Michelle Rodger: Look at failure as a mere stepping stone to success

THERE has always been a vast cultural chasm between America and the UK as far as attitude to failure is concerned.

In the United States it’s not only accepted but often welcomed, particularly by investors who believe failure is associated with progress, learning and passion to try harder.

Harvard professor and entrepreneurship expert Bill Sahlman says it is a distinguishing characteristic of the US economy and US culture, and that failure is never permanent: you’re not kicked out of the game. He insists that if you are part of a failed venture, as long as you didn’t lie, cheat or steal you’re considered “experienced”.

Yet over here failure is a dirty word. Failure is to be hidden. It’s associated with shame and letting people down by losing their money.

Failure is rarely out of the news these days and it’s not just because of the number of businesses struggling in the current economic climate.

On the one hand you have those entrepreneurs and companies who publicly intone that you can’t innovate without failure. On the other there are academics who say there’s no evidence that failure actually ensures future success.

Google, innovator extraordinaire, says that as a culture we need to embrace failure as much as we embrace success.

But then you need to weigh that up against research conducted by Professor Colin Mason of Strathclyde University, whose study found no evidence that any learning associated with previous failure provided the basis for a more successful business.

He said the impact of closures actually generated great caution, and subsequent start-ups were usually scaled back, with more limited aims and ambitions.

The study found the majority of respondents had a strong desire to re-establish themselves as business owners as they did not want to work for anyone else. Indeed, many of them were serial entrepreneurs.

According to his report, however, many had suffered financial and/or personal loss. For some this had detrimental health implications and had led to damaged confidence resulting in scaled-back, less risky operations.

So failure for some is damaging, limiting even, in the long term. But what happens if you actually plan to fail? If you create a culture where failure is part of the learning process, a stepping stone if you like, to finding success.

Alan Noble is an engineering director with Google. He says the company has an “appetite for failure”, built by the way they do things. Being in a highly competitive industry, failure to innovate is potentially disastrous, so Google works to stay agile, takes risks, tolerates failure and learns from each and every mistake that is made.

He cites Google Wave as a perfect example. It was designed to re-invent the way people collaborate, but it wasn’t popular and didn’t work out as a standalone product. However, says Noble, the experience gave the design team a new understanding of how people use technology to collaborate, and many of the features they designed for Wave can now be found in other Google products.

Failure doesn’t have to be expensive, it can be cheap and fast, says Noble. At Google they have a saying: “Fail fast and iterate.” It’s something all entrepreneurs could learn from.

“This creates an environment where people are encouraged to tackle large problems and take those big bets. If you have a work culture where bringing your mistakes to the table every week is a normal thing to do, it feels less like failing and more like learning.”

The upside, says Noble happily, is that there has never been a better time to innovate.

So can failure actually be healthy? I suppose it depends on how you fail, why you fail and what you do after you fail.

Just consider the thoughts of some whose failures led to spectacular success. Henry Ford once said: “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.”

If you allow failure to fail you and your company, then it’s unlikely you will ever succeed spectacularly. You will become like Mason’s examples, exhibiting limited aims and ambitions.

So why not build a culture that embraces and learns from mistakes, and simply see failure as honest feedback.