TAKE MORE RISKS AND BE MORE SUCCESSFUL!

When you look at the most successsful people in the U.S., you find people who are risk-takers, not risk-averse. Successful people are willing to make mistakes, and they consider mistakes to be part of the learning process. The current trend among big corporations is “to cozy up to the risk-taking that innovation requires.” Business Week, July 10, 2006, p. 40. This trend flies in the face of the Six Sigma error-elimination programs that most corporations have practiced over the last decade. There are many great quotes from famous people that tell us how they learned from their mistakes. The following are some famous quotes from Thomas Edison: Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless. Many of life's failures are people who did not realizenhow close they were to success when they gave up. n nI have not failed. I’ve just found n 10,000 ways that don’t work. If one of the most famous inventors in the world can laugh at his mistakes and move on, we should all be able to do the same. A recent article in Business Week entitled “How Failure Breeds Success” talks about many of the well-known mistakes that big companies have made. For example, the article talks about Coca Cola’s mistakes when it introduced “New Coke.” After the failure with New Coke, the CEO admitted publicly that his company made a big mistake. However, he said, “You will see some failures . . ..As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process.” The CEO knew that Coca Cola had to take bigger risks and tolerate failures to inevitably lead to growth and greater success. Stefab G, Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Experimentation Matters, states: “Failure is not a bad thing . . ..(Failure) is so important to the experimental process.” Business Week, July 10, 2006, p. 44. The Business Week article goes on to say that innovation requires organizations to explore, experiment, and foul up. Intelligent failures should be encouraged as part of the success process. What does all this mean for the smaller business or entrepreneur? We can learn from the big companies that risk is a big part of the growth process. We can learn to encourage our employees to “think outside the box” and not to fear retribution if they make mistakes. We must learn not to be risk-averse and to accept mistakes as part of the growth process.nWe should also learn to listen to our employees, our customers, and our vendors, because they can give us a different perspective that may lead to new, profitable ideas. We should learn to ask these people questions and let them work with prototypes before our new projects go too far. Finally, we can look back at previous failures to consider whether they shed any new information on our current operations.nnJo Ann Joy, Esq., MBA, CEOnThe future of your business starts here!