Remember Apple’s Newton? An electronic PDA costing an absurd $700, it was discontinued 5 years after its release, with its main downfall being that the key feature Apple had peddled – handwriting to text recognition – didn’t work properly. You’ll find it on any list of the biggest technology flops. 

Or Amazon’s Fire Phone? It’s lack of compatibility or clear USP forced Amazon to take $170 writedown charge on costs relating to the device, and in 2014 the company were reportedly stuck with $83 million worth of unsold Fire Phones in its inventory.

And yet, people forget that the technology demonstrated in the Newton paved the way for the iPhone, which is now responsible for 50% of Apple’s huge yearly revenue. And the Fire Phone paved the way for the Echo, a product with such staggering growth that Amazon sold 9 times as many of them in 2016 as in 2015. These are just two examples in a sea of Big Tech companies using their failures to drive them onto new successes. 

Fail forward

The term ‘failing forward’ is commonplace in business. John Maxwell’s book titled after the phrase defined the basic relationship between failure and success, stating: ‘The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get.’ Failing forward is about having the confidence to continually move through failure until you find success. As basketball Michael Jordan puts it:

“Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” 

Many business owners see failure as something to be avoided, but success as something to be chased. And while no one sets out to fail, this is not strictly right. It’s valuable to view failure and success not as two separate entities, but as being dependant on each other. Use the momentum from failure to adapt and advance to the next step towards success. 

Microsoft leaders have previously said ‘We want to be a learning-all company, not a know-it-all company.’ And so, as managers and business owners, we are the ones that should be fostering a culture of embracing failure as part of development and growth. Embracing failure allows for experimentation, which in turn will provide the greatest innovation within your business. 

Failure = Growth

The power of mistakes is that, not only will they inevitably tell you what you shouldn’t do, but more often than not, they will also reveal things you should be doing. Work out what you can take away from the failure. Learn to shift your perspective in order to see your failures as successes and opportunities for growth. 

If you would like to learn more or to have a further chat about using failures within your business as a catalyst for success, please don’t hesitate to contact me at tomhosking@actioncoach.co.uk.