"Mistakes On Purpose" workshop

For those who are intrigued by the subject matter on this site, you may be interested in the "Mistakes On Purpose" workshop by Laurie Rosenwald, which she provides to companies and educational organizations. More info here.

Learning from failures (and successes) requires different IT systems

A few years ago, I worked with a colleague tasked with improving his company’s project management outcomes (I was going to say processes, but on thinking about it they asked him to improve the performance and results).

He’s focusing on lessons learned, as you might expect. The company has done lots of projects; surely there are many lessons within those projects that could help improve things going forward? And there are. But my colleague has found that the inability to effectively capture and share these lessons prevents the organization as a whole from getting much if any value out of their past experiences.

[A Harvard Business Review article, "The Experience Trap," emphasizes why project management, in particular, is prone to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.]

I was thinking about my colleague as I was reading this recent article in “Strategy + Business” entitled, “Are You Killing Enough Ideas?” by Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach. The article discusses innovation, not project management, but this section in particular resonated with me and spurred my connection with project management lessons:

…When there is an ineffective balance between formal and informal structures, it often shows up as an inability to manage bad ideas effectively. After a formal decision has been made to advance some ideas but not to pursue others, the company expends considerable effort to plan the next steps for the winners. But no one thinks actively of planning next steps for the losing ideas, to put them to rest, free up their supporting resources, and (ideally) identify and share any lessons or insights gleaned from the experience.

One quibble with this otherwise excellent paper: why is identifying and sharing lessons and insights from experience an “ideal” situation? It should be business as usual.

Significant corporate initiatives, whether they are innovation ideas or IT projects, are expensive in capital, resources and opportunity cost. The experience, whether the project is ultimately a success or not, is hard won and valuable. It should be mandatory to capture and share these lessons and insights.

There are several barriers my colleague faces in trying to institutionalize the creation and use of lessons learned. “Let’s move on” is one of the most pernicious ones. After a difficult project, people are inclined to look ahead rather than backward, to forget difficult or painful experiences rather than mine them for lessons. (As mentioned in chapter 6 of the book, lessons sometimes emerge years after an experience.) Organizations, of course, in their eagerness to place blame, facilitate people’s instincts to hide or blur what happened in the case of a failed project.

My colleague’s company has a very open and positive culture; they are more equipped than most companies at overcoming the reluctance to share. Yet they still face a significant obstacle: their information systems are not up to the task of gathering, sharing, sorting and consuming lessons-learned material.

They capture lessons in Word forms and documents, and store them in file folders on a shared drive. And they are not surprised when no one can find anything. Dumping valuable lessons on a shared drive may have a slightly positive use for whoever writes the lessons down; at least that person learns a bit more from the retelling. But certainly it’s of no use to anyone else.

Lessons-learned need enterprise 2.0-type tools that capture narrative data, signifiers and tags; allow users to “like,” pass along, add to, and otherwise annotate original stories; and browse through, search and connect related stories. That’s what my colleague needs, and that’s what every organization that wants to “ideally” learn from both good and bad experiences needs as well.

Front-line nurses discover small process innovations can cure medication mistakes

Bob Sutton posted on this 2009 San Francisco Chronicle article, but it had so much good stuff relating to areas I’m passionate about that I need to write about it too.

The article concerns an effort by Bay Area nurses to reduce the occurrence of medication errors, which, according to the Chronicle, cause 400,000 preventable injuries and cost an extra $3.5 billion in medical costs each year. The results of the effort: a 88% reduction in medication errors in the participating hospitals.

Here are a few quotes that talk about areas I’m interested in – listening to and empowering customer-facing (patient-facing?) personnel, and the value of simple, low-tech solutions to business problems:

Striving to reduce interruptions that lead to mistakes, teams of nurses at the different hospitals came up with a variety of methods – often surprisingly low tech – to alert others they were administering medications…. 

