Don Keough: Miscalculations are part of the price of staying in business

From Donald Keough's book "The Ten Commandments for Business Failure":

The way forward will always generate some failures. Walter Isaacson in his wonderful biography of Einstein tells a story about what Einstein said he needed in his new office at Princeton.: a desk or a table, a chair, some pencils, paper, and a very large wastebasket "for all the mistakes I will make." In business, you can make a good argument for mistakes like Steve Jobs' Lisa or PowerMac Cube because the highly creative Apple environment that spawned them also produced big winners like iPod and iPhone. You can even justify those mistakes that have become the folkloric case studies in how-not-to-do-it courses in business schools all over the country, such as the Edsel or 45-rpm records or even New Coke. These failures, for all the valuable lessons that they teach us in hindsight about management blunders, are simply risks that just didn't work out. Such miscalculations, costly though they might be at the time, are part of the price of staying in business. As Peter Drucker pointed out nearly fifty years ago, it is management's major task to prudently risk a company's present assets in order to ensure its future existence. In fact, if a company never has a failure, I submit that their management is probably not discontented enough to justify their salaries.

pp.22-23