The impact of the global financial meltdown has made many business leaders realise they weren’t as brilliant as they maybe thought they were. After all, if you claim credit for success during the boom then you may well be held accountable for failure in the bust. This has created a new trend in leadership training: to highlight the learning opportunities that come from failure.
Failure may not yet be the new success but there are a number of chief executives who are now happy to borrow some words from an ever popular Sinatra song, “Mistakes, I’ve made a few…”.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told a recent conference he made “every mistake” he could make in creating the social networking site. The latest to confess is former Proctor & Gamble CEO AG Lafley who was quoted as saying “I think of my failures as a gift” in a recent article in Harvard Business Review.
There is a lot to be said for realistically assessing why a project went well or badly. A candid review can help an organisation develop the skills it needs for future success, so I can only applaud this new-found honesty. However current tough market conditions and a couple of years of falling sales and profits have given chief executives little opportunity to hide their blunders. I just hope that this refreshing approach to acknowledging and analysing failure can be maintained when the economy picks up and sales growth accelerates.
By Jon Davies | Righttrack’s Interim International Business Development and Marketing Manager