The solutions “have to be low tech because we, as staff nurses, don’t have the money or ability to make high-tech changes,” said Celeste Arbis, a registered nurse in the medical-surgical unit there. “Something as simple as changing the process just a little bit can make a big difference.”… 

Nurses attributed much of the program’s success to allowing those on the front lines to develop and tailor their own solutions.

I’ve seen both these situations in action: the ability of front-line personnel to understand and fix problems with the processes they use, and the effectiveness of often-overlooked simple and low-tech solutions. Sutton wrote something very profound in his post on this subject: “I think that people — especially managers — often use spending money as a substitute for thinking, when inexpensive and low-tech solutions work just fine.”

Ben Horowitz - raising capital? You only need one believer

Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz on the difficult task of raising money in a down market, and the value of persistence:

Once you begin your process, keep in mind that you are looking for a market of one. You don’t need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one. If 20 investors tell you “no”, that does not mean that there is no market for your deal. You just need one to say yes and she will erase all 20 no’s.

No Mulligans

I played golf with my brother-in-law a few years ago. He hadn’t played much and was struggling. But no matter where his drive went, or where he found his ball, he would not take a mulligan or improve his lie. “Go ahead and move the ball,” I told him. “Why suffer?”

“No thanks,” was his reply. And he hacked the ball back into the fairway.
That round made a big impression on me. For one thing, I was a poor-to-fair golfer and I’d take mulligans from time to time, or take a favorable drop, or the like. But what my brother-in-law taught me that day was that I would never know precisely how well I was doing at golf if I didn’t follow the rules.

And if I didn’t know how well I was doing, it would be hard to improve. I had to confront the brutal facts (as stated in “Good to Great”) before I could move forward.

I tried to take that lesson into my business life as well. How were things going, really? Was I using excuses to mask weaknesses I myself needed to address?

In short, to be great at business you can’t take mulligans. You’ve got to face reality and try to improve.
It was a very valuable day on the golf course. After I cut down on the mulligans and played the ball where it lay, my scores, predictably, got worse. Over time they’ve come down. And, best of all, they’re real.

(Photo: “Tee Time 3″ from Garrison Photography via stock.xchng–note: NOT my brother-in-law)

Pedro Baranda of Otis Elevator: three beneficial outcomes if leaders delegate

From Pedro Baranda, president of Otis Elevator Corporation, as told to the New York Times' Adam Bryant:

The main mistake I tended to make — and probably still do sometimes — is that because I’m an engineer, I like to get into the details of things. So I got some feedback about it early on, such as, “Let me do my job.”

That was an important lesson, because if you want to develop leaders and not followers, one of the key things you have to learn to do is delegate. One of my bosses once told me: “You’ve got to delegate because there are only three possible outcomes. You tell them what your expectations are, and if their solution is better than yours, that’s fantastic. If the solution is the same as yours would be, then it’s fantastic, too, because at least you didn’t have to do it. And if it’s not as good as you expected, you can always take the time to teach them why and what to do differently. That way, you will have learned about the person and the person will have learned from you.”

That lesson about delegation is fundamental if you want to develop leaders and not followers. I heard an expression from one of my business professors — that talent flow is the best predictor of future cash flows — and that has stayed with me.

Steve Martin: Naïveté is necessary to developing your creativity

Another great quote from "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life." There are echoes here of the entrepreneur's necessary delusion referred to in Dan Isenberg's "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value."

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

Steve Martin learned performing through documenting & reflecting on his own work

Steve Martin's memoir "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life" is a great document of a performer's growth from novice to superstar. The most fascinating sections deal with his teenage years, when, through experiences working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, Martin decides to pursue a career in show business. These are also the most fondly-remembered parts of his life (as opposed to his decidedly mixed view of the last six or seven years of his standup career, when he sold millions of records and sold out arenas across the country).

