Baba Shiv, Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Marketing
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Silicon Valley is populated with people who fear only sitting on the bench while someone else scores with a great idea, says Professor Baba Shiv. How people approach failure is a key to success, he argues...
Baba Shiv, I agree with the notion but I don't agree with a couple of points. Silicon Valley people, as a generalization, aren't the people I would say are the ones fearfully sitting on the bench; that's a problem that spans every corner globally. How people "approach" failure, to me, is the wrong idea. Rather, how people endeavor to outflank failure and make it an important learning and growing process is what's really critical here. I don't think great innovators and executors, in a general sense, are afraid of failure and I don't think their efforts are stalled by the fear. I do however think that the most fruitful innovations (many of them from silicon valley) come from people who have had a healthy respect (read: fear) of failure and made acceptance and path adjustments as a result of unanticipated obstacles.
Posted by: Paul Mugge, Executive Director, Center for Innovation Management Studies | Friday, 25 March 2011 at 01:23 AM