In his quest to invent the electric light bulb, Thomas Edison famously said he did not fail, but merely discovered 10,000 ways that won’t work.
In this regard, it can be said Edison’s greatest achievement was persistence rather than inventiveness, and this distinction should be instructive to business leaders and entrepreneurs as they pursue success.
Expanding knowledge
While virtually no one sets out to fail, failure is itself an important step in the process of learning and innovation, according to Elysse Newman, associate dean of research for Clemson University’s College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities.
“Failure itself helps us understand the limits of what we know,” Newman says. “It’s always going to be useful if it teaches you something.”
But in the business world, there is a tendency to try to control all the variables at play in order to minimize the risk of failure and protect the bottom line. While understandable, this can turn into heightened risk aversion and stymie innovation, according to Alex Estevez, venture partner with Accel and the 2022 chairman of Greenville’s NEXT Venture Summit.
“Innovation requires trial and error,” Estevez says. “If we celebrate innovation, we must understand and embrace the requisite ‘error’ or failure involved.”
He cites the example of Accel’s seed investment in Stewart Butterfield and the project that eventually became Slack, the omnipresent communications platform that has been widely adopted in the business world.
The initial project was a video game that ultimately proved unsuccessful, but instead of giving up Butterfield realized the internal communications platform they’d developed while working on the game was the real innovation.
Estevez says Accel’s gamble on Butterfield as an exceptional entrepreneur paid off, with Slack eventually being sold for $28 billion.
“It doesn’t always work out this way, but this is a good example of not letting failure cause defeat,” Estevez says.
Learning from failure
For entrepreneurs and startups, the risk of failure is real. It can be caused by any number of factors, but careful planning and a willingness to learn from such failures can lead to success.
According to Marjorie Luke with Piedmont SCORE, careful planning is the crucial first step in any new business venture. SCORE is one of the oldest and largest mentoring organizations for entrepreneurs in the country and provides a wealth of resources for people starting their own businesses.
“The potential for failure should be a part of everyone’s initial business planning,” Luke says. “[Failure] should never be something that takes you by surprise.”
What leads to ultimate success is not the failure, but the willingness to learn from it and apply those lessons to a new approach.
This is a crucial distinction, according to John Moore, principal consultant with Greenville-based Momenteum Strategies. Moore, who frequently advises startups and their founders, points to another Edison quote on persistence: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time.”
“Failure doesn’t have to be fatal from a business standpoint, especially over the lifecycle of somebody’s career,” Moore says.
While not advocating the celebration of failure per se, Moore says entrepreneurs should be encouraged for making the attempt to start new ventures, even when they don’t succeed.
He adds that for the startup community, it’s important to foster a network of support which, while acknowledging failure, is also willing to extend the help needed for an entrepreneur “to get back on another horse.”
“That’s an important point — to keep that cycle going,” Moore says. “The results will come from the effort.”
Examples of failure paving way to success
- Walt Disney’s first venture into animation, Laugh-O-Gram Films, was started with $15,000 but eventually failed when a major distributor closed its doors.
- Before founding the company that went on to become a candy colossus, Milton Hershey watched three previous attempts fail.
- Twitter co-founder Evan Williams saw the imminent failure of a podcasting platform called Odeo when it launched at the same time as Apple’s iTunes. He pulled the plug on Odeo and pivoted to developing what was a side project.