Martin's systematic desire to improve struck home with me. Even in his midteens, as he was honing his magic act, he had already developed a practice that most of us (at any age) could benefit from:

Following the advice in "Showmanship for Magicians," I kept scrupulous records of how each gag played afer my local shows for the Cub Scouts or Kiwanis Club. "Excellent!" or "Big laugh!" or "Quiet," I would write in the margins of my Big Indian tablet; then I would summarize how I could make the show better next time.

The habit of self-review continued as he shifted to comedy and became a small-time headliner in California clubs. And, in another lesson we can all learn from, he acted on what he learned, for example in this mistake story:

In case I ad-libbed something wonderful, I began taping my shows with a chintzy cassette recorder. I had a routine in which I played a smug party guy with a drink in his hand. When the bit started, the waitresses brought me a glass of wine that I would use as a prop. When that glass was empty, they would bring me another. One night I listened to the tape and could hear myself slurring. I never had a drink before or during a show again.

It's very easy to let moments pass, especially when they may be embarrassing or tell us something we'd rather not know. But in those moments, Martin shows us, are the data that tell us how to get better at what we do. "Born Standing Up" shows that substantial careers start small, and improve day by day over years - but only if we mine our ongoing experiences to learn and adapt.

Flipboard's Mike McCue: at Netscape, focusing on competition over customers was a mistake

From McCue's interview with Adam Bryant of the New York Times:

One of the biggest mistakes I made at Netscape was to focus too much on competition. Microsoft was trying to kill us. And that caused us to think about what we were going to do about Microsoft. What we really should have been thinking was: How do we focus on what our users want? Why did they love our product? How do we make it more of something that they love? So my advice is, every time you have a thought about the competition, replace that with a thought about your customer and you’ll do far better as a business.

A coda to the story is that Netscape was "killed" by Microsoft despite Netscape's focus on trying to counter their competition. The lesson is that a customer focus might have done better.

Interview with Dan Isenberg, author of "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid"

Dan Isenberg is the executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project and the author of the great new book "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value," a very valuable book on the subject. We had a wide-ranging conversation on failure, mistakes, lean startups and whether entrepreneurs need to try to get very big. Enjoy!

Access the podcast here (30 minutes).

Summary:

1:15 What "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid" is about
3:10 On the emerging "Failure Culture"
7:30 The fine line between success and failure in new ventures
8:20 Is the first mover advantage really an advantage?
9:25 Do entrepreneurs have to be innovators to succeed?
10:00 Dan's failed venture
11:30 Lessons from the failure - the sixth sense of business danger; the speed of failure; reading the macro situation; the "Dersu Uzala" story
13:33 Is there a scarcity of capital for entrepreneurs?
17:00 On the Lean Startup movement; not so novel - "that's the way our grandparents did business"; "a lot of really good ventures will require a lot of capital"
18:55 Is a flower-shop owner really an entrepreneur? "There's not a continuum between self-employment and entrepreneurship."
22:30 Entrepreneurs as job-creators - and public policy (please be patient with the interviewer's 90 - 90! - second question. He got carried away.)
28:05 A bit more on the book - great entrepreneur stories without even one about Steve Jobs

"Better Place" bankruptcy as a component of broader trial-and-error process?

There has been much written on the recent bankruptcy filing of A Better Place, a company proposing to drive adoption of all-electric cars by creating a battery-swapping infrastructure - extending the range of electric cars without a lengthy wait to recharge.

Is Better Place's demise the end of the story? Saul Kaplan doesn't think so. In his post at Fortune Magazine's site, Kaplan discusses what the company's failure means, and answers the company's many after-the-fact critics:

The "I told you so crowd" immediately started taking shots. New York Times columnist David Brooks took a swing directly at Agassi calling him a "brilliant technology entrepreneur" but implying that he was among "conference circuit capitalists who give fantastic presentations but have turned out to be marginal in history." Ouch. Easy for David Brooks to criticize others for sharing their point of view at conferences when he leverages a New York Times platform to do the same thing.

