MAKING FAILURE WORK

For all organisations and managers failure is a recurring reality. But despite failure being all pervasive, few individuals or organisations respond positively. Making failure work productively requires managers to recognise that plans need to be adaptable; failure must be built into the culture and everyone attuned to fail fast, adapt and learn.

“We’ve long believed that over time organisations tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant,” noted Larry Page on setting up Alphabet as a collection of companies including Google and a host of others – from Calico to Waymo.¹

Alphabet companies are a constantly moving portfolio of impressive, wild and brilliant ideas at varying stages of development. The social networking software company Dodgeball was part of the Google ecosystem. Acquired in 2005, it closed down in 2009. Others have had a stuttering existence. Google Glass was publicly launched in 2014 and then returned to development before re-surfacing as the Google Glass Enterprise