On this blog (and generally), I encourage experimentation. Why? Well, the history of innovation is not a straight line. It is littered with unanticipated consequences in the proper and best sense of the phrase — people solving immediate problems and thereby exposing new opportunities, shifting paradigms, new trends, new answers. Moving forward is about achieving a new (and often better) vantage point.

Here is a video from Honda with some great stories about how creative and competitive people have failed, and through this “failure,” succeeded. It is, I think, ultimately a testament to resiliency and persistence.

Was it failure after all? Or just the necessary path?

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Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson is the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, a past-President of SSP, and the founder of the Scholarly Kitchen. He has worked as Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher of JBJS, Inc., a publishing executive at the Massachusetts Medical Society, Publishing Director of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own.

Discussion

1 Thought on "The Success of Failure"

As someone who oversees product management for a software company, I know all too well how many failures come before a success. It’s not uncommon for a functional specification to be rewritten from the ground up two or more times before the concepts really coalesce. The cycle of trying and trying again is critical to developing powerful, flexible software.

Kevin Cohn
Director of Product Management
Atypon

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