The One Word Talk #TOWT - Episode 2: Failure

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Episode 2 of The One Word Talk is my personal view about “Failure”. It consists of 3 parts:

• It’s okay to fail
• When you fail, fail fast for rapid learning
• As a business, never fail to innovate, because if you don't innovate, you die?

It’s okay to fail

My seven-year-old son was learning to ride a bike recently. On the first day of practice, he wasn't able to keep balance yet, but he kept trying. I were there with him telling him the basic techniques. First, to learn about all the key components of a bike. Second, to learn how to get on and get off the bike. Third, to learn how to use the brakes, which side controls the front brake, and which side controls the back brake. Then, I was holding him as he started paddling. Next, I slowly released so that he can try on his own for a few seconds. And we were repeating those steps. Later on, he practiced with the bike by himself. When he's back home, there was a bruise on his knee, and he said: “I lost balance and fell down. But I picked the bike up and tried again”. On the second day of practice, my husband was with my son as I was busy with something inside the house. After 30 minutes, my husband sent me a video that my son was able to ride the bike by himself with a comment: “He learned it fast".

My ten-month-old daughter was learning how to walk now. I bought a baby safety play yard gate to surround her playmat area. I also put 2 thick platmats inside one on top of the other. About two month ago, my daughter started to pull the edge and lean on the panel to stand up. Frequenly, she would lose balance, let go of her hands, and fell down multiple times. My helper quickly sat next to my girl so that she wouldn't fall down. When I observed this, I learnt that my baby girl wasn't afraid of falling down. Every time she fell, she quickly picked herself up and pulled the panel to stand up again. She kept doing this non-stop. Then I realized this perseverance was wired into the baby brain as a natural developmental step so that babies could learn how to crawl, sit, stand up, walk, and then run. So I told my helper to just let her try it, it's okay for her to fall, and even if she fell, the safety gate and the thick playmats would help to protect her. And now, after two months, she can walk slowly along the panels with her hands holding on to the edges for support.

When babies are learning to walk independently, they fall down. A lot. Some babies don't seem to mind much. They enthusiastically throw themselves into the project, and learn to walk rather quickly. You can see that children can learn new skills much faster than adults because they are not fear of failure. In this aspect, we can learn from our children. If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn.

When you fail, fail fast for rapid learning

Allow me to clarify what I mean by the phrase “fail fast", or "embrace failure", it doen't mean that you keep failing in the same way over and over again. This is super unproductive because it means that we are repeating the same mistakes and should not be celebrated or allowed to continue. The term "fail fast", which is commonly used in the tech industry, means that when something goes wrong, you could learn something meaningful, and you should learn as quickly as possible. When you fail fast and you learn rapidly, you avoid wasting time, effort and money in the long run. It's the learning after failure that matters.

In his book, Creativity Inc., Ed Catmul, co-founder of Pixar and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, talks about the formation and growth of Pixar. He devotes a whole chapter of his book to the discussion of “Fear and Failure”. Ed shares about the culture of Pixar, in which “fail early and fail fast" and "be wrong as fast as you can" are the norm. Ed has been quoted as saying, “Early on, all of our movies suck.” He means that new ideas are rarely perfect, and he and the directors at Pixar encourages his team to iterate, and even fail, in their pursuit of the next great story.

“If you aren't experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.” - Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and president of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

For example, in “Up", the amazing, innovative, and well-loved movie about an old man, an young boy and their grand adventure. When Catmull's team first conceived the idea, the story was nothing like the one viewers have come to know. It was about a castle in the sky inhabited by people who were at war with people on the ground. "This version didn't work," Catmull said. Neither did the next version nor the version after that, until, well, the version that garnered five Academy Awards nominations, including the best picture. Failure is in fact an ingredient in the creative process of Pixar.

Pixar cultivates an environment where its employees can act quickly and start going. They will be able to learn real feedback, and if they make mistakes, they still have enough time to pivot in the right direction. In order to build a culture that’s unafraid to fail, you have to be willing to trust people to make mistakes and fix them quickly.

“Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.”, as Ed writes.

As a business, never fail to innovate

Have you ever asked: Why did companies fail to innovate? It's tradition. Busineses prefer to play it safe, "don't change if it's not broken". They look at shareholder value, they look at quarterly earnings, they look at Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet, they look at analyst forecasts, they look at stock price. All of these are short-term view. If you continue to focus on short-term face value, sooner or later, your competitors will outspeed you. If you don't invest capital in order to generate long-term growth, if you don't adapt to change, you will be out of the game sooner than you know.

Many of you might be familiar with the case of Kodak. Once one of the most powerful companies in the world, Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. Today the company has a market capitalization of less than $600 million. An easy explanation for its downfall is myopia. Kodak was so blinded by its success that it completely missed the rise of digital technologies, which destroys its film-based business model. However, do you know that the first digital camera was invented by Kodak itself, by an engineer named Steve Sasson in 1975? “But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute—but don’t tell anyone about it,” says Sasson. The management of Kodak failed to see digital photography as a disruptive technology and online photo sharing as the new business, not just a way to expand the printing business. Its failure was due to its inability to truly adapt and embrace the new business models.

When Robert Iger became the CEO of the Walt Disney Company in 2005, it was during a difficult circumstance. Competitors were aggressive, and technology was changing faster than ever before. In his biography “The Ride Of A Lifetime - Lessons Learned From 15 Years As CEO of The Walt Disney Company”, Iger believed that there was no other direction. Disney needed to adapt to technology changes instead of fighting it, and focus on creating high-quality and original content. Iger is the person who led Disney's acquisition of Pixar, Lucasfilm (together with all the Star Wars stuff), Marvel, as well as 21st Century Fox. Iger also spearheaded the company investment in the direct-to-consumer business via a streaming service. Iger is the transformative CEO who not only advocates for innovation, but also drives it from the top down, convinces the BOD, with full support from, and alignment across, all senior leaders and business functions. I think it is fair to say that the strategy worked: Disney+ was launched in November 2019 and it has now surpassed the 100 million global subscribers just 15 months after launch.

In the end chapter “Lessons to Lead By", Iger writes: “I became comfortable with failure - not with lack of effort, but with the fact that if you want innovation, you need to grant permission to fail.”

Simply as this: If you don't innovate, your business would die. There is no learning without failing, there are no successes without setbacks.

And that's it for episode 2 on The One Word Talk about “Failure". This blog-like series would be about a one-word topic for every new episode. I would tell my story about what that word means to me, or how I interprete it, what is my point of view and my personal experience about that particular one-word topic. Every new episode would be posted weekly on every Tuesday or Wednesday, as I hope we can have an open forum and learn from one another. The next episode would be about "One" because... after failure, let's start with 1.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on today’s episode :)

The One Word Talk #TOWT - Episode 1: Introduction: Click here

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