In 1985 I worked on a project to develop a laptop computer. Today, a laptop is a piece of consumer electronics but in those days it was revolutionary. Our vision was of executives on the road, arriving at their hotel rooms, downloading their mail, checking the Dow, all the kind of stuff we now take for granted. I led the team which was developing the software.

There came the day when we had to decide what operating system our laptop would run. I wasn’t part of the decision-making process – as the project manager, I just needed the decision made. One way or the other. A or B.

The techies assembled to make the decision to choose between two contenders. One was a product called MTOS which the techies quickly explained had it all – multithreaded, multitasking, make your breakfast, lots of other great things – and another, really rather pathetic product called MS-DOS. They spoke of it as though it were dog’s poo on the underside of your shoe.

You’ve guessed it. At this critical fork in the road on our project, we went the wrong way. At about the same time, a rather small company in Seattle called Microsoft was in the process of cutting a deal with a rather large company called IBM for the operating system that IBM would run on its PC.

It would be a few more months before we figured out we had made a mistake. And not just any old mistake. A monster mistake. A catastrophic blunder of spectacular proportions. An epic fail. Had we gone the other way, we could have been Compaq. I could have been on my ninth or tenth Ferrari by now.

I’ve made other mistakes in business which, though not as costly, weren’t exactly cheap.

• Not making my company small enough quickly enough when the tech bubble burst. Cost? About $1,000,000.
• A high-risk retail business I invested in recently. Cost? €250,000 approx.
• Buying a house for €420,000 and having to sell it for far less than that.

I won’t go on.

And that’s just me.

• The captain of the Titanic steered his ship into an iceberg because he was going too fast and ignored ice warnings. The cost was over 1,500 people dead (including himself) and an inflation-adjusted loss of $168 million.
• Twice – in 1986 and again in 2003 – NASA lost a Space Shuttle and its crew due to faulty equipment. Cost – 14 dead and an inflation-adjusted financial loss of about $27 billion.
• At the height of the dot.com bubble, AOL bought Time Warner for $182 billion. Nine years later, Time Warner spun off with a market capitalization of $36 billion – a $178 billion loss. The newly separated AOL was valued at only $2.5 billion.
• The First World War started because a small group of very important men made some monumental mistakes and miscalculations. Cost – over 37 million military and civilian deaths.
• And further miscalculations at the end of that war by some other important people, meant that it all restarted 20 years later, resulting in the biggest single reduction in the world population since the Black Death. Cost – 60 million dead, 2.5% of the world’s population.

Enough already.

You learn so much from your mistakes. As one of my uncles, a hugely successful businessman, was fond of quoting, ‘The man who never made a mistake never made anything’.

And so it is. I’ve learned that you should never trust a techie to make a marketing decision. I’ve learned that when your CEO decides to rebrand the company, it’s almost certainly time to fire him. I’ve learned that I really should have been more careful with money throughout my life. And so on and so on and so on.

I’ve learned things about myself. I’ve learned that I’m a risk taker. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ will almost be the first words out of my mouth when some new venture appears on the horizon.

My failures have made me a better person. I’m stronger, more resilient, don’t get stressed easily, laugh more (and I used to laugh an awful lot anyway). When I started my own company, I didn’t just start it with no money, I started it – for reasons I don’t have to explain – with a £20,000 debt. The Israeli Air Force has a saying – ‘en brera’. It means ‘no alternative’ – failure is not an option. And so it was. The failures in my life, the mistakes I had made and consequences that I had ridden out, meant that when this challenge of challenges came, I was ready for it. I believed in myself and reckoned I could do what had to be done. Without that history, I suspect I just would have folded and gone and applied for a job somewhere.

Failures make you smarter. Much of the success of the Normandy landings in 1944 was due to the failure at Dieppe in 1942. Just one illustration of this is before Dieppe, the Allies had assumed that, as part of the invasion of Europe, they would have to assault and capture a deep sea port. This would be required because of the scale of the logistical follow up and support, post-invasion. Dieppe convinced them that there would be huge loss of life in such an assault.

So from this grew the idea of not assaulting a port at all but rather creating one. This was the genesis of the so-called Mulberry artificial harbours and PLUTO (pipeline under the ocean) which supplied fuel to the allied army.

Failures make life more interesting. Imagine what a dull and small life you would end up leading if you had no failures, if you never risked anything.

Dun & Bradstreet in Malibu¹⁸ has set up a ‘Failure Wall’ where employees are encouraged to write about their failures. The company feels that it encourages risk taking.

And it has. One example of this risk taking is that the company has now instituted what it calls a ‘fast failure model’ to get products to market more quickly. Jeff Stibel, the CEO, explains: ‘We used to do three- and four-year projects, with dozens of consultants, slowly rolling a product to market. Now, we use the fast-failure model: We have a prototype, put it into beta with customers, and then customers tell us whether we are succeeding or failing. It’s a calculated risk: We learn from incremental failure, and have geometric success’.

It seems to work. The company achieved double-digit growth in 2011, the best in the company’s history.

So the next time you have a failure, there are three things to do:

• First, come out with your hands up. Take responsibility. Don’t blame others or try to find scapegoats. Be upfront. If you blew it, say that you blew it.
• Next, learn the lessons. You don’t need dozens – just the top two or three – or even just one. ‘What’s the number one thing I can take away from this debacle?’
• And finally, and most important of course, do better next time. When failures deliver lessons, you find that your choices narrow – so that next time you’re likely to make a better or much wiser choice.

(This is not idle talk on Edison’s part. He tested literally thousands of materials when trying to come up with a suitable filament for the incandescent light bulbs we now take for granted.)

And not only will you make a better choice but the choice will be made more easily. Instead of having to weigh pros and cons and agonize over things, the course of action will be much clearer – or even a no-brainer.

You’re in good company when you fail. Here’s Michael Jordan, the basketball player:

J.K. Rowling believes in failure. This is one of the themes of her (sometimes very funny) 2008 Harvard commencement speech.¹⁹

‘I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation’, she begins. She goes on to speak about ‘the benefits of failure’ and how ‘rock bottom became the solid foundation upon which I rebuilt my life’. (We described that ‘rock bottom’ earlier in the chapter on Commitment and Perseverance.)

So too does Conan O’Brien in his completely hilarious 2000 commencement speech at the same institution.²⁰ He describes graduating, then working for a year on a small cable TV show before being fired. After that he took a series of dead end jobs before getting back into TV. His new show was canned after four weeks.

Then finally he got his big break on Saturday Night Live. He was hugely successful and so, on the crest of this wave, he left the show after two seasons to write a TV sitcom. It bombed. But then he moved onto The Simpsons and then Late Night and found success again.

His life is a rollercoaster of alternating success and failure and this is what he says:

And finally here’s one for your wall from Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett. (It’s almost certainly the only writing of his that I’ve ever read.)