Don’tworryaboutfailing.ppt

Don’t worry about failing 2007.7.20 Ray Meyer led the De Paul University basketball team to 42 winning seasons. When his team lost its first game after 29 straight victories at home, his response was: “Great! Now we can focus on winning, rather than on not losing.” Meyer showed a spirit of working towards positive goals, pouring one’s energy into the task and not looking behind and making excuses for past events. For a lot of people, the word “failure” carries with it a feeling of coming to an end, but for the successful leader, failure is a beginning, a seed of hope. Leaders don’t allow themselves to be held prisoner by the fear of failure. They don’t even use the word “failure”, instead they rely on words like “false start, never failure.” Karl Wallenda, the great tightrope walker, usually walked without a net below him. He fell 23 meters to his death in 1978, during a midday walk in downtown San Juan, Puerto Rico. His wife recalled: “All Karl thought about for a period of three straight months was falling. It was the first time he’d ever thought about that, and it seemed to me that he put all his energe into not falling rather than walking the tightrope. Wallenda also carefully watched the workers put up the tightrope, something he had never even thought of doing before.” From that we learned from interviews with successful leaders, it became clear that when Wallenda poured his energy into not falling rather than walking the tightrope, he was almost certain to fail. William Smithburg, the chairman of a large food company, took responsibility for two major mistakes. He said “There isn’t one manager who hasn’t had a product that did badly. That included me. It is like learning to ski. If you are not falling down, you’re not learning.” Tom Watson, Sr., who founded IBM and was it guiding force for over 40 years, knew the importance of learning from mistakes. A young manager at IBM took a big risk on a product and lost over $10 million. And he climbed the stairs up