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Henry Ford said that failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.
But many of us begin again with no increase in intelligence. Or, we don’t get smarter because we won’t risk failure in the first place.
Yikes! It’s the end of the year, and we’re all supposed to have a bunch of stuff done by now – like writing our strategic plans. But the deadly temptation with strategic plans is just to “git-er-done” so we can “git-er-out-the-door!” You see, simply getting it done and out the door doesn’t mean much if the plans never actually materialize.
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Successful innovation requires successful experimentation, and successful experimentation requires eagerness to learn from failure. This has become a cliché because it holds true, time and time again.
The great experimenter Thomas Edison is famous for comments such as, “I have not failed.
“Innovation sandbox” is a term coined by the late C.K. Prahalad. The gist: For a truly quantum innovation in either goods or services, (1) set a really high bar for what “good” looks like, (2) identify a small handful of aggressive constraints, and then, within that “sandbox” (3) begin a radical re-examination of your assumptions and self-imposed limits as you develop your breakthrough design. That combination forces you to, as Apple says, “think different.”
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Deep wisdom directed at today’s leaders isn’t what you’d expect from a guy who’s been dead since 1792. But Captain John Paul Jones, having been successfully channeled by Rear Admiral Rob Wray, has stern advice for today’s officers of the American Navy.
“Goals are dangerous!” That’s what a current spate of management literature would have you believe, stating that goals cause narrow and short-term focus, inept performance, and harmful side effects such as unethical behavior. Say it isn’t so!
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"It’s an accountability problem." This is one of those diagnoses that sound definitive and inspire lots of nods around the conference table – right up there with “it’s a leadership issue,” and “it’s a communication problem.
Strategy execution is about getting other people, and yourself, to do things – the right things. And that doesn’t happen in the typical, annual strategic planning ritual where people throw around some ideas and then check in a year later.
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Any serious strategist must ask, “How will we know when we’ve succeeded?” Strategies have intended outcomes – goals – and it’s terribly helpful if those outcomes are clear enough that success or failure will be indisputable.
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An introduction: We like Mike Kipp, and we’ve never met him. Over time, we’ve come to admire this fellow blogger’s ideas on strategy – and we’re a bit picky on that topic. (He also has some pretty interesting perspectives on health care, which is his main focus.
