Songwriter Jason Isbell "follows his mistakes" to develop a personal style

From an article in CountryWeekly.com:

Combining his personal experiences with fictional ideas to make a more compelling story is something Jason has honed over years of trial and error. “I try to follow my mistakes. I think that’s really the only way to develop a personal style,” he suggests. “If you start out imitating people, the ways you mess that up are usually the things that become your own signatures. I try to follow that.” 

Honda shares failure stories

A very cool video from Honda, "Failure: The Secret of Success." It focuses on their racing experiences, but also includes manufacturing and engineering anecdotes.



Hat tip to What's the Pont.

Mistake Bank Bookshelf: "The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures" - a minor book ennobled by "the world's worst soccer player"

In Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures Stephen Pile has written a funny, lighthearted look at failures. It's a compendium of third-person anecdotes about people doing things badly. Stories include "The Slowest Cross-Channel Swim," "The Worst Photography Exhibition," and "The Least Successful Concert." There's no analysis and the subjects themselves have no voice. As such, it's a very minor addition to the reading list on mistakes and failure. Rather than commanding a prominent place on the bookshelf, it's probably better suited for reading in the bathroom.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The book is not without insights, though. In the Epilogue, Leonardo Cunha Lima, director of the documentary short film Mauro Shampoo, about the so-called "worst soccer player in Brazil," discussed why he chose to make a football movie about a non-star:

Mauro’s story had something that I find particularly interesting when I see it in documentaries—a sense of the irony of life. After all, this is a film about a man that turned the otherwise catastrophic fact of his failure into a positive thing. And his ultimate goal of becoming famous was accomplished in a completely unexpected upside-down way. And of course there is the fact that I believe that Mauro’s story expresses a love for the game much greater then any love of winning. That is actually the beautiful legacy of the Ibis Sport Club, it is a living example of pure love of the game. In essence, Brazil is a country that would love football just as much if it had never won any game at the World Cup. The persistence of Ibis is the proof of this love....

He is peculiarly endowed with heroic underdog characteristics that make him an iconic urban legend and a symbol of Brazil. His personal story serves as the perfect counter balance for success stories like Pele, Zico and the Ronaldinhos out there. After all most Brazilians will become Mauro Shampoos, and only a few will ever see the glories of a Ronaldo.

So Mauro is the perfect role model for failing with dignity and pride, but to still succeed in those things that really matter in life: a loving family, his own business and the respect of his community. What more could a man wish for?

Mauro Shampoo (2006) from LCL on Vimeo.

[Note: the interview excerpt I included is expanded somewhat from the version in the "Ultimate Book." I liked some of Lima's words that Pile chose to leave out. Original interview source here.]

Autotuning Mr. Rogers - what can result from a culture of intelligent failure

I had the opportunity last week to talk to a group of project managers and customer support managers at a large tech company about learning from mistakes. They were most interested in the "contract for intelligent failure" that Rita McGrath proposed. This contract specifies, for a particular workgroup, the parameters around acceptable failure. It defines what acceptable failure is and creates a zone of safety for people trying new things.

Now I've just read "How I Got My Team To Fail More" by Jason Seiken on the HBR Blog Network.  Seiken, head of PBS' digital operations, was able to break through his unit's risk aversion and complacency - which caused growth to stagnate - by mandating that they fail more. Seiken recounted how the team learned how to work to this new objective:

In a beautifully ironic twist, the failure metric itself initially failed. We originally envisioned the metric as a formal KPI in each staffer’s annual performance review. But we soon realized we had created a contradiction: You can’t build a culture that values rapid iteration by simply changing an annual performance cycle. We needed daily reinforcement of the desirability of risk-taking and failing fast.

So instead of spending cycles working with HR to create a KPI measuring lack of failure, we focused on endlessly repeating the “must fail” message.

The change was rapid and profound. Some staff were uncomfortable with the new culture and left. Others began taking risks. The product manager working on our first augmented reality site for PBSKids.org ditched her plans for months of customer research and testing in favor of a 10-week sprint to launch. The site failed. The product manager? She received a spot bonus and her “smart failure” was listed as a top accomplishment in her glowing annual review....

Crucially, we redefined success. When our first foray into web-original video production, a safe, TV-type series called “The Parent Show,” launched to fairly good reviews, we resisted the temptation to declare victory. Instead, the team challenged itself to risk breaking the PBS mold by creating a truly YouTube-native show.

This led to the Mr. Rogers remix, “Garden of Your Mind,” which auto-tuned old clips so Mr. Rogers bursts into song. Within 48 hours, it rose to the top of the most viewed and most shared videos charts on YouTube.

Before the failure metric, the team would have considered a Fred Rogers music video to be risky at best, sacrilege at worst. Instead, the culture change triggered by the failure metric gave the team comfort that even if this blew up in their face, they would be protected.