He points to Tesla's announcement of battery-swapping trials as evidence that the model is far from dead:

Tesla is going to test stations where Model-S owners can swap batteries in 90 seconds for $50-60, less time and money than filling up a tank of gas. Bold business models don't die; they just get reinvented. If we want to go from best practice to next practice we have to try more stuff. We learn more from efforts that don't work than from those that do. So instead of piling on those that try to do bold things without initial success or criticizing those that share their paradigm shifting ideas publicly, we should thank them for pushing us forward and providing the knowledge to try again, only better the next time.

As we've discussed here, trial and error is not a random process; within a constrained problem definition, failures reduce the subsequent exploration that's needed to solve the problem. A Better Place didn't work, but that's not the end of the story. Battery-swapping may very well work, in time.

Can struggle and failure lead to competitive advantage?

Found this interesting post from Lolly Daskal, "Failure: The Competitive Advantage." Lolly compares two leaders facing upheaval in their professional lives and the loss of their jobs. One was handling it poorly - the other was excitedly looking to the possibilities of the future. Here's how they differed:

The first leader—the one who was struggling—had up to this point lived a charmed life. A perfect childhood in a loving, stable home, the best schools, graduation from a top college followed by a great job obtained with his father’s assistance. He had married his college sweetheart and they had a beautiful family—adorable twins, a boy and girl—with a fantastic home and even a luxury vacation home.

The second leader came from a very different background. His parents had been divorced, and his childhood was often lonely. Money was scarce and he always had an after-school job. After graduation his only option for continuing his education was a city college, where he continued to work nights to put himself through. After graduation he got a good entry-level job and made his way quickly up the ladder through hard work and dedication, eventually becoming global leader of his business unit. He married a woman he had met at a soup kitchen, and they had two wonderful sons.

The thesis being that the trials experienced by the second leader prepared him better for the unstable environment of today than the easy successes of the first leader. As we know, struggle and failure produce grit, a trait which is hard to teach out of a book but which is a major component of long-term happiness and success.

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.

Books of the summer so far

This post is off topic, but no one in the US is reading anyway due to the holiday weekend ;)

I wanted to share the books I've read so far this summer; it's been a great reading season - when I looked back I was shocked at how many I've finished. Enjoy!

Steve Martin, "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life." A performer's coming of age, from raw beginner to superstar.

Dan Isenberg, "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value." Valuable, plausible and wise. More to come on this book in the coming weeks.

John Le Carré, "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold." I borrowed this from the seaside hotel where we spent the Memorial Day weekend, and I'm glad I did. Chilly, and chilling. Its reputation as a classic is well-deserved.

Haruki Murakami, "1Q84." A 900-page mind f---. I loved it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder." Perhaps the most significant book I've read in recent years. Explains much of my current mindset on economics, philosophy and social policy. But be warned: the author's voice is quirky, redundant and can be infuriating. Ignore that and focus on the ideas, which are priceless.

Bessemer Venture Partners celebrates its missed opportunities

Legendary Silicon Valley venture capital fund Bessemer Venture Partners publishes, on its website, its "anti-portfolio," containing investments it could have made, but chose not to. These investments are as star-studded a portfolio as you can imagine, a testament to the difficulty of picking investments in startups. As Daniel Isenberg wrote in "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value," "Entrepreneurship and the process of betting on it may be impossible to systematize, precisely because of its contrarian nature."

BVP's successful investments include Skype, Staples, LinkedIn, Celtel and Yelp. Its missed opportunities include these:

Google: Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”

Lotus & Compaq: Ben Rosen, one of the founders of Sevin Rosen, offered Felda Hardymon the chance to invest in both Lotus and Compaq Computer on the same day. Says Hardymon: "Lotus wasn't proven yet, and I was worried about the situation there. As for Compaq, I told him there was no real future in transportable computers since IBM could do it."

eBay: "Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You've GOT to be kidding," thought Cowan. "No-brainer pass."

And more are available on the site. (Thanks to Dan Isenberg for referring to this list in "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid.")

