The Cranky Communicator - Failure: Embrace It

Audio Blog: 

Jack Lilienthal - Failure_Embrace It.mp3

“Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan,” goes the old saying. But failure itself can be positive if lessons learned are applied to future schemes and dreams, turning dismal defeat into incandescent entelechy. No pun intended, but think of the careers of Thomas Edison and the recently deceased Steve Jobs. Both men’s business lives were marked by a spectacular succession of failures. Yet, they endured, and a century apart have become icons of American inventiveness and success.

The marketing landscape is littered with abject failures; the curricula of MBA schools chronicle these chapters of shame in their case study textbooks. Think of the Edsel and New Coke. Yet, Ford and Coca-Cola overcame these calamities and remain among the world’s most successful business firms. Why? Because their marketers evaluated these fiascos with a dispassionate sangfroid and vowed never to repeat their mistakes again. More plainly spoken, they resisted the impulse to make self-delusional excuses (i.e., transferring the blame). They followed Pembroke’s advice in Shakespeare’s “King John”:

            “And oftentimes excusing a fault

            Doth make the fault the worser by the excuse.”

I’ve had my share of spectacular marketing blunders … where everybody should have known better and done other than he did, but where the rewards of self-deception were too extraordinary to pass up. The story of the valve actuator comes to mind. 

A company I worked for was WAY late in coming to market with an actuator to automatically operate valves. They were simply mounting proven and preferred actuators from other manufacturers to their valves. The valve managers were determined, however, to develop their own actuator and threw enormous resources in a Manhattan-style project to achieve it. I was charged with developing a promotional plan to launch this new actuator with full fanfare. And the plan I concocted was a doozy, the single most expensive project launch in the company’s history. Every conceivable advertising angle was covered, including a press party at the 21 Club in New York City.

We were successful beyond our wildest dreams. We made the covers of every important trade publication. Oodles of sales leads were generated. Orders began pouring in. And then, the bubble burst. The product was a dog. The complex design was a technical nightmare. It was a “short” product line and the promised sizes and models were never built. In sum, a total freakin’ fiasco. The recriminations quickly followed, all sounding very much like this Yiddish proverb: “The girl who can’t dance says the band can’t play.”

I could tell you about the lessons learned and ignored from this episode, but you can probably guess them for yourself. For me, this is what I learned: be skeptical of the run-away ebullience of product managers and listen more intently to the dour caveats of the engineering department. And when it comes time to assign blame (rightly or wrongly), keep your mouth shut and take your beating. Who knows, it may motivate you to start your own advertising agency.