Tweet

What’s the Real Key to Success? It’s Failure

Guest post by: Jeff Ogden

Article Overview: The World’s Greatest Successes are the World’s Biggest Failures

What’s the Real Key to Success? It’s Failure

Jeffrey Stibel is Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. and author of Wired for Thought - who penned a great Harvard Business Review article entitled "Why I hire people who fail." His article described efforts of a hiring executive to uncover failures in people's backgrounds. In the mind of this executive, failure is in every successful persons DNA. Only by failing do people learn, therefore those who have not failed have not learned.

To support this claim, he cited the fact that Apple created a "Failure Wall" to learn from mistakes.

Here are three great quotes about failure:

"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill

"I have not failed, I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work." - Thomas Edison

"Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life." - Sophia Loren

This got me to thinking of the risks I personally took in founding the B2B demand generation company Find New Customers in 2009, our many months of failure, and the great successes we enjoy today - delighted clients, Mad Marketing TV and more.

The light bulb went on. Had I not been willing to fail over and over, the success we enjoy today would never have happened.

There's a lesson for business leaders here. Don't reject failure - celebrate it. Champion the risk-takers. They are the ones who make great things happen

Related Articles
  Powerful Relationship Selling
  Question of the Day: What will you do with your failure?
  Fear: The biggest obstacle to success
  For Good SEO You Must Go Back To Basics
  “Failure Breeds Success – If You Learn From Each Failure”
  The Magic of Thinking Big: Developing the Power of Belief
  Success or Failure Sequence
  Getting to your North Pole
  Failure and Risk
  Failure or Feedback You choose
  Fail to Succeed
  The Truth About Failure
  What’s So Little About the Small Business Government Loan In Canada ! SBL Guaranteed Financing
  Small Business Owners - How To Overcome Fear Of Failure?
  It's Better to Fail Quickly
  Profitable Online Business Ideas; Success from Failure
  5 Secrets of Turning Failure Into Success
  Fear Free Selling
  Success Demands You Must Go Where You’ve Never Gone Before by Doing What You’ve Never Done Before
  Do You Know the Top 7 Reasons Why Business Coaches Real Estate Agents Share Similar Failure Rates

Article Tags: b2b demand generation, b2b lead generation, btob demand generation, btob lead generation, demand gen, demand generation, demand generation companies, demand generation company, find new customers, lead gen, lead generation, lead generation companies, lead generation company, sales lead generation



Related Forum Posts
Re: Hello from a San Diego-based marketer - Welcome Aaron! Whats the next stage for your business? Ben
Re: New, young entrepreneur - Congrats H20ismyLife! Do you have a website so we can see any of your work? Whats the next step for you?
Why A Project Fails? - Hello Everyone As the size and complexity of ones business grows, so does their need to effectively manage projects. I have been thinking about the major reasons why a project can go wrong and my limited experience comes up with the following. 1 Leadership: A project manager with leadership skills and not just management skills. 2 Failure to (Foresee and) Plan 3 Failure to Manage: Ineffective change management control methods. Unclear decision making guidelines. 4 Talent: Finding, allocating and developing people 5 Scope: Setting an overly ambitious or amibigious project scope 6 Alignment: When projects are not prioritized in alignment with the business strategy, or project members personal objectives are not in tandem with that of the project / company 7 Lack of Candor: Communication Breakdowns I would be interested in knowing everyone's thoughts on this, especially on ways to overcome the above mentioned obstacles. Cheers!
Top performing Franchise Loans - Evan, There are over 120 Franchises listed by the SBA with 0% Loan Failure from 10-1-00 to 9-30-05 these companies have at leat 10 loans disbursed. A number of the companies are Hotel/Motel Franchises so I listed them separately. Since all the ones listed have 0% loan failure I listed them descending by # of loans disbursed. Top 20 (by # loans Disbursed) 0% SBA Loan Failure (does not include hotels/motels) 1 21425--CULVER'S FROZEN CUSTARD 85 2 66910--PRIMROSE SCHOOL (DAYCARE) 76 3 14467--CARTRIDGE WORLD STORES 54 4 68021--QUIZNO'S SUBS 41 5 06560--AUNTIE ANN'S (SOFT PRETZELS) 40 6 29912--FIREHOUSE SUBS 35 7 31154--FOOT SOLUTIONS 35 8 52707--MEDICAP PHARMACY 35 9 09802--BEN & JERRY'S ICE CREAM 33 10 67759--COMFORT SUITES 33 11 70150--RITTER'S FROZEN CUSTARD 32 12 05650--ARBY'S 31 13 65160--PLATO'S CLOSET 31 14 67417--PUMP IT UP 30 15 69149--REMAX 30 16 71456--SALAD WORKS, INC. 30 17 76282--SONIC DRIVE-IN 27 18 84725--UNION 76 OIL 27 19 17049--CHRISTIAN BROTHERS AUTOMOTIVE 26 20 78950--SUNOCO SERVICE STATION 26 Top 10 0% SBA Loan Failure Hotel/Motels 1 10275--BEST WESTERN INN 104 2 67750--COMFORT INN 98 3 38605--HOLIDAY INN EXPRESS 87 4 36680--HAMPTON INNS 57 5 53165--MICROTEL 33 6 75385--SLEEP INN MOTEL 26 7 04160--AMERIHOST INN 18 8 69134--RED ROOF INN 13 9 17230--CLARION INN & SUITES 11 10 20715--COUNTRY INN 11
Re: THE SECRET TO SUCCESS IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD...RIGHT NOW!!! - Success = Thinking (Head) + Heart (Feeling / Interest) + Hand (doing/ action). Success - H3 Robert


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Five Ways to Show Honest Appreciation

Starting a Business with Bad Personal Credit

SEO – Link Building Secrets

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.