Meta Friday - a discussion of a MBank post spurs thoughts on revealing mistakes

A discussion started yesterday over at Regretsy Forums, a site where people share gripes with Etsy products, vendors, life in general, and, sometimes, about issues they have with Etsy, the online crafts marketplace. The subject of the discussion ("I know why Etsy screws up so much" - free registration required) was a Mistake Bank post entitled "Etsy CEO on the Three-Armed Sweater Award for Spectacular Mistakes." One of the Chad Dickerson quotes featured from tabby, who started the discussion was this: "We have 100 engineers, and any single engineer can deploy code to the live site at any time. It happens about 30 times a day."

This prompted 26 replies and counter-replies, many of which echoed this theme from whiskeyish:

That's been discussed pretty heavily here before. I sound like a broken record when I say "the ship-it mentality is killing even the established companies, because they run it like a broken-ass startup with no consequences to the end users."

It's a fascinating conversation that to me illuminates two important points:

1) Etsy, assuming they still deploy live code to the site, may want to consider if they've grown too big for this kind of "broken-ass startup" approach to change management (or as Dickerson himself puts it: "embody(ing) the hacker spirit"). A fair number of their users seem to think so.

2) Discussing mistakes openly will subject you to derision. You need fortitude, self-confidence, and the ability to tune out the chatter - without losing important lessons you need to hear, even if unpleasant (see item #1).

Good stuff to think about on a Friday.

Tim Berry asks "why can't failures be included in speakers' bios?"

Tim Berry, in his great "Planning Startups Stories" blog, brings up a provocative assertion that is right up this site's alley:

I say entrepreneurs should agree on full disclosure in their bios. We should list not just our successes, but also the failures. Nobody lists the failures.

And he lists several reasons why this would improve our understanding of entrepreneurs and, ironically, success as well. Part of Tim's argument, which I agree with completely, is that people look at successful entrepreneurial ventures and create patterns that they believe are success rules. Then they publish them in books like "Good to Great" and readers think they have the magic formula. But because these books deliberately exclude failures (even from the same entrepreneurs!), their assessments are invalid and, worse, leave the mistaken impression that entrepreneurial success is replicable if you follow their 5 principles.

New businesses operate in a world of complexity. External issues, coincidence, luck, timing, etc., overwhelm operating principles when it comes to success and failure in entrepreneurial ventures. This doesn't mean you don't work hard and smart, but it does mean that those qualities don't guarantee anything at all.

Tim Berry: Trying to quit the wrong way

Tim Berry, president & founder of Palo Alto Software, shares this story of a mistake he made much earlier in his career. This story first appeared on Tim's blog Planning, Startups, Stories.

I've made a lot of mistakes. This one wasn't my worst, but it's perhaps one of the more memorable, and one that might help you avoid the same thing. There is a moral to this story. It was August of 1981, early morning, in the office of John Lutz, managing partner of McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City. I was three months out of Stanford with an MBA degree, working for McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City. The McKinsey offices sat in a very stylish high-profile office building overlooking a critical freeway junction over Chapultepec Park, linking the fancy Las Lomas residencial area with Polanco and the Paseo de Reforma main business district. The streets were wet from rain overnight, and the freeway was, as almost always, jammed. The sky was dense, a mixture of rainclouds and smog.

I needed to quit. It was so embarrassing. I didn't like to see myself as the archetypical fancy MBA blowing off the first job. I was 33 years old, married, and my wife was expecting our fourth child. I was way too mature for this stuff. But still ...I had arranged a job waiting for me with Creative Strategies International in San Jose. From where I was, returning back to the San Francisco peninsula, Silicon Valley, seemed like returning from exile back to paradise. I liked Creative Strategies, and liked living back in the states. I wanted out of McKinsey.

I really didn't like the job with McKinsey. It was stupid to have taken it. It was a job meant for a 26-year-old single person blinded by ambition untrammeled by relationships. Like most professional firms, success involved putting up with a corporate culture that spent 12 to 14 hours a day in the office, whether or not there was work to be done. The firm actively discouraged families by encouraging long-term business travel but without families, and by running 5-day strategy meetings at beach resorts and forbidding families coming along, even at the family's own expense. I was not supposed to disagree with partners on well, you get the idea.

I certainly didn't belong. I'd been entrepreneurial for 10 straight years, making my own way with freelance journalism and, later, my own consulting, and I wasn't up to faking awe for the partners. And as a family, we didn't belong in Mexico City. I had loved that place for nine years in the 70s, it had been good to me, but I was done. My wife is Mexican, she grew up in Mexico City, and had family there, but she was tired of it too. The city was too big, too hard to deal with. We had left in 1979 and shouldn't have gone back in 1981. I fell for the money and prestige, stupidly, because it wasn't enough to keep me.

So, back in the office with John Lutz, did I tell him why I was leaving? That I didn't like the job, had made a bad decision, didn't like Mexico, I'm sorry, it won't work.

No. I didn't. I told him I needed a lot more money.

This is one of the best arguments ever for telling the damn truth, even when it's embarrassing. I'm still embarrassed, but I'm older now, and, well, I think this is a good lesson to share.

So they gave me more money, and then how dumb did I look?

I still left, and I left looking really stupid. Why didn't I just tell the truth in the first place?

So there's the moral to the story. You'll be in a situation where you're tempted to slant away from the truth to make it easier, but remember before you do how bad you'll look if the other side answers the wrong issue, forcing you to admit it was never the real problem. So here there is. It bothered me for a long time but that was 25 years ago or so, and hey, I've made a lot of other mistakes since, the sting has worn off on this one. I hope you find the story useful.

Roughnecks learn to learn from mistakes

"Unmasking Manly Men" in the July-August 2008 Harvard Business Review has a grabby title and a thesis puncturing a resilient stereotype: one of the roughest, most macho, most dangerous industries in the world--offshore oil drilling--has developed a new work culture where workers support each other, where they are open and candid with their feelings, and...my favorite topic...where they admit mistakes and seek to learn from them.

The piece, written by professors Robin Ely of Harvard Business School and Debra Meyerson of Stanford University, states that the culture change was led from above, primarily as a way to improve safety and reduce accidents. And that worked--on-the-job accidents declined 84% over a fifteen-year period. Efficiency and productivity improved as well.

This culture of candor had at least on beneficial side effect--the company developed a new assessment of leadership potential based on ability to listen and learn rather than excellence as a roughneck. [A lesson to the many many professions out there that still select new leaders based on skill in the old job vs. capability for the new one.]

Developing a culture of destigmatizing mistakes, discussing them and learning from them makes the whole organization a lot more human, caring and fun. Oh, yeah, innovative, too.