Fail Fast

The best piece of advice I ever received in my career was to fail fast. Like most young graduates coming out of school I was determined to be successful and never fail. In fact, from an early age it was engrained in me that failure is not an option.  None of this “everyone received a trophy for participating” stuff that seems to be more and more the norm in America’s schools and competitions. You worked hard to be the best you can be, and there was nothing else. But when you come out of school and are thrown into the fast world of business, profits and growth, you realize that trying to be perfect is likely the fastest path to failure.

Last August the COO of a global bank that has been smothered by the financial crash gave a pretty moving speech to about 400 employees. After outlining the long term plan to pay back the government and return the bank to a stand alone independence, his message to the team was simple: fail fast. The team he was speaking to are responsible for the cost management of the organization and cost management is going to be the fastest way to recovery for financial institutions. That means scrutinizing every aspect of the business and coming up with better ways to do them. The only caveat is you don’t have much time. So you have to go for it and fail fast, if you must, then move on to find the right way.

People generally do not embrace the concept of failing as a path to success. A simple example is people who invest in stocks and hold on hoping their bad investment will somehow bounce back.  Successful investors will tell you that if they make a mistake in picking the wrong company, they take their losses fast and pull out the majority of their capital in order to invest in something better. Yet leaders and managers do not follow the same principles, believing that they simply cannot fail or do wrong. It is this train of thinking that I believe has got the world economy in the state its in today, and it is this same thinking that could prevent us from a speedy recovery.

The first rule of fail fast is that there are no absolutes. There is no right or wrong, no black or white. We live in a world of gray and that means no one has all the answers no matter how smart or how deep their pockets. The second rule is that you have to know when to act instead of think, and when to think instead of act. Most people have a normal tendency to go from ‘doing’ to ‘knowing’, instead of from ‘knowing’ to ‘doing’. The opportunity I see is for us to be able to toggle between these two, and that truly takes talent, humility and courage. We know more than enough to act. We have more technology than we could ever absorb to enable action, we have more information than we know what to do with. What we lack is the capacity or inclination to try more stuff. It is time to take ideas off of the white board and get them on the ground. We have big challenges to address and it is time to put technology and purposeful networks to work solving them. We will learn what works by going from doing to knowing, and from knowing to doing.

History is riddled with examples of people acting instead of thinking in order to reach their goals. Yet the fear of failure prevents the majority of us from acting on what we know. Anyone who has put it all on the line to pursue something they believe in understands what I am talking about. I recently met two young founders of an internet business, Matt and Doug. They have been going at their business for almost 5 years now, straight out of school, and it has been anything but easy. They employ a total of 7 people, they used to all live and work in the same townhouse in order to save on rent and costs, and they hadn’t taken a vacation or a day off in that entire time. Yet their belief in their product and its value has fueled a remarkable journey that has seen them generate $1m in revenue in 2009 and the first profit in their short history. Oh, and they have 1.5m unique visitors on their site each month.

Its unclear whether this business will survive or how well it will do, they have a long and challenging road ahead, and their ability to fail fast and course correct will be the key to their future. But they don’t think too much about that. They are focused on doing because they know enough about their market and their business to plough ahead. What we need are more people acting like Matt and Doug. And you don’t have to be an entrepreneur or work in a small start-up. We need people who are willing to fail fast and move forward in every part of our economy, in every part of our government and in every part of our education system. We have enough of a foundation to permit ourselves the possibility of failing in order to succeed. Its time to go for it.

Over the coming months I will be looking for opportunities to fail fast in order to create value. I am seeing it happen slowly in a large organization, and I have met with dozens of entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors and opinion makers who are looking for the same thing. The opportunities are endless but it takes just one person to make it happen, especially in a big organization or a bureaucratic one. I would love to hear more about your experiences as it relates to failing fast and getting it done. Send me your thoughts, I would love to hear them. In the meantime I'll leave you with the words of Henry Ford: "One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again."