Comeback from failure can define us
The problem with people is we don’t think that we are wrong nearly enough. It seems the more we consider ourselves an expert in something the less we think we will be wrong in that subject.
Imagine you are a Harvard Business School graduate – it’s safe to say you would be an expert in business, having spent years of studying case studies by some of the best business minds in the world.
Professor Amar Bhide studied 400 Harvard Business School graduates who went on to start their own companies.
Anyone who has studied business knows that startup businesses are quite unlikely to succeed. As expected, most of the Harvard graduates’ companies did fail.
But the few companies that survived had an interesting thing in common. Ninety-three per cent of them had to completely abandon their original strategies in order to stay viable.
That basically means they were wrong. What they thought was going to work when they started the company didn’t actually work at all.
I can certainly relate to this finding. Being wrong is quite normal and is more common than we think.
I’ve just finished watching Ken Roczen win the Glendale Supercross race in California. Ken was aboard a Honda CRF 450.
Honda has been a dominant force in off-road motorcycles for decades but its beginning in the dirt bike market was a complete accident and a great example of how the original strategy was wrong.
Honda had been very successful in making 50cc commuter motorcycles that were very common in Japan and other parts of Asia.
But Honda had a grand vision of taking on the United States.
The company felt it could capture 10 per cent of the US market and increase that share by 5 per cent a year. Its market research indicated Americans wanted big highway motorcycles and that cost was not important to the US motorcycle consumer.
So in 1959 Honda developed the Dream 250cc and 305cc motorcycles and tasked Kihachiro Kawashima to sell them to Americans.
Things did not go well. Dealers wouldn’t even consider selling a
Japanese motorcycle. But Kawashima did manage to sell a couple of hundred motorcycles.
Then the problems really started. The Japanese had underestimated how demanding the US consumer was on these motorcycles. They were horribly unreliable and the warrantee repair bills were costing Honda a fortune.
In the weekends, Kawashima and his three co-workers would take their Honda commuter motorcycles into the California desert and ride around the hills. Every time they did this, they were stopped by other motorcyclists who inquired about the 50cc super cubs they were riding.
They started making sales of these 50cc commuter motorcycles. They were light and manoeuvrable and 70 per cent cheaper than existing motorcycles.
Off-road motorcycles were not yet a thing in the 1960s. The closest thing to a dirt bike most people had seen was Steve McQueen jumping a heavy Triumph over a barbed-wire fence in the movie The Great Escape.
A new form of motorcycling was emerging and it was a new kind of customer that Honda had not considered. These were casual motorcyclists; they were not enthusiasts who committed large chunks of their income to the hobby.
These customers just wanted to have some fun. And Honda had lots of expertise in making cheap, manoeuvrable motorcycles that were a perfect fit for the new buyers.
Eventually, Kawashima was able to convince the managers in Japan to change their strategy. It started with the 50cc super cub, but Honda stopped trying to copy Triumph, Moto Guzzi and Harley-Davidson.
They instead embarked on a completely unique journey only they could pull off – that of low-cost manufacturing combined with new types of motorcycles.
A lot of successes happen by accident because we can’t see everything in the future and our assumptions are often wrong. That’s fine, as long as we’re willing to change our minds and our strategy.
Next time you’re in a debate with someone about politics, religion, the environment or the kids’ bedtime routine, just consider that maybe the probability of you being wrong is higher than you think.