What we can learn from mistakes and challenges
In today’s high-performance business culture, the overwhelming focus is on proficiency and prosperity. Few people talk about the importance of errors but mistakes are critical to success – miscalculations and missteps provide powerful lessons. In April, the third dinner of the Think. live interview series was held at Donna Chang in Brisbane, featuring three Australian business leaders. Hosted by Kirsten Galliott, Editor-in-Chief of Qantas magazine and Travel Insider, the session revealed candid stories about the value of failure. Here are some of the evening’s insights.
Kirsten Galliott: Oscar Wilde said, “Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes.” Janine, does that resonate with you?
Janine Allis: You can’t achieve anything without getting it wrong along the way. Someone once asked me, “Can you tell me about all the things that went wrong?” And I really struggled with that question because every time I think about what went wrong, I think about what I learnt from it and what I implemented in my business as a result. Even though there are squillions of things you do wrong, what goes wrong makes you the business you are. I didn’t think I was going to have a problem with bananas – until there was a cyclone in Queensland. Suddenly, a week of talking about bananas!
You have also said, “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.” What do you mean by that?
JA: In business for the past 50 years, you could have done pretty much the same thing over and over and been successful. We are in an era now where things are popping up that we’ve never seen before. If you’re not prepared to change then you will go backwards – consumers are changing and you have to change with them. Apparently, if you’re 23, change is easy but if you’re over 23, it’s really hard. You have to accept that with change comes mistakes – you’re not going to get it all right all of the time but you have to embrace it. Change comes naturally to me so I’m good with it. I think fear needs to come into play; it’s a great motivator for you to change because if you don’t, the semi-trailer is coming for you whether you like it or not.
Steven, we often hear this thought that we need to feel scared. As a leader, is that something you try to foster?
Steven Worrall: We don’t necessarily talk about fostering fear or that emotion directly but we do talk about something that’s related. In our organisation, we talk about the growth mindset, which encourages us to be willing to accept that failure is a part of doing what we’re doing. No organisation has ever achieved anything of consequence without having gone down some paths that didn’t work out. The “growth mindset” terminology encourages us to see it as an opportunity to learn, to grow and to get better for next time. Having that language means we can talk to each other about failure, which has been very effective for us as an organisation.
Microsoft went through quite a turbulent time. Can you talk about what you and the organisation learnt from that?
SW: You bet. For those not familiar with the Microsoft story, the company’s been around for 43 years, famously founded in a garage by Paul Allen and Bill Gates. For the first 20 years, everything went swimmingly well. The company was synonymous with what the IT industry became through the ’80s and ’90s but then entered a period of great disruption. In 1998, a small company called Google
was founded. In 2004, another small company called Facebook came along and again disrupted the Microsoft business. And then this little thing called the iPhone launched in 2007 and upended the business forever. For a 10-year period, Microsoft really struggled for relevance but in the past five years, we’ve been finding our way back. At the heart of it is this growth mindset – being willing to accept failure, seeing it as a learning opportunity and moving ahead with those lessons under our belt.
Do you think the mistake was being complacent?
SW: When you achieve great success, one of the biggest challenges is how to keep it real for your customers and for your team. Microsoft is a case study of an organisation that had achieved massive success; in fact, as a consequence of that success it was regulated by governments across Europe and around the world. I think that led us to be comfortable with how we had arrived at that point, confident in the sense that it would continue. The only thing you know in business is that things always change. You have to continually refine what it is that you’re about – especially the value proposition you take to your customers – because there are other people out there every night and every day trying to find ways to knock you off your perch.
Were those mistakes ultimately good for the business?
SW: The company that you see today as Microsoft wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for all of those failures. This may not be true in every industry or for every organisation but it was certainly true for us – in an industry that moves at such a pace, we had to be disrupted before we could reset ourselves and be at the point we’re at today. I’m not suggesting for one moment that we’ve arrived at any particular destination because among the lessons we’ve learnt is humility and the sense that tomorrow is yet another day for us to continue in the right direction – or not! That’s what I try to cultivate with my team because possibly the only way we can be assured of success in the future is by being paranoid.
Does being paranoid resonate with you, Leanne? You’ve had so many startups and you’ve said that you know a lot about failure.
Leanne Kemp: Every day from nine to five, there’s some form of test – learn, fail, iterate and perfect. The true DNA of a great entrepreneur is to live in the unknown. From a Queensland perspective, to a certain extent we’re born with the thick skin to withstand the rigidity needed to get up every day and continue fighting.
Is being able to embrace failure something you were born with or did you have to work at it?
LK: I have two younger brothers and I thought I was unbeatable. When I was young, I could beat them rolling around in the dirt and arm wrestling. Then they got to the age of 16 and all of a sudden they had strength and there was no way I could continue those games. My mindset has
always been driven and crafted by the allure of the zenith, whatever that may look like. Everledger was three years in the making – I’m a 25-year overnight success story. I think I’m the Steven Bradbury of founders: the last man/woman standing as all the others just fade away.
What is it about startups that encourage test-and-learn in a way that corporate Australia stands back from a little bit?
LK: Learning from failures is how you get to a point of anti-fragility. Athletes know this. If I were to run 10 kilometres today, it would hurt but as I sleep tonight, my muscles would break down to build themselves back up. And tomorrow I would run those 10 kilometres and feel less pain so I'd push through that pain barrier. From the perspective of a startup or founder, the entrepreneurial journey is about understanding when to push to the limits of physicality and when to take time to rest and reflect.
There are plenty of entrepreneurial people in corporate Australia. Why does there seem to be this divide between startups and corporate Australia in terms of fear of failure?
SW: One answer is the way in which companies are run: the expectation that leaders of large businesses will deliver results within a certain parameter, plus or minus 10 per cent. Having worked in two large organisations, that’s certainly been the traditional way that companies have gone about planning their future and directing the business. Whereas entrepreneurs are starting with an idea, a group of talented people and a marketplace they’re looking to serve, with a multiplicity of options as to how they might go about it. There are many lessons corporate Australia can learn from entrepreneurs and vice versa – the crosspollination of ideas is really beneficial. But no doubt the prism through which we look at risk is different when you’re in a corporate versus when you’re in a smaller company.
LK: It’s too safe for corporates – they’re not playing with the same risk paradigm.
I have a cash deadline, I have a burn rate, I have a time. It’s immediate, it’s immutable and it cannot be moved. In corporate, it’s a fake clock – you’re running down the rabbit hole but you know that you can have a nice tea party at the end. If I can’t solve certain things and I can’t bring the right team together, that clock ticks and for me, it ends. I don’t get that time over again – I have to make the one shot.
Janine, you launched Boost Juice in China in 2009 but it ceased trading in 2012. What did you learn from that experience and how has it influenced the way you continue to do business overseas?
JA: We launched in 20 markets and the reality is that a certain portion are going to fail, a certain portion are going to go really well and then there’s the middle. Businesses, big or small, have to get everything right. You have to get the product right, the people right, the brand right, the marketing right. If you get one thing