The Importance of Failure

A recent news shook me up.

Cafe Coffee Day (or CCD, as it is more popularly known) is a familiar red banner in even the remotest corners of India. It started off as a single store on Brigade Road in Bengaluru in 1993, and in less than two decades, was counting more than a 1000 stores in 2011--less than 20 years later. The iconic red chat logo was created to indicate that the coffee shop was a social element: inviting people in to chat, sit around and discuss ideas, thoughts, and ambitions.

Yet, the social icon failed to save it's founder.

Yesterday (July 29, 2019), the founder, V. G. Siddhartha, took his own life by jumping off a bridge in Mangalore. You can read all about it here.

Starbucks, with a first store in 1971, had only 31 stores by 1991. It went public in 1992 with just 53 stores. Only 53 stores a full twenty years later. Today, it commands over 25,000 stores worldwide, and the former CEO is running for President.

What is different, you may ask. It is how two different societies view failure.

In early 2016, Princeton University professor Johannes Haushofer posted a “CV of failures” on his professional website. In this document, he listed positions and awards for which he had applied and been rejected in his career (Stefan, 2010). When asked about the decision to publicize his failures, Haushofer explained: “Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me. As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days.”

In contrast, if you search for Kota, you will see a string of suicides in the news. These are young kids, having just passed their sophomore high school who came to the city of Kota in Rajasthan, where they train to pass the Indian Institute of Technology entrance exams or the medical college exams. From scoring nearly 100% in their schools, they come to work the grind in these "coaching centers," and find themselves staring at sub-par scores in the first few weeks.

Failing an obscure entrance exam system has decided their life's end.

In my school system in India (funded and subsidized by the Federal Government, no less!) you have a "twice-fail, you are out system." If you fail (score below 35% in those days) in a subject, you are asked to stay back in the same grade. You fail the next year as well, you are asked to find another school. It starts right there.

Failure is not an option.

In a land of plentiful people, systems are always under stress to serve the demand, hence everything is extremely competitive. Or corrupt methods of "buying" oneself the service brings another complex angle to demand-and-supply balance.

Amy Edmondson, a professor in leadership and management at Harvard Business School, has studied three different kinds of failures: preventable failure, complex failure and intelligent failure.

"You could have studied harder, or tried better, or done something different," are familiar phrases in what would be a child's "preventable" failure at school.

The entire Indian and Chinese diaspora in the U.S. (Asian tigers) are shining examples of children not being allowed the benefit of "preventable" failure. Despite making it to Ivy Leagues and getting through to a Silicon Valley icon or to a high-end medical school, the scions of these Asian tigers are known to have just "burnt" out.

The latter two (complex and intelligent failures) have the greatest potential to promote learning in the workplace.

“Complex failures occur when we have good knowledge about what needs to be done. We have processes and protocols, but a combination of internal and external factors come together in a way to produce a failure outcome,” Ms. Edmondson said. “These kinds of failures happen all the time in hospital care, for example, where there’s enough volatility or complexity in the environment that things just happen.”

In the case of V.G. Siddhartha, it is clearly a case of complex failure, yet he wrote his last note blaming himself for not having built a profitable business model. Complex failure is rampant in the case of agriculture, manufacturing, and public-sector entities, but the stakeholders and investors hammer the CEO: the farmer suicide rate in India is the highest in the world.

There has always been the taunt hanging in the air, "Why doesn't India ever develop a Facebook or a Microsoft or a Google despite so many engineers?"

Many of the Silicon Valley founders are school dropouts who didn't think much about failing, as they knew their skills were far more valuable in a challenging environment than in a corporate wheelhouse. This is intelligent failure.

In contrast, the Indian's fear of failure is the key reason that snuffs many brilliant ideas right there--at the idea level.

If preventable failure assures that we tread the beaten path and try "harder" to just be on the path and not innovate, complex failure is just around the corner: corruption, societal values and labels, and economic imbalances. Intelligent failure is yet to find a spot in India.

We need to change. By telling a child it is absolutely alright to try. By not defining the outcome of that trial as a "success" or "failure" but as "learning." By giving the child the confidence to try "more options" than to try "harder."

If you look at the raging entrepreneurial world in India, most of the ideas being funded are just Indian versions of an American idea. Ola, Flipkart, Swiggy all are just copies. Yet they are funded in far more valuation than that idea of two kids who designed a robot to clean the sewers.

I dare ANY venture capital fund in India to put their hand on their heart and say they will fund such a revolutionary idea. The risk of "failure" is too high for these blokes. They prefer very little "venture" in their portfolio.

V.G. Siddhartha's death is frightening. When a Vijay Mallya or a Nirav Modi can outwit their lenders and investors to a few billions of dollars and simply fly out, here was a man who battled the odds, fought back, and tried to make an honest comeback.

But, alas, the long arm of failure reached out to end his life at the edge of a bridge.

We, as a society, have failed yet another child who tried "differently."

May his soul rest in peace.