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.

Value Creation = What Drives The Market

Perhaps the most important thing I have learnt in my professional life that my education failed to teach is that markets do not reward merit, they reward value. These are two entirely different things yet politicians, the labor market and the Press still confuse the two. At Davos French President Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed that the recent financial meltdown had demonstrated that letting markets decide executive compensation was "morally indefensible." Mr. Sarkozy said "There are remuneration packages that will no longer be tolerated because they bear no relationship to merit." Mr. Sarkozy, like his counter parts in the US and UK, fails to appreciate this key criteria of what makes a free market the best option for every individual in the world.  And many free market supporters equally confuse value with the cult of market meritocracy, a distinction that can prevent their hard work from being rewarded.