兰桂姬语言文化，不仅仅只是语言，关注必有收获！
Why, all of a sudden, are so many successful business leaders urging their companies and colleagues to make more mistakes and embrace more failures?为什么突然之间，有这么多成功的商业领袖敦促他们的公司和同事犯更多错误并接受更多失败？
In May, right after he became CEO of Coca-Cola Co., James Quincey called upon rank-and-file managers to get beyond the fear of failure that had dogged the company since the “New Coke” fiasco of so many years ago. “If we’re not making mistakes,” he insisted, “we’re not trying hard enough.”今年 5 月，就在他成为可口可乐公司的首席执行官之后，詹姆斯昆西呼吁普通经理们摆脱自多年前“新可乐”惨败以来一直困扰公司的对失败的恐惧。 “如果我们没有犯错，”他坚持说，“我们还不够努力。”
In June, even as his company was enjoying unparalleled success with its subscribers, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings worried that his fabulously valuable streaming service had too many hit shows and was canceling too few new shows. “Our hit ratio is too high right now,” he told a technology conference. “We have to take more risk…to try more crazy things…we should have a higher cancel rate overall.”6 月，尽管他的公司在订户方面取得了空前的成功，但 Netflix 首席执行官里德·黑斯廷斯担心他的价值惊人的流媒体服务有太多热门节目，而取消的新节目太少。 “我们现在的命中率太高了，”他在一次技术会议上说。 “我们必须冒更大的风险……尝试更疯狂的事情……我们应该有更高的总体取消率。”
Even Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, arguably the most successful entrepreneur in the world, makes the case as directly as he can that his company’s growth and innovation is built on its failures. “If you’re going to take bold bets, they’re going to be experiments,” he explained shortly after Amazon bought Whole Foods. “And if they’re experiments, you don’t know ahead of time if they’re going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”
即使是亚马逊首席执行官杰夫贝索斯，可以说是世界上最成功的企业家，也尽可能直接地证明他的公司的成长和创新是建立在失败的基础上的。 “如果你要大胆下注，它们将是实验性的，”他在亚马逊收购 Whole Foods 后不久解释道。 “如果它们是实验，你不会提前知道它们是否会起作用。实验就其本质而言容易失败。但是一些巨大的成功弥补了数十种无效的东西。”
The message from these CEOs is as easy to understand as it is hard for most of us to put into practice. I can’t tell you how many business leaders I meet, how many organizations I visit, that espouse the virtues of innovation and creativity. Yet so many of these same leaders and organizations live in fear of mistakes, missteps, and disappointments — which is why they have so little innovation and creativity. If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn. And unless people and organizations manage to keep learning as fast as the world is changing, they’ll never keep growing and evolving.
这些 CEO 传达的信息很容易理解，但我们大多数人很难付诸实践。我无法告诉你我遇到了多少商业领袖，我访问了多少组织，他们信奉创新和创造力的美德。然而，许多同样的领导者和组织生活在对错误、失误和失望的恐惧中——这就是为什么他们的创新和创造力如此之少。如果你没有准备好失败，你就没有准备好学习。除非人们和组织设法随着世界的变化而不断地学习，否则他们永远不会继续成长和发展。
So what’s the right way to be wrong? Are there techniques that allow organizations and individuals to embrace the necessary connection between small failures and big successes? Smith College, the all-women’s school in western Massachusetts, has created a program called “Failing Well” to teach its students what all of us could stand to learn. “What we’re trying to teach is that failure is not a bug of learning it’s the feature,” explained Rachel Simmons, who runs the initiative, in a recent New York Times article. Indeed, when students enroll in her program, they receive a Certificate of Failure that declares they are “hereby authorized to screw up, bomb, or fail” at a relationship, a project, a test, or any other initiative that seems hugely important and “still be a totally worthy, utterly excellent human being.” Students who are prepared to handle failure are less fragile and more daring than those who expect perfection and flawless performance.
那么错误的正确方法是什么？是否有技术可以让组织和个人接受小失败和大成功之间的必要联系？史密斯学院是马萨诸塞州西部的一所女子学校，它创建了一个名为“Failing Well”的项目，向学生传授我们所有人都可以学习的东西。 “我们试图教导的是，失败不是学习错误，而是积极性，”负责该计划的雷切尔西蒙斯在最近的《纽约时报》文章中解释道。事实上，当学生注册她的课程时，他们会收到一份失败证书，声明他们“在此被授权在一段关系、一个项目、一个测试或任何其他看似非常重要的倡议中搞砸、爆炸或失败” “仍然是一个完全有价值的、完全优秀的人。”与那些期望完美和完美表现的学生相比，准备好应对失败的学生没有那么脆弱和勇敢。
That’s a lesson worth applying to business as well. Patrick Doyle, CEO of Domino’s Pizza since 2010, has had one of the most successful seven-year runs of any business leader in any field. But all of his company’s triumphs, he insists, are based on its willingness to face up to the likelihood of mistakes and missteps. In a presentation to other CEOs, Doyle described two great challenges that stand in the way of companies and individuals being more honest about failure. The first challenge, he says, is what he calls “omission bias” — the reality that most people with a new idea choose not to pursue the idea because if they try something and it doesn’t work, the setback might damage their career. The second challenge is to overcome what he calls “loss aversion” — the tendency for people to play not to lose rather than play to win, because for most of us, “The pain of loss is double the pleasure of winning.”
这也是值得应用到商业的一课。自 2010 年起担任 Domino's Pizza 首席执行官的帕特里克·多伊尔 (Patrick Doyle) 是任何领域的商业领袖中最成功的七年经营者之一。但他坚持认为，他公司的所有成功都是基于它愿意面对错误和失误的可能性。在向其他 CEO 发表的演讲中，Doyle 描述了阻碍公司和个人对失败更加坦诚的两大挑战。他说，第一个挑战是他所谓的“遗漏偏见”——大多数有新想法的人选择不去追求这个想法，因为如果他们尝试某事但没有成功，挫折可能会损害他们的职业生涯。第二个挑战是克服他所谓的“损失厌恶”——人们更倾向为了不输去玩而不是为了赢去玩，因为对我们大多数人来说，“输的痛苦是赢的快乐的两倍。”
Creating “the permission to fail is energizing,” Doyle explains, and a necessary condition for success — which is why he titled his presentation, with apologies to the movie Apollo 13, “Failure Is an Option.” And that may be the most important lesson of all. Just ask Reed Hastings, Jeff Bezos, or the new CEO of Coca-Cola: There is no learning without failing, there are no successes without setbacks.多伊尔解释说，创造“允许失败是令人振奋的”，也是成功的必要条件——这就是为什么他为他的演讲命名，并对电影阿波罗 13 号“失败是一种选择”表示歉意。这可能是最重要的一课。问问 Reed Hastings、Jeff Bezos 或可口可乐的新 CEO：没有失败就没有学习，没有挫折就没有成功。
来源：How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn from Failure (hbr.org)
| 留言与评论（共有 0 条评论） “” |
