By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady
Bob Brady finds the balance between two seemingly conflicting pieces of advice—”Avoid mistakes” and “Try something”—and admits to a few mistakes of his own.
In the last couple of days I’ve come across two contrasting, intriguing quotes. One, from Franklin Roosevelt when he was facing the grave economic crisis of the Depression, exhorted “… above all, try something.”
The other, “Avoid mistakes, so you will be ready for surprises,” is from the president of the bank we use. He said it was his father’s advice to him (his father was the bank’s founder). He then went on to admit several mistakes, which left the bank ill prepared for the surprise of the mortgage-backed securities failure. (He’s right about both the mistakes and the surprises—the bank’s stock has fallen 90 percent in the last year.)
His father’s advice is good, but it needs a big qualifier. Maybe, the saying should be, “don’t make BIG mistakes.” Little ones can be a good thing—if you learn from them.
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Few people (that I know) have made more mistakes than I. Some of mine were so impossibly stupid that their memory makes me cringe. I’m not proud of them, but I am proud of two things: 1) there was a lot of learning from many of them; and 2) most of them were not very expensive—at least in dollars.
I like to joke that one of the reasons that I’m still the president of a proud, prospering company 32 years after its founding is that I’ve had the freedom to make mistakes and there was no one around who could fire me.
The reason that the mistakes never killed the business was that, most of the time, we’ve been prudent enough not to bet more than we could afford to lose. If you totaled up all of our collective mistakes, we’ve probably paid millions for our education, but it was in relatively small installments over a long period of time. (The bank, on the other hand, made a couple of hundred-million-dollar bets all at the same time, leading to some severe problems.)
Helping Others Learn from Mistakes
My job now, as leader of BLR’s talented staff, is to help others learn from their mistakes. Of course, I’d prefer that they not make the mistakes in the first place—at least on BLR’s nickel. But, realistically, if we’re going to innovate, we have to take chances. And if we take chances, we’re going to be wrong some of the time. That’s the price of admission.
It’s my job to make sure we don’t make big mistakes. If we’re trying something new, we make sure we test our way into it. If it is a new product, we make sure customers think it is a good idea before we invest too much. If it is a new way of selling, we make sure we know sales costs, renewals, fulfillment expense, etc., before we roll it out in too large a fashion.
If a manager wants to try some wacky way to motivate his or her employees, it might be OK to test it in a small way. It’s usually a mistake to go too far, too fast.
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But Try Something
It’s also my job to make sure that people don’t get penalized unfairly if they try and fail. (There are all sorts of caveats to that, of course. People who make the same mistake over and over again, or who risk too much too soon, do not do the company—or their careers—any good.)
This brings us back to the Franklin Roosevelt quote. He said, “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
The advice is good for a business, or a career. Try something. Don’t just sit there talking and speculating. Control the experiment so you learn, quickly, as much as you can, and don’t lose more than you can afford.
So, I offer to my bank president a revised quote, “Avoid big mistakes, so you will be ready for surprises.”
HR managers have a reputation for being cautious. That’s not an evil thing—but experimentation is a necessary ingredient for growth and improvement. We can help our careers and our employers by looking for easy, inexpensive ways to test our innovations.
That’s my e-pinion. I’d love to hear yours. Rbrady@blr.com
I recently spent two months putting together a “Corporate Culture” for our companies. One of the points in that culture reads as follows:
“Be a person of action. Make some mistakes; after all, that is how we learn.” A person who does not make any mistakes is not doing anything.
Good. We’ve used “Don’t do anything stupid” for quite some time. Sometimes, depending on who we are talking to, its “Don’t do anything, stupid”. I write a lot about critical thinking lately because I don’t see much of it. Not at the office, not by journalists, not by politicians. Perhaps it is a function of our school system and our lack of teaching of basic logic skills. Perhaps “The Power of Logical Thinking: Easy Lessons” by Marilyn Vos Savant should be required reading/ training for all.
Here is a sound collection of common sense. I have also made more than one mistake. I learned from most of them. A few moved me forward in a positive manner. A few cause me to cringe at the memory. Life is too short as it is. We must make the most of it, learn from our mistakes and help others along the way.
Thanks,
Excellent advice.
Some of my wisest mentors drilled into me that it was best to evolve a process through small incremental change. Very rarely is it necessary to take on the big transformation to make a difference.
Break the big project down into small independent pieces and you can learn from small issues as you go forward.
-Shawn