Thursday, May 21, 2015

PERSONAL SPECIAL................. Fall Better to Succeed

Fall Better to Succeed


Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn tell us to make smart mistakes to succeed faster

We are all familiar with the fable of King Robert Bruce of Scotland who hid in a cave after running away from a battlefield and how he was aston ished to see a spider trying again and again to make the web till it succeeded.
The logic is simple: learn from your mistakes and try again. In Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner, Anjali Sastry of MIT Sloan School of Management and consult ant Kara Penn make a similar point.
Perspiration, they say, is inspiration's overlooked but essential companion, needed to deliver on genius.
The book's title is inspired by a line from Irish novelist Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho: “Try again, fail again, fail better.“ “It is almost impossible to escape failure in a world which is as complex as ours. Somehow or the other we will all fail. But the question is, that what do we do with that? Failure is a critical moment in people's lives and the only good thing about it is the learning,“ says Penn, who is the cofounder and Principal Consultant for Mission Spark as social enterprise based in Colorado.PHOTO: BHARAT CHANDA One of the core ideas of Fail Better is the importance of iteration in pro jects. Iteration involves repetition of a procedure, as a means of obtaining suc cessively closer approximations to the solution of a problem. Planning for re iteration requires extra work, and only some activities warrant it. According to the authors, there is incredible power in designing activities for iteration.“That way you can test and improve, figuring out what you have learnt, distilling your insights and sharing them and then turning these useful insights into practice,“ says Sastry.
Fail Better presents real world examples like that of Eli Lilly, the American pharma giant. Eli Lilly's promising chemotherapy drug Almita was causing unexplained deaths in clinical trials and was deemed a failure. The company was on the verge of giving up, when the physician leading the trials decided to dig deeper. He was given two weeks' time by the company and with the help of a staff mathematician who was skilled in statistics, he analysed the outcomes and found that the patients who suffered from negative effects had deficiencies in folic acid.Further investigations proved the giving the patients folic acid with Almita solved the problem. This is how the company snatched success from the verge of what they thought was an imminent failure.
According to Sastry, there should be a system, method and structure where you can take on board the general advice to learn from failure and make it into something which is useful. The very act of professionally writing up a description of failure is a learning act in itself. “In consumer companies, you make a lot of mistakes when you are trying to launch new products into a market. We do see a lot of them having failure parties,“ she says.
Companies need to free their executives to make failures early, so that they learn and benefit from it and Fail Better uses the early failures of products like Postit Notes, Viagra and New Coke to make the point. Then there's Harley Davidson, presented as a case for “mak ing issues visible.“ As the head of Powertrain Operations at the company, Don Kieffer ran the engine plants, overseeing the process of introducing new engines into the production line. In 2003, when the company was hunting for increased quality and was trying to speed up its time to market, Kieffer made the processes, progress and problems visible so that the teams could prioritise their activities. After eight months, the engine plant was outperforming all other teams at Harley­ Davidson.
In high risk professions, there are ex-post facto studies or after-the-fact researches. Sastry feels such analysis comes too late. “You need to check if there is a causal relationship between the work we do and the impact on this world,“ says Sastry. “If managers don't make their prior assumptions salient before they undertake an action, if they are contradicted by their experience, that mismatch is not highlighted and everything gets a sense of taken for granted.“
dearton hector
CD ET8MAY15


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