“To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing be nothing” — Aristotle.
The forgoing aphorism depicts the reality of how individuals and corporate leaders can make progress or derail in social and economic relations. Though, the founder of the peripatetic school made this proposition several hundreds of years ago, the truth of the idea remains sacrosanct in modern corporate ecosystem.
Many business ideas have been stillborn due to unfettered fear of failure or fear of the unknown often characterized by leaders who are supposed to be agile and proactive with respect to decision making. It cannot be emphasized enough that failure is an integral part rather than an antithesis of success.
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Companies or corporate organizations exist to solve market frictions. This invariably involve taking risks. Hence, scholars have proposed that for organizations to continue to be the harbinger of innovation and the advancement of humanity, they need to resist doing nothing at all despite the risks involved in the creative process.
Speaking on the relationship between failure and successful execution of innovative ideas, Stanford University’s Robert Sutton suggests that inaction is far worse than failure. “Failure, after all, implies some sort of output”.
Since the quality of innovation is intrinsically linked to quantity of ideas whether those ideas initially becomes successful or fail, it is suggested that employing metrics based on quantity of ideas and equally rewarding an idea whether successful or not would provide greater incentive for innovation. Examples of such metrics include how many prototypes built, patents filed, papers published, projects completed, etc.
On how organizations could reward failure, Sutton recommend the following:
• Make sure people are aware that failure to execute new ideas is their greatest failure and that it will bring about consequences.
• Make certain everyone learns from past failures; do not repeatedly reward the
same mistakes.
• If people show low failure rates, be suspicious. Perhaps they are not taking enough risks, or maybe they are hiding their mistakes, rather than allowing others in the organization to learn from them.
• Hire people who have had intelligent failures where lessons have been extracted that enabled subsequent success. Let others in the organization know that’s one reason they were hired.
Resource:
Hugo Campus (Editors). 2021. The Innovation Revolution in Agriculture: A Roadmap to a Value Creation. Springer