The New Rules of Management by Peter Cook

Author:Peter Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fail 50 per cent

In any given project or endeavour, we can succeed or fail, and we can go about every project flat-out or half-hearted, which give us four options:

• Succeeding half-hearted. Some things we can only put a bit of ourselves into and still pull off. Nice when you do that, but generally this attitude is not going to be enough for pulling off the big things.

• Succeeding flat-out. These are the things that give us the greatest satisfaction — we have left nothing in the tank, and come out victorious.

• Failing half-hearted. This is playing safe. We can fool ourselves into thinking we didn’t really fail because we didn’t give it everything. Too much of this kind of behaviour is dangerous — we can get in the habit of failing without being responsible for the failure, and the habit of not giving our best.

• Failing flat-out. This can be the hardest, and it is by far the most important. All successful people and teams have had spectacular failures giving their all. It is the most important because without being willing to fail flat-out, we’ll never succeed flat-out.

Failing flat-out is what we need to become comfortable with, and why I recommend that people aim to fail 50 per cent of the time. This applies to our innovative projects, not to everything we do. In the next chapter, we will come back to the distinction between responses, systems and projects. When responding to direct instructions or requests, or following systems, we generally want to get it right. So be a bit selective about when to apply the fail 50 per cent rule. Please don’t tell the police officer who has pulled you over that Pete said fail 50 per cent and so now you only stop at every second red light.

In the right areas, allowing ourselves to fail 50 per cent of the time lets us risk failing flat-out. If we aren’t able to risk failing at 100 per cent effort, then we will be half-hearted in everything we do, and we will never succeed flat-out either.

In Bull Durham, one of my favourite movies, Tim Robbins’s character ‘Nuke’ La Loosh is in the middle of a winning streak when he says something very profound about success and failure: ‘I love winning … you know … it’s like better than losing.’ Emotionally he’s right, but in terms of building character and learning about yourself, failing flat-out beats winning every time.

So go out and fail, fail hard, fail often, fail spectacularly, fail at the right things and fail flat-out — 50 per cent of the time.

Commit completely

As we have seen, every project goes through three phases: start, persevere and complete. At the start, we need to commit completely to our projects. My favourite quote in the whole world encapsulates this. Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray said:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness ... The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.

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