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The Law of Failure – Failure is to be expected and accepted

Guest post by: Michael Farrell

Article Overview: Too many companies try to fix things rather than drop things, suggests Mike Farrell with aspenIbiz. Read this short article as it explains that it is a better strategy to recognize failure early and cut your losses to be successful in the world that includes the Law of Failure.

The Law of Failure – Failure is to be expected and accepted

Too many companies try to fix things rather than drop things. "Let's reorganize to save the situation" is their way of life.

Admitting a mistake and not doing anything about it is bad for your career: A better strategy is to recognize failure early and cut your losses. Many years ago, IBM should have dropped copiers and Xerox should have dropped computers years before they finally recognized their mistakes.

The Japanese seem to be able to admit a mistake early and then make the necessary changes. Their consensus management style tends to eliminate the ego. Since a large number of people have a small piece of a big decision, there is not stigma that can be considered career damaging. In other words, it is a lot easier to live with "We were all wrong" than the devastating "I was wrong."

This egoless approach is a major factor in making the Japanese such relentless marketers. It is not that they do not make mistakes, but when they do, they admit them, fix them, and just keep coming.

The hugely successful WalMart has another approach that enables the company to deal with failure. It is called Sam Walton's "ready, aim, fire" approach. It is an outgrowth of his penchant for constant tinkering.

Walton was well aware that nobody hits the target every time. But at WalMart, people aren't punished if their experiments fail. As WalMart's chief executive said in a Business Week article, "If you learn something and you're trying something, then you probably get credit for it. But woe to the person who makes the same mistake twice."

WalMart is different from many large corporations because, so far, it appears to be free of an insidious disease called the "personal agenda" that can creep into any corporation. Marketing decisions are often made first with the decision maker's career in mind and second with the impact on the competition or the enemy in mind. There is a built-in conflict between the personal and the corporate agenda.

This leads to failure to take risks. (It is hard to be first in a new category without sticking our neck out). When the senior executive has a high salary and a short time to retirement, a bold move is highly unlikely.

Ever junior executives often make "safe" decisions so as to not disrupt their progress up the corporate ladder. Nobody has ever been fired for a bold move they did not make.

In some American companies nothing gets done unless it benefits the personal agenda of someone in top management. This severely limits the potential marketing moves a company can make. An idea gets rejected not because it is not fundamentally sound but because no one in top management will personally benefit from its success.

One way to defuse the personal agenda factor is to bring it out in the open. 3M uses the "champion" system to publicly identify the person who will benefit from the success of a new product or venture. The successful introduction of 3M's Post-It Notes illustrates how the concept works. Art Fry is the 3M scientist who championed the Post-It Notes product, which took almost a dozen years to bring to market.

While the 3M system works, in theory the ideal environment would allow managers to judge a concept on its merits, not on whom the concept would benefit.

If a company is going to operate in an ideal way, it will take teamwork, esprit de corps, and a self-sacrificing leader: One immediately thinks of Patton and his Third Army and its dash across France. No army in history took as much territory and as many prisoners in as short a period of time.

Patton's reward? Eisenhower fired him.

Small companies are mentally closer to the front line than big companies. They have not been tainted by the Law of Failure. That might be one reason why they grow more rapidly and are viewed as the engine to revive the economy.

It takes a while but many Internet Marketing entrepreneurs learn the Law of Failure.

It looks easy but marketing is not a game for amateurs. Marketing is not a battle of products. It is all about the strategy you use to benefit from the Law of Failure as no one can predict the future with any degree of certainty.

You can find out more about Internet Marketing and home-based businesses by reading updates that will be posted at my blog over the next few weeks.

Finally, a great book to read is "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" by Ries & Trout. It is the source of some of the material provided in this article.

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Article Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Mike Farrell aspenIbiz, Product Line Marketing, Target Market, Traffic Formula



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