167 Posts Found

We tend to avoid failure at all costs. But our smarter missteps are worthwhile because they can force us to take a different path that points us toward personal and professional success.

Content: Article | Authors: Amy Edmondson, Michael Blanding | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Success / Failure

With experience comes pattern recognition and resilience, the ability to separate yourself from individual setbacks enough to see that the far side of failure is success if you reflect on the lessons.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Keller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Personal Development, Success / Failure

Most companies promote managers for hitting designated targets rather than for pursing the best process strategy. A good plan which fails is seldom rewarded, even if it had evident merit. But some companies do inculcate a smart process mindset in their culture and try to reward it. […] Has your organization ever given a performance reward for an excellent plan that happened to fail? Although … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul J.H. Schoemaker | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Management, Success / Failure

If you want a test-and-learn environment, you have to make it OK to share failure, so that not only can I learn from failure but others can learn from my failure, and they don’t have to make the same mistakes I made.

Content: Quotation | Author: Aaron De Smet | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Success / Failure

Sometimes we hear this thing about “embrace failure. Failure is good.” Actually, it’s not that failure is good. I, at least, don’t like failure. I like working with people who don’t like failure. But there’s a difference between not liking failure and having failure be taboo and not discussed or shared or learned from. If you never fail, you probably aren’t being bold enough.

Content: Quotation | Author: Aaron De Smet | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Success / Failure

We fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.

Content: Quotation | Author: Russell L. Ackoff | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Success / Failure

It is in the anticipation of success that success itself resides.

Content: Quotation | Author: Baba Shiv | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Personal Development, Success / Failure

One of the things about failure is that it’s asymmetrical with respect to time. When you look back and see failure, you say, ‘It made me what I am!’ But looking forward, you think, ‘I don’t know what is going to happen and I don’t want to fail.’ The difficulty is that when you’re running an experiment, it’s forward looking. We have to try extra … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ed Catmull | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

Great goals go beyond SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant to your interests, and time-bound). They have specific milestones that help provide a sense of progress, which is crucial to happiness at work. If you start off with well-defined goals that will allow you to realize success and that have multiple steps toward an endpoint, you are much more likely to enjoy working toward them.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Goals, Management, Organizational Behavior, Productivity / Work Tips, Success / Failure

There’s a common assumption that you will be happy when you are successful. But the reverse is actually true, and not just anecdotally. Hard neurological science supports the idea that happy people have more capacity to succeed. And beyond that, that happiness is not a genetic mandate, or a product of circumstance. It’s a choice.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

Small differences in performance can lead to very unequal distributions when repeated over time. […] You only need to be slightly better than your competition, but if you are able to maintain a slight edge today and tomorrow and the day after that, then you can repeat the process of winning by just a little bit over and over again. And thanks to Winner-Take-All Effects, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Clear | Subjects: Management, Success / Failure

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.

Content: Quotation | Author: Herbert Swope | Subject: Success / Failure

The most dangerous poison is the feeling of achievement. The antidote is to every evening think what can be done better tomorrow.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ingvar Kamprad | Subjects: Achievement, Career, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Success / Failure

I don’t know of anybody who has been extremely successful when they’ve taken on something much bigger than they’re used to without a good dose of humility. Humility is what forces you to be prepared. Humility is what forces you to say “I don’t know everything” or “I don’t fully understand all these people, so I’m going to have to listen rather than just tell … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Deepak Malhotra | Source: The Washington Post | Subjects: Achievement, Career, Personal Development, Success / Failure

A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

Content: Quotation | Author: John Burroughs | Subjects: Achievement, Success / Failure

Those who let things happen usually lose to those who make things happen.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dave Weinbaum | Subjects: Achievement, Action, Strategy, Success / Failure

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jack Welch | Subjects: Leadership, Success / Failure

What I’ve found is that in the recruiting process, soft skills are under-assessed. In other words, they’re not properly measured.

Once people get hired, they are often slow to be developed by the human resources people. Only when there is a problem, only when somebody gets passed over for promotion, does a person realize that they undervalued, underappreciated how much the soft skills were going to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James A. Runde | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Career, Human Resources, Success / Failure, Work

The ability to recognize, own, and shape your own emotions is the master skill for deepening intimacy with loved ones, magnifying influence in the workplace, and amplifying our ability to turn ideas into results. My successes and failures have turned on this master skill more than any other.

Content: Quotation | Author: Joseph Grenny | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Success / Failure

Bad execution is when you try something that fails and a) you can’t really draw lessons out of that failure that would apply to a future project (because you don’t know why it failed) or b) it took you a year to learn a particular lesson when a smarter path would have let you learn the same thing in 3 months.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: Medium | Subjects: Execution, Management, Success / Failure