The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination | Harvard Magazine
http://harvardmagazine.com/commencement/the-fringe-benefits-failure-the-importance-imagination

J.K. Rowling: "I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea."

speech by JK Rowling to Harvard graduates passing out day quite inspiring

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

fantastic speech i should watch every day

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. -- You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. " -- J. K. Rowling

excerpt from book by Jim Collins - How the Mighty Fall and why Some Companies Never Give In

Every institution is vulnerable, no matter how great. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall, and most eventually do. But all is not gloom. By understanding the five stages of decline we uncovered in our research for How the Mighty Fall, leaders can substantially increase the odds of reversing decline before it is too late—or even better, stave off decline in the first place. Decline can be avoided. The seeds of decline can be detected early. And decline can be reversed (as we've seen with notable cases such as IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Merck (MRK), and Nucor (NUE)). The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

overview of an upcoming book that analyzes the 5 stages to failure for a company or country.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, on how to spot the subtle signs that your successful company is actually on course to sputter—and how to reverse the slide before it's too late -- THE SILENT CREEP OF DOOM

Printed 30/8

It’s a classic adage that we usually learn more from our failures than from our successes. I’ve find this line of reasoning with Enterprise 2.0 failures to be fascinating because of how very different it’s often turning out to be from traditional IT projects. For one, IT doesn’t seem to be in the driver’s seat nearly as much with Enterprise 2.0. In fact, the initiative is frequently coming from the business side. Two, as the latest case studies emerge and are analyzed, it is grassroots efforts that often end up being the most successful, bubbling up and then across the organization, only then to be formally adopted later. And three, many so-called Enterprise 2.0 projects are local, unblessed, informal uses of social computing software which — by their very nature — are less compliant with enterprise technology standards, legal/HR guidelines, and corporate policy. The point here is that many Enterprise 2.0 tools are often used widely in organizations without tacit approval.

IT doesn’t seem to be in the driver’s seat ...the initiative is frequently coming from the business side. Two, as the latest case studies emerge and are analyzed, it is grassroots efforts that often end up being the most successful, bubbling up and then across the organization, only then to be formally adopted later. And three, many so-called Enterprise 2.0 projects are local, unblessed, informal uses of social computing software which are less compliant with enterprise technology standards, legal/HR guidelines, and corporate policy. So, this seems to mean projects are more likely to fail due to seeming larger than usual lack of alignment and organizational backing. .... ...they were missing one or more ingredients to succeed. Occasionally some of them will hit on the right formula, reach a critical mass of participation, break out of their team or department, and begin drawing in the rest of the organization.

the smart strategy now appears to be to find and build upon the early successes stories; namely the internal but local efforts that are rising and have already hit upon the right mix of tools, participants, motivation, and content.

14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail

Founder diagnoses why his startup failed. Good comments on traffic business models

Who are your users and are they really useful/real users?

Many of the strategies employed in competitive and recreational sports are applicable in business and our personal lives. One lesson I learned from alpine ski racing was the "40-30-30 Rule." During training, early on, I tried to go fast, and I also focused on not falling. On a ride up the ski lift, my coach told me I was missing the point. He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks.

If you're not risking failure, you're not risking enough. Why pushing outside of your comfort zone is a crucial part of the creative process.

The 99 Percent

Screw ups, disasters, misfires, flops. Why losing big can be a winning strategy.

"There are advantages to thinking on the margin. When we look at a problem from the outside, we’re more likely to notice what doesn’t work. Instead of suppressing the unexpected, shunting it aside with our 'Oh shit!' circuit and Delete key, we can take the mistake seriously. A new theory emerges from the ashes of our surprise."

"This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box."

Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Article about the messiness of science, its failures and how an “in vivo” investigation that attempted to learn from the messiness of real experiments -

"Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit." ... "This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box."

Recomm. by Francois R.

Blog article by Peter Bregman - July 2009 HarvardBusiness.org

Why we need to fail

i love this.

JK Rowling

inspirational commencement speech

失敗する時

Pretty much every new product gets hyped as a potentially disruptive technology these days, and usually nobody outside of the company's marketing department actually believes it.

RT @GuyKawasaki: Top 10 disappointing technologies. http://adjix.com/cm52 >> This wkend primed me for their take on Ubuntu. [from http://twitter.com/awsamuel/statuses/1839944070]

adopters to hold off on upgrading until developer

RT @Farrhad: RT @Iconic88 Top 10 disappointing technologies http://bit.ly/acJVI [from http://twitter.com/phaoloo/statuses/1834098743]

- News - PC Authority

Lessons learned from 13 failed software products

Software entrepreneur culture is full of stories of the products that succeeded. But what about the products that failed? We rarely hear much about them.

Lessons learned from 13 failed software products http://bit.ly/aUboh8 - (via Instapaper) http://tumblr.com/xgib2bvir

1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.

As 50 piores invenções pela revista Time.

...