How can you Succeed in Business by Failing

In the previous post we discussed why failing is so important for all businesses. If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried hard enough. And if you haven’t tried hard enough, you have lost the battle even before it has begun! In this sense, failure is closely tied to risk-taking. Only those who are willing to take risks are going to possibly fail. But then only those stand any chance of becoming successful.
Not all failures are created equal. There are some who will never recover from their first ever failure. And there are others, like Thomas Edison, who can fail 10,000 times but come up with life-changing innovation at the end. So, is it possible to approach risk-taking to improve your odds of success at the end? We think the answer is YES as shown in the following bullets.

• Fail Early – The longer you spend on the project before failure, the higher price you will pay for it. That’s why it is important to take the risk early on and face the consequences rather than avoiding it for as long as you can. Remember, avoiding the risk doesn’t make it go away; it just stretches the time before the inevitable happens.
• Fail Small –This is somewhat related to previous item. It is better to test your idea or products while it is still in infancy rather than waiting till it is fully developed. That is why Google and other software companies launch “beta” version of their products. The purpose is to get feedback from end users and customers while the product is still being shaped. This way even if the product fails you don’t have much to lose.
• Fail Often – You cannot expect things to succeed in the first try. That’s called being lucky! All successful entrepreneurs have ability to rise from the failures again and again. How many times has Donald Trump filed bankruptcy? The key is to not get discouraged from failures and not to treat failure as evidence of your incompetence. Just consider it as part of the process and move on.
• Learn from Failures – Successful people are able to look back at their failures and analyze what they need to do differently in their next endeavor. The definition of a stupidity is to keep trying the same thing over and over and expect to get different result. After you have failed you should spend time talking to your colleagues to understand what went wrong and why. Only after you have learned from your experience can you expect to have success in the next round.
• Make failure part of the company culture – As a leader it is your responsibility to encourage people to take risk and not be afraid of failure. If you punish people for taking risk and failing people will be afraid to bring ideas forward. And there are lot of ideas out there in your employees’ minds. Successful companies allow, even encourage, employees to try new approaches without having to worry about the consequences of failure.

What other advice do you have from you experience on succeeding from failures?