BQF Innovation

Do you watch The Apprentice?  Candidates for the position of apprentice to Sir Alan Sugar are set business tasks in teams.  The losing team then has to face trial by ordeal by Sugar and his henchman and henchwoman.  Ultimately, with a great dramatic flourish and an accusatory pointed finger, Sir Alan announces, ‘You’re fired!’  And one more poor soul is sent on his or her way.  It is one of the few programmes about business on TV and the weekly elimination of a candidate makes for great drama.

However in many respects it is a poor guide to business.  One thing about it that bothers me is there has to be a losing team and a losing individual each week.  If one team makes a profit of £200 and the other team makes a loss of £200 then the loss-making team loses – simple as that.  But what if the loss-making team had a really creative idea but poor execution (as often happens the first time you try something)?  What if both teams had creative approaches? 

Innovative leaders do not punish failure.  They applaud honest attempts at new ventures that fail.  They treat each failure as a valuable learning experience.  They do not fire people for being entrepreneurial and launching a business that makes a loss on its first day.

I wrote an article on this subject titled Welcome Failure. 

Very often the best way to test an idea is not to analyze it but to try it. The organization that implements lots of ideas will most likely have many failures but the chances are, it will reap some mighty successes too. By trying numerous initiatives we improve our chances that one of them will be a star. As Tom Kelley of IDEO puts it, ‘Fail often to succeed sooner.’

Deborah Bull is the artistic Director at the Royal Opera House in London. She is keen to encourage small companies of artists to come out with mad ideas and to try them. She says, ‘We need to get away from the idea that everything has to be a hit at the box office and a hit with the critics. If everything we do succeeds, then we are failing, because it means we are not taking enough risks.’

Do you think that Sir Alan Sugar is a good role model as a business leader?  Is he really as brutal as that or is he just playing a part for better TV ratings? 

Paul Sloane 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.