Category Archives: Failure

Confront the Brutal Facts

Business Book, Failure, Goal Achievement
Face the Brutal Facts!

The third lesson from Good to Great by Jim Collins  is Confront the Brutal Facts yet Never Lose Faith.  Wow that is a great lesson, not just for companies but also for life.

I think this is what is wrong with a lot of the positive thinking movement.  If you always think positive and never confront things that are not so positive then you are in for trouble.  You have to face and accept the harsh reality of a situation but still remain upbeat.  There is a famous quote from Winston Churchill “Success Is Going from Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm”.  He didn’t say that you ignore failure and pretend everything is great.  Yes you recognise failure and accept it but you don’t let failure get you down.  Failure is just information – you learn from it, you adjust your future plans in the light of what you have learned and you keep going.

In other words if you live in a Pollyanna world reality will eventually rise up and bite you in the rear!  You cannot impose your vision of how the world should be on reality.  You have to accept reality brutal as it is.  The same happens in companies and organisations.  The brutal facts must be confronted.  If a situation develops where everyone is in awe of the leader and nobody dare bring bad news to him/her then you have a recipe for disaster.

Jim Stockdale was the highest ranking US military officer imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam war.  According to Stockdale the people who didn’t make it out of the terrible conditions they endured in the prison were the optimists!  Why? because they didn’t face the brutal facts of their imprisonment.  They wanted to believe they would be home by Christmas or some other date and they weren’t.  They were crushed by reality.

So in summary we must keep motivated and moving forward towards our vision for the future but at the same time accept the brutal reality of what happens to us and deal with it. There is no hiding from reality.

Best Wishes,

Tom

PS More lessons from the book next week.  In the meantime have a look at Jim Collins’s website for further information and resources.

Grab your copy of Good to Great from Amazon:

 

FEAR and the Knowing-Doing Gap

Book Review, Business Book, Failure
The knowing-doing gap and fear

 

When fear prevents acting on knowledge

This week we continue looking at the knowing-doing gap in business and how this can relate to our own lives (Ref: The Knowing-Doing Gap by J. Pfeffer and R Sutton – see below).

So you have a problem in the organisation or business and you have information on the problem and you know what to do to solve the problem but there is a culture within the organisation where you fear to take the necessary action because you could get into trouble.   That sounds crazy but it does happen.  In particular if there is an element of risk in your solution or it involves doing something new.  Employees can fear for there jobs or their self-esteem or they don’t want to jeopardise their mortgage.  What they will do is stick to what they’ve done in the past so they recreate past mistakes even though they know there are better ways of doing the work.  The organisational culture doesn’t support doing things differently!  We are back to ‘that’s not the way we do things around here‘ type thinking that we saw in the last article.

Some organisations also have fear based management systems which assume that fear is a good thing to keep staff on their toes and make them work hard.  There is a general sense of distrust for staff.

Interestingly there is something called the MUM effect where staff distance themselves from bad news.  People don’t want to deliver bad news to others because they feel they would be blamed by association!  An example given in the book was where an executive assistant of one CEO who was interviewed as part of the research said that she screened out bad news from her boss!  Why?  Because her job would become less pleasant if the boss got bad news and was in a bad mood.  So to keep the CEO in a good mood she would schedule appointments with people who would not deliver bad news to him about how things were going in the company.  This tendency for gatekeepers to screen out bad news ends up creating leaders who have a very inaccurate image of what’s going on in the business.   Top management can have a very rosy and inaccurate view of what is going on.  People who are afraid of their bosses will not want to deliver bad news and will also have an incentive to lie about what is going on.  All this leads to falsification of information and the inability to learn and the inability to improve.  I think all of us can relate to having a boss that you would want to keep happy!

How to tackle fear and inaction in orgaisations
  • Encourage, praise and promote people who deliver bad news to their bosses
  • The only failure is failure to act.  Punish inaction and not unsuccessful actions.
  • Learn from mistakes
  • Encourage people to try new things
  • Encourage leaders to talk about their failures and what they have learned from them.
What lessons for our personal lives?

I think one of the big lessons we can learn is that the only real failure is not to try at all.  Our failures should not be feared and brushed under the carpet as if we are embarrassed by them.  No, we should be open about our failures and most importantly what we have learned from our failures and how we have applied this learning in taking new actions.

Next Week:  When measurement obstructs good judgement and taking action.

Ref: ‘The Knowing-Doing Gap – How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. Harvard Business School Press, 2000