Bravo to the BVP Partners for sharing their list and their sense of humor.

Wyoming musical tour showcases entrepreneurial drive and creativity

Entrepreneurism is fed by constraints. Obstacles create situations that must be overcome, leading to success, or not, in which case failure results. And that's OK.

I've been reading the book "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value," by Daniel Isenberg, and one of the many quotes I've underlined is this: "A degree of adversity strengthens the entrepreneur and weeds out those without the required pluck."

And pluck is precisely the adjective I'd use to characterize the players in the WYOmericana Caravan, a musical tour featuring roots music acts that traveled through some of the loneliest, least inhabited territory in the USA. The tour was featured in a New York Times article.

Some excerpts from the piece that highlight the group's entrepreneurial pluck:

The caravan’s grass-roots style of self-promotion reflects a growing trend. “I’m seeing more and more artists who don’t have an agent or publicist but are finding creative ways to tour,” said Valerie Denn, a booking agent in Austin, Tex. As examples, she cites Dave Barnes, master of the “barnjo” (a hard-body electric banjo), whose coming itinerary takes him through Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan, and the Denver-based singer-songwriter Megan Burtt, who will be appearing at clubs in Colorado, California and Texas.

“Bands are pooling their resources, coming up with unusual packaging ideas,” Ms. Denn said. “They’re using social media to raise money, find free places to stay on the road or do house concerts between tour dates so they can pick up a little cash and sell some CDs. Crowdsourcing is the new norm among independent bands.”...

The caravan was inspired by the 2011 Railroad Revival Tour, in which members of Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, and Old Crow Medicine Show traveled across the Southwest. “We wanted to replicate some of the camaraderie and spirit of that tour,” said [WYOmerica co-organizer Aaron] Davis, 35, “particularly the all-band jam sessions they did at the end of their shows. They just tore it up.”

Both that tour and the caravan featured musicians who claim fealty to the mash-up genre known as Americana, but the similarities largely end there. Mumford et al traveled across the balmy Southwest amid the comforts of the pristinely restored Silver Solarium train car, while the Wyoming bands piled into two vans and Mr. Shogren’s Toyota 4Runner, braving spring hailstorms, snow-clogged mountain passes and squalls that threatened to blow their vehicles into oncoming traffic. Just outside Missoula, Mont., after a long, winding, steep descent through Hellgate Canyon, Mr. Crossland discovered that he had blown a brake line when he pumped his pedal at the bottom of the gorge. “I think God wanted me to play Missoula,” he said.

And while Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros could choose among sleeper cars, Mr. Crossland curled up each night in his van, which is tricked out with a writing desk, coffee maker, wardrobe, banjo and guitar racks, and caches of food (mostly canned peaches). Hoping for warm weather, the others had planned to camp, but unusually frigid late-spring weather forced them indoors most nights.

By economizing, collaborating and focusing on a neglected part of the country, WYOmericana sounds like what it is: a scrappy, innovative startup. And it demonstrates how a beleaguered music industry might have a future after all.

"Mistake Bank" book Kindle edition free today and tomorrow (June 27 & 28)

Follow the links on the right column or simply click here: http://amzn.to/11fiX4G

Malcolm Gladwell explores creativity driven by "misjudgment of the task"

In the New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell reviews a biography of economist Albert O. Hirschman (a name that was new to me), and his paradoxical findings that progress is often an outcome of misjudgment:

Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function.

But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill’s operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country’s many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined. If bad planning hadn’t led to the crisis at the Karnaphuli plant, the mill’s operators would never have been forced to be creative. And the plant would not have been nearly as valuable as it became.

“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote:

Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

And from there Hirschman’s analysis took flight. People don’t seek out challenges, he went on. They are “apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.” This was the Hiding Hand principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.

This idea has been explored here many times. Entrepreneurs start companies ignoring the fact that most of them will fail. They make mistakes because of their ignorance that create awesome challenges, and from time to time overcome them. And thank God they do.

