The trouble with business is that failure is looked upon as a disaster. Of course sometimes it is but mostly it’s a setback. Famously Edison is supposed to have said “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Whilst I am not suggesting that you should look to fail 10,000 times it would help if we realised we need to treat business more like science.
In science you create a hypothesis, invest time and money in it and sometimes (often) that hypothesis proves to be wrong. Do you say that all of that time and investment has been wasted? No, the scientist learns from what has been done and moves on. In business however, we look for who should be blamed for the failure and how we can avoid it ever happening again.
Likewise in science there may be something that has been held to be true and acted upon for years. Then things change and it is found that everything needs to change. For years it was believed that you could get a cold or flu simply by getting too cold. We now know about viruses and can update our knowledge and act accordingly. In business we will often stick with the old beliefs and techniques because they have always worked in the past. The use of certain ratios to analyse businesses Why Effective People Never Use EBITDA To Judge A Business is a classic. The “we’ve always done it that way” mentality. Just like science we should use the past as a basis for the future but not stick to it religiously. Adapting as we go is so important.
To summarise. Failure is not always bad Why Failure Is The Effective Route To Success
Use “failure” to update what you know and what you think you knew. Treat business more like science. Science constantly moves on and effective businesses do too.
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