“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Because everybody’s mantra needs a poster…! Nice work, Rational Works.

I haven’t traditionally considered Pete Drucker’s work in the context of failing fast, but apparently I should have been based on this article. Tying the concept specifically to design thinking is a useful model, and hearing the Drucker Institute itself articulate the philosophy is compelling.

I also love how so many references to fail fast are immediately refuted by someone who disagrees with the idea and suggests an alternative, which essentially agrees that failing fast is a good idea but uses softer language like “learn quickly.”

Perhaps everything really is semantics.

“Experimentation” doesn’t have the consonantal strength and counterlogical imperative of “fail fast,” but it really is pretty much the same thing. Check out the Harvard Business Review article on its growing global usage.

In our recent sample of 149 senior executives in the Babson Executive Education survey of global respondents, December 2010, 51% say that experimentation is now their organization’s preferred approach to understanding and acting on potential opportunity. Interestingly, for the subset of executives leading the highest growth firms (more than 20% revenue growth last year), the percentage encouraging experimentation is 10 % higher than that (61%). The practice of experimentation is widespread, and seems to be linked to higher revenue performance as well, our data suggest.

An old buddy of mine forwarded a link to this blog post the other day. It is worth a read if your holidays are in need of a fail fast injection (say, your cookies didn’t turn out, your ham is dry, or your present for someone you love — the one you thought was going to be a big hit — fell flat). It includes a great video by Honda that I mentioned back in early 2009. Secret 3 in the post may ring true:

Create it, launch it, learn from it, and fail fast.

The first design or prototype you put out will always be the worst it will ever be. Version 1.0 is going to suck. 2.0 is going to be much much better, but without first putting it out there, you’ll never know. So fail fast, learn from your users, and use survey’s to gather feedback of their experiences with your product or service.

Here’s hoping your holidays — mine are now at version 39.0 — are an immediate success.

This blog entry crossed my inbox last night: 7 Qualities of Good Marketing Strategy. In the “Testable” section, they write, “If you’re going to fail… fail fast, fail early, and fail small.”

I think “fail fast” and “fail early” are redundant; my preferred three fails (with a bad taste of non-grammatical in my mouth) have been “fail fast, fail safe, and fail cheap.” Fast makes natural sense; prolonged failure is clearly unappetizing. Safe is crucial, too: let’s make sure no one gets hurt physically or (too) emotionally. And cheap is a good way to preserve your gig if you are testing things at work. Even the most inspired boss will have a hard time accepting a $1M failure, regardless of whether your resignation accompanies the news.

“If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough.” -Alan Kay

It has been a while since I was an every-day-all-day Java developer and since that time (vi on Solaris or HP-UX) tools like Eclipse have made the Java environment greatly simplified. However, just this week I was reminded that, even in this easier world, there are three rules I came up with way back then that still apply when you are debugging a ClassNotFound or other sort of environmental error:

1. It’s your classpath. Go through your path a character at a time if you have to.
2. It’s permissions. You don’t have read or write access to something. Look through every line of code that accesses a resource and validate that you have the proper permissions to get to it.
3. It isn’t permissions? Sorry, it really is your classpath. Go back to rule 1!

Thanks for the reference, Mr. Limer:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/failure-success-and-neither.html