Still more on apologies - this time, Kickstarter

A friend passed on word that Kickstarter, under pressure from public interest groups, this week apologized for a campaign featuring a "seduction guide." Here's the apology:

Dear everybody,

On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.

We were wrong.

Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:

• The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found out about the material to when the project was ending. We’ve never acted to remove a project that quickly. 
• Our processes, and everyday thinking, bias heavily toward creators. This is deeply ingrained. We feel a duty to our community — and our creators especially — to approach these investigations methodically as there is no margin for error in canceling a project. This thinking made us miss the forest for the trees.

These factors don’t excuse our decision but we hope they add clarity to how we arrived at it.

Let us be 100% clear: Content promoting or glorifying violence against women or anyone else has always been prohibited from Kickstarter. If a project page contains hateful or abusive material we don’t approve it in the first place. If we had seen this material when the project was submitted to Kickstarter (we didn’t), it never would have been approved. Kickstarter is committed to a culture of respect.

Where does this leave us?

First, there is no taking back money from the project or canceling funding after the fact. When the project was funded the backers’ money went directly from them to the creator. We missed the window.

Second, the project page has been removed from Kickstarter. The project has no place on our site. For transparency’s sake, a record of the page is cached here.

Third, we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.

Fourth, today Kickstarter will donate $25,000 to an anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN. It’s an excellent organization that combats exactly the sort of problems our inaction may have encouraged.

We take our role as Kickstarter’s stewards very seriously. Kickstarter is one of the friendliest, most supportive places on the web and we’re committed to keeping it that way. We’re sorry for getting this so wrong.

Thank you,

Kickstarter

Applying Heidi Grant Halvorson's model of apologies to this one, it appears that Kickstarter is touching on two of the three types of apologies:


- the apology to strangers requires compensation; Kickstarter's donation to RAINN qualifies


- the apology to workgroups requires an admission that group norms were violated ("This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter").


- there isn't a reference (at least in how I read the apology) to empathy, which is necessary when apologizing to friends, according to Halvorson. Perhaps that's appropriate. Kickstarter's relationship with the public isn't that close, is it? Or should they have included an empathetic note as well?

Fred Wilson apologizes for insulting corporate venture capital funds

In his AVC blog, Fred Wilson took the opportunity to clarify remarks he made in a video interview (below).



What's fascinating is that his remarks about the corporate VCs come in the context of a mistake story. Fred is so passionate about what he learned from his mistakes working with corporate VC partners that he goes a bit over the top when Sarah Lacy, the interviewer, probes:

Fred: I have made, since then, a few mistakes, for example investing with corporate venture capital firms, corporate investors. Never, ever, ever, ever gonna to do that again. Never, ever. Ever. Never!

Sarah: What happened?

Fred: They SUCK! Because they're not interested in the company's success or the entrepreneur's success. Corporations exist to maximize their interests. They could never be mensch-y or magnanimous. It's not in their DNA. And so they SUCK as investors....

He goes on to exempt Intel and Google from this critique, and ends with this: "That's how you should think about a corporation. They're your exit, not your partner."

But the initial emphasis must have caused some blowback, because today's post contains this apology:

I apologize to all of the corporate venture firms that I insulted on Thursday night. I've got a lot of scars, deep and painful, on this topic and I let that come out in a way that was not right. I'm sorry about that.

I say, thanks, Fred, for sharing. I think he's speaking from the heart, honestly and candidly. To me, that doesn't require an apology.

Heidi Grant Halvorson - three types of apologies

Heidi Grant Halvorson posted on the HBR Blog Network about apologies ("The Most Effective Ways to Make It Right When You Screw Up"). She denotes three different constituencies who require different types of apologies:

1. Strangers - they value offers of compensation (Assuming you accidentally knock over someone's coffee cup, say, "So sorry, I'll buy you another cup of coffee.")

