to unearth lessons and make them available to others.
At the end of the day, any organization that wants to reap a "Challenge Dividend" should embrace failure. First, failure is a kind of challenge; the desire to avoid failure pressures us to work harder and think better. Second, when you fail you have at least "been in the game", and you learn lessons that help you succeed going forward. The old phrase "nothing ventured, nothing gained" holds here; by getting in the game you either succeed or learn from failure, and maybe succeed in the future.
I also find it interesting that each of the tactics above are essentially ways to "challenge" your product in hopes of improving it. For example, outsider perspective offers challenging feedback, and post-mortems challenge team members to confront their mistakes. The "Challenge Dividend" approach works for small project teams just as well as for large organizations.
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