DON'T BE AFRAID OF FAILURES

John Sculley was the CEO of Apple in the late 1980s, One day he gave the go-ahead to an idea called the Apple Newton. It was an early iPad, seeing it as the future; Sculley dropped more than $100 million into this project.

But with no available mobile-phone networks and limited internet access, there was little that the Newton could actually do. The Newton was ahead of its time. Apple expected to sell one million Newtons in its first year. Instead, it sold just 50,000. In 1993, a near-bankrupt Apple forced Sculley out.


“At the time it happens, it’s very embarrassing and it hurts,” Sculley recalled recently from New York City. “It took years to overcome, and it really knocked the wind out of me.”


In some organizations, failure is a career-ending event. But at better-managed companies, failure is an accepted part of taking a risk. Failure means taking time to reflect on what went wrong, what can be learned, and to actually reward your staff for the willingness to take risks.

Managers are bound to fail. When it happens, here’s what to do next.


1. Take ownership and accountability for the fact that you ultimately are responsible for the setback.

2. Debrief your team on what went wrong.

3. Explain to the staff how to do things differently next time.

4. Design goals, objectives and a recovery plan.

5. Set aside time to assess your progress and make sure the staff is hitting those goals.

How to react to failure
The first step is to take ownership and responsibility for the failure. Don’t look for an employee to sack when things go wrong. Consider it the team’s collective loss, and be willing to admit.

Be sure your staff is comfortable with the post-failure review. They need to know this isn’t a process of searching for a person to blame, and they need to know it’s OK to tell the boss what you did to contribute to the problem.

What’s next after a setback

With the review completed, determine what can be done differently in the future. Your team needs to know what’s off limits next time to make sure you don’t end up in the same spot.

Then set goals so that your employees can strive for something new. Check in regularly to make sure you’re hitting those benchmarks and leaving that failure behind you.

Failure to success

It took a few years after the Newton failure, but Sculley finally figured out a way to personally process the failure. It was a very public failure and that meant dealing with a hit to his pride alongside everything else he felt.

“There’s nothing fun about failing. It’s embarrassing and can really hit you in your self-confidence,” Sculley said.

Now, Sculley sees his failure at Apple far differently. The recent popularity of the iPad proves that he was right in thinking, it was the future.

“Like anyone who’s been an executive for many years, I have a lot of failures,” Sculley said. “The secret is figuring out how to process those failures and then pivot.”





Ref – www.bbc.com