Business Week has some articles on how organizations respond to failures and what successful people learnt from failures:
This one is from Jeffrey R. Immelt, Chairman and CEO, General Electric
“In 1992, I was running all the commercial operations for the plastics business at GE. We had a product called Nuvel, which was a sheet product that would go over wood to try to create the poor man’s Corian countertops. Turns out the thing just didn’t work. Any time you dropped a coin on it, it would leave a mark that you couldn’t get out unless you buffed it with sandpaper. It was a classic case of just not asking the right questions up front.”
“This one was my mistake. I let the need for speed overwhelm doing enough upfront market research and testing. It was a $20 million mistake. We caught it after about three months. Customers would complain. At first, you go through this denial phase: “You don’t understand” the product, and stuff like that.”
“It made me learn about listening better. I’m more disciplined on the upfront stuff now than I was then. I wanted to do something big and exciting, and I wanted to do it now rather than wait a year.”
Though he does add on: “You’re never allowed in GE to make the same mistake twice. You’re allowed to make the mistake once. If you try something and it fails, but you went about it the right way and you learned from it, that’s not a bad thing.”
Read his complete story and others such as Jim Goodnight,CEO, SAS Institute and E. Neville Isdell
CEO, Coca-Cola
here
How organizations handle failures is here
It includes Virgin Atlantic Airways and its sleeper seats in business class, Jet Blue Airways inflight snack mix among others.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.