Normalize failure, you're just getting better
Google, Airbus, Nokia...have all fallen on their faces and still succeeded. But what about you?
In our culture, which places such a high value on success and exceptional performance, many of us forget that the world, industries, and even the best companies have also been built on failures. Failure is a learning experience, part of a normal process towards success, provided that there has been hard work beforehand and reflection afterward.
Rachel Simmons, a leadership specialist and trainer, emphasized that "failure is not a bug in learning, it's a feature." Indeed, when you were a baby learning to walk, you didn’t give up after falling, did you? So what happened since then?
Your brain evolved and built mental barriers that cause you to doubt yourself in the face of difficulties, life challenges, or professional setbacks, making it hard for you to fully thrive through new actions. Stepping out of your comfort zone is always challenging, but it’s not insurmountable. As Rachel Simmons simply puts it, failure is normal, not an anomaly.
The tech world, passionate about innovation and thus about projects where success is never guaranteed, agrees. Jean-Louis Gassée, a former executive at Apple in the 1980s, noted: "Failure is an integral part of Silicon Valley. It’s even a reason for its success." After all, hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of companies in Silicon Valley are striving to become the next Google or Facebook. But despite the hard work of their founders and employees, success doesn’t always follow. Investors are well aware of this, which is why the concept of "venture capital" exists; the potential gains from investing in a startup are very high, but so are the risks.
But failure is not a word that applies only to startups seeking a scalable and powerful business model. The best companies have failed and continue to fail, so why not you? Here are a few examples:
In 1983, IBM told Microsoft that "there’s no money to be made in the software industry." Wrong: today, the software market is one of the most profitable, valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. No doubt IBM considered this when it decided to acquire companies like Red Hat in 2019.
Airbus launched the largest civilian aircraft in aviation history, the A380. A true technological feat, Airbus predicted in the 1990s that it would sell 1,400 aircraft by 2020. In the end, fewer than 300 were sold worldwide (it could have been much worse if Gulf countries hadn’t placed large orders). One of the reasons for the A380’s failure was the miscalculation by Airbus, which believed that air traffic would increasingly concentrate on major airports, while its rival Boeing (which quickly abandoned the idea of competing with the A380) anticipated that air traffic would focus more on medium-sized cities over time, making large aircraft less viable. But guess what? Airbus still exists and continues to build high-performing aircraft for airlines.
Nokia tried to enter the smartphone market late to compete with Apple and Samsung at the end of the 2010s. It failed, and Nokia's market share in mobile phones continued to decline quarter after quarter. Nokia had to abandon the race but continues to exist and perform in another area, namely heavy network equipment. Yves Doz, a researcher at INSEAD, explains that this strategic failure resulted from a combination of factors, including "management decisions, dysfunctional organizational structures, increasing bureaucracy, and deep internal rivalries." Worse still, he notes that success breeds "conservatism and arrogance," preventing companies from reinventing themselves, anticipating, and evolving. As a result, you leave the door wide open for your competitors to take your market share.
Google has failed many times but remains a leader. These failures are numerous, ranging from the inability to launch Google+ (Google’s social network intended to compete with Facebook at the time) to the billions of dollars invested to acquire Motorola in 2011 to enter the smartphone market, only to sell Motorola three years later due to lack of profitability.
As you can see, we could spend hours listing the strategic errors of the world’s leading companies. Billions of dollars and the best engineers in Silicon Valley aren’t enough to prevent failure. The reasons for failure can be many: entering a market too late, poor forecasting, geopolitical contexts, technical product issues, poor management decisions, and so on.
In any case, after a failure, you must analyze it, understand it, and take a step back: why did you fail?
I’ve spent my life failing, dozens of times, on many different subjects. Spoiler: I’m still alive. Some people will try to convince you that they’ve never failed in their lives, that everything has always gone their way. Either they’ve been incredibly lucky but will (or already have) become mediocre, or they’re lying (90% of the time) because they think admitting failure is a sign of weakness. What a shame: you only truly grow when you acknowledge that you’ve done something wrong and learn from your mistake.
The best at this is the french artist Uzi, who said in a recent interview with Mehdi Maizi: "The results weren’t good because we weren’t good. We shouldn’t make excuses."
The artist in question is confident in his talent. But he knows that one of his projects didn’t succeed because he didn’t work well enough. This makes him all the more interesting to listen to and shows an extreme form of maturity. You should do the same.
In any case, be honest with yourself: the reasons for failure can be varied, but not always. In all cases, learn to cultivate failure, draw lessons from it, take a step back, and be proud of yourself: as long as you’ve tried and fought to succeed, you’re already among the winners (just look at the progress you’ve made and the things you’ve learned). The next time will be the right one, and after all, those who don’t try cannot succeed.
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****This article is a repost from October 28, 2022 (initially in French, on LinkedIn)****
For further reading:
*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/fashion/fear-of-failure.html
** From Sun Tzu to Steve Jobs - A History of Strategy, by Bruno Jarrosson – Dunod, 2016