Thursday, January 5, 2012

Failing Forward


What differentiates between average people and successful people?  The findings are against our conventional wisdom. Successful people have failed more often than average people. Why? Several management leaders and thinkers have a common answer for this. According to them, successful people treat failure as a learning curve and use it as a stepping stone for future success. Average people are risk averse which limit them in their growth path. If someone has not made any mistake, we can say that (s)he has not tried enough to explore full potential. These safe players are like ship in a harbor, they are not exploring the deep sea!

Leadership expert, bestselling author and speaker, John Maxwell who coined the term ‘failing forward’ says, “I know of only one factor that separates those who consistently shine from those who don’t: The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”  Many successful individuals and organizations have experienced failures at different stages in their life cycle.  They made use of the lessons to improve their performance, rather than dropping the ball.

Thinking failure is mostly a mindset. Many people look at isolated instances of failure and miss the big picture. Today, several leading organizations start realizing the value of failing forward and encourage teams to share their failure stories and even reward ‘successful failures’! So, next time before you blame yourselves or your colleagues on any failure, think twice. The victory is round the corner and march ‘fail forward to success’!!


Note: This is the first of the series of blogs planned for the current year in vide ranging topics. Your comments are welcome.

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