Failure isn't always a bad thing...

“We go to school and are taught reading, writing and arithmetic for however many hours a day and we’re taught that getting a good grade is better than getting a bad grade… we’re also taught from a very young age to feel badly when we fail."

(Slava Rubin, founding CEO of Indeigogo, one of the first crowdfunding sites)

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again because it’s worth repeating: failure isn’t always a bad thing.

James Dyson made 5,126 prototypes before successfully creating a bagless vacuum cleaner. And one of the company’s bestsellers, the Dyson Airblade, was a discarded idea for a totally unrelated product!

Henry Ford allegedly wound up completely broke five times before Ford cars became a success.

Throughout my career so far, I’ve tried to train myself to be less afraid of failure, to see it for the learning experience it really is… and I try to impart that ethos to my teams. I want them to know that when you’re trying to shake things up and break new ground, failure is almost inevitable. But we can bounce back and use our new-found knowledge to learn and improve.

If we don’t foster a workplace environment in which our employees know it’s ok to stumble and course-correct, they’ll always be too scared to explore new ideas and find new ways of doing things. As Thomas Edison said:

“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”.