The Samuel Beckett Guide to Business Success.
What, you may ask, does a deceased experimentalist Nobel laureate for Literature have to do with succeeding in business? Nothing except for the message embodied in his famous words:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
This brings to mind another quote — one more obviously connected to modern business, since it comes from Michael Bloomberg’s business memoir:
“We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan — for months.”
“Fail faster, try again,” is good advice regardless, but we’re taking it especially seriously here at the BIZ blog. Now that we have several months under our belt, we’re beginning to see what works and what doesn’t, and we’re sharpening our appetite for ongoing improvements. Expect more improvements — and appeals for your feedback — in the weeks to come.
So, narrow application of the Beckett/Bloomberg dictum: better blogging here.
Broader application: Well, . . . why don’t you tell me? What’s the best example you know of people embracing the wisdom to “Fail better”?
[Hat tip to Tom Peters for the Bloomberg quote.]
Category: Hoover's, Management, The working life2 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
Subscribe to the RSS Feed
Very profound. I don’t think people can catch immediately what that saying means.
My thought for the phrase “Fail better” I think this is the same as “Success is 99% failure”. We often failed and how much we tried to improve our goal there is always a minute error that hinders our success.
-Jan
[...] A little while back I quoted Michael Bloomberg on how he built his eponymous business: “We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.” [...]