Monday, July 03, 2006

Failure, Learning, and Success

In BusinessWeek:  How Failure Breeds Success

Lots of outstanding case studies on failure, learning, and success.  The new montra in the business community is fail, forward, fast.  Why?  Because we learn more from our failures than from our successes:
"But designers, inventors, and scientists, all models for companies struggling to be more creative, take the opposite tack. They try to prove themselves wrong. That focus on potential flaws makes failure, and the lessons that come with it, happen earlier. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied how organizations learn from failure, says managers would do well to think more like scientists. "Failure provides more 'learning' in a strictly logical or technical sense" than success, she says. "It's a principle of the scientific method that you can only disconfirm, never confirm, a hypothesis."

The beautiful thing about the new web tools available to us is that they cost practically nothing to implement. I have an internet service provider that charges me $4.99 a month. With that I get a magical installation of just about any cool open source development app I want: Moodle, Wordpress, Drupal, Mambo, Mediawiki, and many more.

Within the Corporate environment you must have your "IT Buddy" (referred to in early posts) install them for you, but most IT guys are geeky about this stuff and would love an excuse to load 'em up and get something going. My newest IT Buddy within Intel is Joshua Bancroft.  His team is doing some great stuff within the firewalls of Intel. 

If you turn the stuff on your users will come.

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