Diane,

Thank you for a thoughtful post on this subject. I was blown away by JK Rowling's speech when I read the transcript. I think fear of failure is a major deficiency in the business world today. Several months ago I started a site (mistakebank.com) devoted to gathering and sharing first-person stories of business mistakes and failures. I believe that the tide is turning and more and more businesspeople realize that only through encouraging and embracing failure and its lessons can true breakthroughs occur.

Without question, my failings during the twilight of my professional military career were the foundation for my entrepreneurial successes. Amazingly, as I left the military I took a failed idea borrowed (with consent) from a colleague and with a little tweeking used that to start my business; an idea that netted me tremendous success and was the cornerstone for future successful efforts. My failures are a critical part of my success today. And I'm not finished; failing or succeeding!!
Wayland Coker
President
Coker Logistics Solutions, Inc.

All the young people (as I am) are so afraid of failing ! Why ? Because often, in our corporate life, failing is not permitted!
If managers explain that it is possible to fail if you can stand up again, that you liberate a lot of energies!

My blog (in french) about my experience on management : http://www.managementetmoi.blogspot.com/

Wow, if only corporate America could embrace this concept, Instead, an environment where "failure is not an option" prevails, leading many employees down a slippery slope towards finger pointing or worse. I know it does not feel intuitive to reward failure and I know that the article above is not suggesting that, however, my question is how can companies successfully address this without giving the employees the impression that they can ease up on goals and without causing panic amongst the shareholders?

Folks might be interested in reading "The Value Captor's Process," Rita McGrath's and Thomas Keil's excellent article in the May 2007 issue of HBR.

This article is about a learning-based process for developing new businesses, which explicitly calls for learning from failures along the way and changing course accordingly. So maybe there's hope!

This is a fantastic article, thank you for promoting the idea of failure. I believe the competitive spirit of the brightest make it challenging to accept.

Diane -- I completely agree. I'm an editor here at HBR and readers might be interested in an article we have coming in September on this very topic. Longtime journalist Paul Carroll and consultant Chunka Mui did some really thorough research into major business failures and found some interesting patterns. It's called "Seven Ways to Fail Big" and it has lots of stories that show how managers can and should learn from failure.

Diane, you are perfectly right that the ability to handle failure well is crucial to succeeding in any venture. If all your efforts are succeeding, it probably means you are operating well within the zone of comfort ! And operating within the zone of comfort is hardly a recipe for architecting bold or new ventures of any kind.

The fact that doing things in teams is a way of 'saving face' is another way of saying that it's a way of sharing the risk of failure.

Oganizations are increasingly taking this 'risk-sharing' approach, rather than choosing to avoid failure altogether. This is a key reason why approaches such as Open innovation, "Crowdsourcing", Co-creation and User-centric innovation have gained so much traction over the past few years. Organizations have realized that breaking down boundaries and innovating jointly with other groups both within and outside the organization is a great way to share the risk so inherent to any innovative effort. In fact I collectively denote these approaches to innovation as "unplugged innovation". I have elaborated on what unplugged innovation is and how it helps to - among other things - share the risk of failure in my blog post, "Innovation is a Many-Splendored Thing..." at http://www.infosysblogs.com/thinkflat/2008/02/innovation_is_a_many-splendored_thing.html.

This is an excellent post. I have had numerous instances of failure in the past, and I must admit, over the years, I had gotten into the rut of avoiding failure.

The primary consequence for me has been a serious reduction in speed and learning. In the past, my fear of failure was much lower. I knew that any failure I experienced was simply part of the process of progress.

I will admit, I have been irritated by the number of organizations that I have worked for that not only don't accept failure, but that actually obsess on it. If I made 5 mistakes and 50 successes, it seemed as if the 5 mistakes were all the mattered and the 50 successes were expected.

One of the organizations taglines was "Do it right, the first time". To me what this really says is, "You're only doing your job if you achieve perfection". The result is that when you succeed, it is just business as usual. no rewards, no recognition, but if you fail, you're not doing well enough. Since no one is perfect, this creates an environment where no one takes risks and no on communicates when mistakes are made. You can imagine how much better the organization would do if it would provide an achievable bar.

Anyway, I recently blogged about this. Please check out: http://unusualthoughts.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/failure-tests-and-difficulties/

This is a challenging topic now in this fast-driven business era.

Failure is a Taboo and has even become an unwelcomed social status if you come across such an experience at work and talked about it to others. Not everyone comprehends the concept Failure now represents and the hidden positive outcomes it holds on ones life. Its a matter of time until companies accept this concept and develop employees when they fail in order to progress. Performance Management Cycles are my proof that to a certain extent, time is ticking and management is watching and terms such as excellent performers will always outcast average performers and poor performers...other words used for failures...correct?

I worked with great companies in the Middle East region. Now I am with a start-up company! So much is going on and every time we move a step forward we leap miles backwards because of insecurity that is felt by the failure of people who had sky-high expectations, so does the management. It is so easy to set targets that you forget the fact with targets comes resources and skill-set requirements. Place the right person in the right job and you get success. Mistakes in a job which I believe is failure to comprehend a task is far different than job failure as a whole which is what I call a job mismatch and lack of proper management support.

Failure is accepted only if you had the whole equation done wrong and inaccurately and you made it a point that anyone can do it just because you say so. This is what I call improper management skills and this is what I call putting up people for failure and this will be a humiliating experience that employees will be demoralized by because it was forced on them and they did not see it coming. Poor communication! People just don't talk with each other. everyone wants to do the job alone that failure is bound to occur too often and learning are too scarce.

Failure on the other side can teach you a lesson if you were able to assess a certain situation. You can only assess if you are capable of analyzing the elements in the job you do and identify what went wrong. But when managers for instance force a task on you just because they are giving up on finding the right person for the job or that targets are far more important to be achieved than actually recruiting the fit employees who can do this job is the harm that I don't favor and neither call any lesson behind it as a good one.

The topic of failure comes with allot of pre-requisites. Along with it comes unrealistic expectations, poor time management, poor leaders and poor management support, oh my god...poor communication too! Failure is great in the hands of those who know how to filter out from this so called negative incident the learning lesson, the challenges and the breakthroughs. I don't think anyone can, not even multinational companies when they don't accept that this word is OK to use for assessing performance without harming the individual score, salary raise promotion...etc. Perfection is the word everyone carries around on golden plates. Failure...will remain under the tables!

I see the transformation and transition occurring by individuals and not companies hence this theory will come though in time. but for now, its the people mindsets that we rely on to allow and accept failure as an opportunity for learning and success.

This is an interesting topic....stands on rocky grounds as I am sure inputs will vary based on experience, culture and the region we come from.