Ordering people to fail more doesn't work unless they are given the tools to take intelligent risks. What would your "contract for intelligent failure" look like?

Here's an example of the residue of the failure-tolerant culture:

Ashley Good of AdmittingFailure.com discusses learning from failure

This is the keynote presentation Ashley Good gave at FailCon Oslo back in June. Ashley is a fellow traveler who helps companies and non-governmental organizations tell their failure stories so they can learn and improve. Her site AdmittingFailure.com includes stories and discussions of learning from failure. Her talk is a great reinforcement of many points we discuss at this site. Enjoy!



Money quote from a hockey coach to a player who was focused on playing perfectly: "You are not falling enough... practice is for finding your edge." Failure is a way to test our limits and understand what we have to do to get better.

One of Ashley's pieces of work is the annual Failure Report published by the Canadian NGO Engineers Without Borders. You can access its 2012 Failure Report here.

Fun Friday: Elvis Costello's "Brilliant Mistake"

There's a brief interview at the start, then the song begins at 1:10. Did you catch the snippet of Dylan at the beginning? Tell us in the comments.

Calculation error gives Moog synthesizer its signature sound

Bill Hemsath, one of the engineers of the original Minimoog synthesizer, on why it had such a distinctive sound.

Our instrument had punch to it because we inadvertently overdrove the filter like crazy. Jim Scott did the filter and voltage controlled amplifiers. He made a calculation error, and he overdrove the filters by 10, 12, 15 dB, something like that. And nobody knew that until a month or two after we started in production. And everyone said, "Leave it alone!"

Hat tip New York Times.

Guy Kawasaki's Top 10 Entrepreneur Mistakes

A great talk from tech guru Guy Kawasaki. This talk is full of humor, bold language, and good insight. Kawasaki has been in the startup business a long time and, as he says, has seen just about everything. It's worth an hour of your time to check it out.



Hat tip Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen.

Doug Rauch of Trader Joe's: 1 in 100 new products becoming "big successes" is a good performance

In this HBR video, Doug Rauch, former president of the Trader Joe's grocery chain, describes the need to fail often in order to create "exciting, adventuresome products."

Vijay Govindarajan on how to learn through failing cheaply & quickly

This brief video from Vijay Govindarajan of the Tuck School at Dartmouth University illustrates a simple method for creating an effective innovation experiment. His recommendation: "Test your most critical unknowns as early and as inexpensively as possible."

This has some resonance with the "Smart Mistakes" article I recently posted on The 99 Percent.



Govindarajan is the co-author of "Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere." We posted on that book earlier.

Video: View of failure in the startup world

A great 3 1/2 minute video from the New York Tech Meetup #startupstories. Entrepreneurs and investors talk about the impossibility of getting it right the first time, and the need to iterate to find a successful path when you start a new venture. Thanks to Fred Wilson for sharing it:

Renny Gleeson: the 404 error page is an opportunity to engage with users

In this TED talk, Renny Gleeson discusses the HTML 404 error (page not found), and how companies have creatively designed their version of this error page to build connection with their users. Says Gleeson, "A simple mistake should remind me of why I love you."

Tim Harford's video compilation of mistake quotes (with a blues soundtrack)

Tim Harford, author of "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure," posted a video compilation of quotes about mistakes and failure, backed by Charley Jordan's "Titanic Blues."

My favorite discovery in the video was this quote by Laurence Peter, co-author of "The Peter Principle":

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and informed just to be undecided about them.

New York Giants and Jeremy Lin demonstrate how to accept and learn from mistakes

I'm still basking in the afterglow surrounding the Giants' recent Super Bowl win. A Sports Illustrated article mentioned something that might have helped develop the remarkable resiliency that characterized their late season and playoff performances. Here's a brief excerpt:

During the bye week following a 4-2 start, director of player development Charles Way invited fighter pilots from Afterburner Inc., a corporate training company, to address the team about the value of "debriefing" sessions. Pilots returning from missions build trust through sessions in which they sit in a room together, stripped of name and rank; each speaks openly about mistakes he made during the mission. Players also received a copy of a book by one of the pilots, James D. Murphy, the title of which expressed the ultimate goal: Flawless Execution.

Soon Manning and Tuck, respectively, were leading offensive and defensive debriefings the day after games. Coaches were not present. Meetings lasted from 20 minutes to an hour. "I wasn't coaching anybody," Manning says. "I was just coaching myself, looking at what I needed to do better and telling everybody. Then everybody would talk about what they needed to do to improve."

Says linebacker Mathias Kiwanuka, "There was a time there when we needed every single minute of [debriefing]. It wasn't about calling people out. It was an opportunity to see everybody hold themselves accountable. The big part of why we're here is that fingers don't get pointed. These kind of teams don't come along very often."

If accountability and execution characterized New York's undefeated run from 7--7, those qualities were beacons during the Super Bowl.

