Move On

Fail fast and move on.

 In his book “Players First,” University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari stresses the need for players to “fail fast” so they can learn from their mistakes, make corrections and move on. He explains that bouncing back faster leads to success faster. This advice also holds true in the business world. Gail Kelly, the CEO of Australia’s second‐largest bank, explains, “How are you going to learn and how are you going to innovate unless you fail? You need to fail fast, quickly, and then get up and off you go again.” Adapting to a rapidly‐changing world requires the ability to fail fast, make the necessary adjustments and move forward with confidence.

Managers can play a valuable role by helping their employees learn how to bounce back.Even successful companies embrace failures and figure out how to move past them proactively. The history of business has consistently shown the utility of failure a as springboard to success.

Grey Advertising actively promotes the idea that one must try and often fail in order to succeed. On its company culture page, Grey highlights the quarterly Heroic Awards, noting that innovation occurs “by embracing the importance of trying, failing, dusting yourself off, and trying again.” The award serves as a strong symbol for employees to know that it is okay to be imperfect and to keep working toward success.

Similarly, in an October 2013 Forbes article, Halah Touryalai profiled the odyssey of the Domino’s pizza chain, which in 2009 put its CEO in a commercial to distinctively acknowledge that Domino’s pizza did not taste good. Patrick Doyle publicly apologized for Domino’s failure to deliver a quality product and promised to improve the recipe.

 This risky and honest move paid off. Domino’s 2013 revenue was $1.8 billion, it is growing faster than its competitors and opening more locations.