Is It Better To Be Right Or Wrong?
The conventional wisdom in life and in business is that you must learn from your mistakes, and that it’s important for you to make mistakes in order to improve and ultimately succeed. But is this really the case? Is this merely a clichéd misnomer, after-all, you should learn a lot more from your successes, most notably to do them again and repeat the success. So is it better to be right or wrong?
In reality you can’t be successful all of the time. You will occasionally make poor decisions…not all ideas will be good ones…sometimes you will be just plain wrong! It’s human, so you may as well accept it. As Tony Robbins puts it: “There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.”
It is the fear of failure that is the biggest failure in itself. Too often we strive for perfection: for the perfect solution, perfect insight, or the perfect product. In so doing, we waste time and effort in our ability to deliver the optimum. Optimum is the best result possible under the pertaining conditions. It may not necessarily meet every single specific requirement, but it is ‘good enough’, and good enough allows you the scope to learn. Learning is the key to right or wrong – failure and success are relative; what ultimately makes the difference and generates value is to learn from either scenario and move forward, constantly improving and optimising.
As such, intrapreneurs can’t fear failure. As Gifford Pinchot puts it “Come to work each day willing to be fired.”[i] This may seem draconian, but the essence is that the intrapreneur, just as the entrepreneur, needs to have some ‘skin in the game’. They need to be prepared to lose once in a while; that loss should hurt – emotionally, reputationally, even financially – but the key is to learn and look at how you can turn that failure into success, either in the short or long-term. You will fail, to some degree, so fail fast and fail forward.
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
Critically though, failure isn’t a badge of honour – you don’t need to have failed to become ‘battle-hardened’. Failure isn’t a rite of passage; you aren’t more successful just because you’ve failed previously. Failure can only give you part of the picture – one path of what not to do. It’s unlikely to provide the most meaning insight, i.e. what you should do next. Succeeding, being right, enables you to repeat the decisions and actions that brought about that success so you can experience it repeatedly in the future. The situation may have changed which potentially could deliver a different result, but you’re odds for success will vastly shorten by repeating prior successful behaviour. So be satisfied with the wins that you get, however small, as each of these are milestones towards the achievement of your ultimate goals. Celebrate, make a noise and be seen – otherwise what’s the point?
“Develop the winning edge; small differences in your performance can lead to large differences in your results.” – Brian Tracy
Success for the intrapreneur will be judged by the commercial benefit that you bring to the organization, in other words the financial return or value that you add. This could be a new revenue stream or greater efficiencies resulting in time and / or cost savings. Whatever the value that you’re adding is, it is imperative to be seen to be delivering something quantifiable, sooner rather than later, as evidence that you are moving forward. The more specific and measurable you can be, the better. This will facilitate endorsement and support for and from your sponsors and connectors, buying you time to progress your plans. At the end of the day, being an intrapreneur is a results business.
[i] ‘The Intrapreneur’s Ten Commandments’ Gifford Pinchot
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