2. Friends and Colleagues - they value empathy ("I'm sorry that I hurt you with that careless remark.")

3. Workgroup - they need an acknowledgement that an important norm was violated. ("I'm sorry I didn't make our meeting and didn't let you know beforehand. That's not acceptable. I will plan better next time.")

This is a very useful addition to our growing body of knowledge on apologies (see related posts on the subject).

Read the entire piece here.

Mistake Bank covered in Forbes.com

I met Linda Peia of Ashoka, an organization supporting social entrepreneurs, at the 99u conference last month. She has just published on Forbes.com a synopsis of the conference with some very nice comments about this project. Check it out.

Teacher's mistake: not including all the children in the school performance

This is a story from my aunt Catherine McShane. This was one of my first interviews for The Mistake Bank in 2007, but I never posted the video due to its poor quality (camera and cinematographer not so great). I have always liked this story and it fits perfectly in our Education section.

In the 1950s I was teaching for the first time. I taught in California, and then we didn't have a kindergarten in most places. The children I got had not been to kindergarten. And so it was new for them as it was for me. As we went along, we kind of grew together.

I had 60 children in first grade. One of the activities we did with the children was an end of year program for the parents. This one year the children were doing a dance. They were all involved - all 60. But somewhere along the way - because some of them were so immature - I decided not to include all of them in the final performance.

We had the dance; parents enjoyed it. However, when the dance was over, I had one parent come up to me. He said, "You did not allow my son to dance. I came all the way from Chicago to take his picture."

Now I see the difference in not allowing all the children to participate, whether they could dance or not. It was a poor decision. And I certainly learned a lot from that. I have now retired, but I still remember this clearly. It's very important to get the approval of parents and teachers and classmates, and agree that everybody gets involved.

Jeffrey Katz of Wize Commerce - do what I say, not what I do!

In his Corner Office interview in the New York Times, Katz talks about the usefulness of strategy and recruiting:

To me, it’s all about having a thoughtful strategy and recruiting talent, and if you have those two things, you can really make a lot happen as a leader or as a team. You can make almost anything happen. I don’t think it’s a guarantee, but without them, it’s very hard to thrive and be successful, and frankly to enjoy yourself.

I’ve even had examples when I didn’t follow my own advice. I started my own little company, called Travel Game, and tried to make a go of it for 18 months before I shut it down. I had no team. It was all contractors, and really there was no strategy. I just thought, “Let’s throw it out there and see what happens.” And of course it flopped. I thought: “Wow. What if I had followed my own advice?”

Entrepreneurs to Cornell Tech students: "It's a miracle if a startup gets off the ground"

From the New York Times profile of Cornell NYC Tech, a new university with an introductory class of eight students. The school, which is building a new campus on Roosevelt Island off Manhattan, focuses on combining research and practical work, saying that "business, technology and real-world experience are baked into the coursework."

Not long ago, three young high-tech entrepreneurs sat with the students, talking about failure. They talked about questionable technical, financial or personnel decisions in start-up businesses they had created or worked in, about companies they had seen disintegrate, and about detours into projects they later discarded.

A question was asked about Andrew Mason, co-founder of Groupon, who had been fired a day earlier as the company’s chief executive.

“We should all be so lucky as to build a company that the investors care enough about to fire us,” Tim Novikoff, the C.E.O. of a small company making mobile phone software, said with a wave of his arm around the table, prompting laughter from the students and knowing nods from the Cornell Tech staff. A rail-thin man with the deep-set eyes of someone who could use a little more sleep, Mr. Novikoff is in his early 30s, making him the oldest of the three visitors.

“It’s a miracle if a start-up gets off the ground,” he said. “The last six months I’ve had no income, I have no health insurance. But I got to fly out to a C.E.O. conference and talk with Ashton Kutcher about mobile video for 10 minutes.”

The visitors urged the students to take risks but to expect, at least at first, a precarious existence, riddled with setbacks, that will require obsessiveness and a thick skin — and they made it sound like the grandest of adventures.