This practice recalls some of Robin Ely's great research on learning among oil-platform workers and Amy Edmondson's work on hospital nursing teams, as well as Justin Menkes writing on leadership. Learning and performance are enhanced when people are unafraid to share mistakes, when they look to themselves first ("owning their missteps") instead of blaming others.

In a similar vein, here's what Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin said in his postgame interview after hitting the game-winning shot against the Toronto Raptors: "I did a horrible job on Barbosa and Calderon... Shump did an unbelievable job... I let them get into a flow early, and that's on me. He bailed me out." Very little about his good performances, a lot about what his teammates did well, and what he can improve. Here's the interview:

CEO Sergio Marchionne: Fiat 500 launch "poorly executed"

Fiat & Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne explains why the US launch of the Fiat 500 undershot company projections. "Speaking bluntly," he says, "the launch was poorly executed." He doesn't say "I screwed it up," but he doesn't give excuses or deflect blame. This is showing a sense of agency. Marchionne also doesn't overreact to this data point, and takes the long view - this is the first step in reintroducing Fiat's cars to the US marketplace. It's a great 2-minute lesson in how a CEO should talk in public.



(Hat tip to Stephen Wunker)

Kathryn Schulz discusses the importance of regret

Kathryn Schulz (author of "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error") has a great TED Talk covering regret - why it's painful, and why it's necessary. Knowing that the absence of regret is a trait of psychopaths is one reason why we shouldn't feel too bad when we, you know, feel bad about something we've done. Schulz had a prior talk which we posted on earlier in the year.

Michael Bloomberg recalls being fired 30 years ago

TechCrunch's "Founder Stories" series recently presented an interview with Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City. Mayor Bloomberg is a highly successful tech entrepreneur as well as a 3-term mayor of the Big Apple. He discusses the role of hard work, as well as luck (he mentions luck twice), in his success.

While I was watching the interview, I thought about this quote from Paul Schoemaker: "The school of hard knocks is a great teacher, even if the tuition is very high, precisely because the lessons make such a deep imprint." At least three times in the interview Mayor Bloomberg refers to his being fired from Salomon Brothers more than 30 years earlier. In spite of his subsequent triumphs, the occasion of his firing still gnaws at him, still gives him something to prove. Here's the entire interview:



You can find Mayor Bloomberg's story of his firing in this excerpt of "Bloomberg by Bloomberg" from the New York Times.

Paul Schoemaker discusses "Brilliant Mistakes"

More than five years after his terrific HBR article (written with Robert Gunther), "The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes," Paul Schoemaker of the Wharton School has published a book on the subject. "Brilliant Mistakes: Finding Success on the Far Side of Failure" extends the thinking from the article, and is a great gift to those of us who want to improve how we, as Schoemaker says, "invite mistakes into our lives." One of the key values of mistakes, he states, is to overturn our assumptions and allow us to see reality more clearly.

The Wharton School has posted an interview with Schoemaker on its site (you can see the video below). Knowledge@Wharton is also conducting a "Brilliant Mistakes Contest" if you'd like to share your story.

Here are some choice quotes:

A brilliant mistake is an action you take or a prediction you make that turns out to be wrong. This hurts you initially, but then it also opens up new vistas, and it may result in innovation and discovery. You start to see the world -- or yourself -- differently. For example: You get fired from a job unexpectedly and it prompts a lot of learning. Or you enter a new market or a new technology, and initially, many things don't work out well, but the benefits eventually make that "mistake" more than compensate for its cost....

You have to look at the conditions that favor these brilliant kinds of mistakes. If there is a lot of uncertainty, and the world has changed on you and your old ways of thinking are not quite the right ones, then you have to create more space to discover new approaches....

Very few people want to say they favor mistakes. However, I was also struck [by the fact] that many very successful people have not only a tolerant approach to mistakes, in music or in sports, but they actually embrace them, to some extent. They have an intuitive sense that these mistakes are, as James Joyce put it, "portals of discovery." These are new venues, new avenues for having insights that otherwise you wouldn't get. That's the key: The mistake is an expensive way to get to new insight. But if that is the only way to get to that insight, it may still be worth pursuing.

I've posted my "brilliant mistake" here.

Related post: Benefiting from deliberate mistakes

"Hey, would you like to help create the World Wide Web?" "No, thanks"

An interesting story from Ian Ritchie, former head of Office Workstations Limited (OWL), an early maker of hypertext software for personal computers, speaking at TEDGlobal 2011. Ritchie describes how he (and several others) were in a position to help Tim Berners-Lee realize his dream of the World Wide Web, but failed to see it Berners-Lee's way and declined to participate. And the rest is history.

Wall Street Journal collects 10 CEO video apologies

The Wall Street Journal "Deal Journal" blog has collected YouTube clips of 10 CEO apologies, the most recent being RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologizing for the company's lengthy service outage:



You can view the entire collection here.