Several companies are posting significant gains, yet the overall economy is simply inching its way forward. Why the disconnect?
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"Maybe America's Great Stagnation isn't happening because we're failing – maybe it's happening because we're not," writes Umair Haque in a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog. Companies deemed "too big to fail" were propped up with subsidies, and executives are keeping a hyperfocus on the bottom line. Maybe that lack of change is keeping us from a substantial recovery.
Failure plays a key role in innovation. We need failure to identify what needs to be changed. Grainger recognized this as it built out its eCommerce platform – though they were hesitant to use the word "failure."
"The first incarnation of some things wasn't always the most elegant, but there was always something we could build on," Sam Kim, Grainger's vice president of U.S. eCommerce, told MDM in 2010. (Read Grainger's E-Commerce Evolution.)
Rather than avoiding failure at all costs, Haque advises that we embrace failure. "It's time to get lethally serious about failing bigger cheaper," he writes.
Failing cheaper is about being aware and adaptive. It's about being nimble enough to quickly identify what's not working, and being willing to come up with alternatives. Failing bigger is about the willingness to make radical change.
The key to Grainger's success on the eCommerce front was its willingness to accept that not everything will be a success, but they couldn't know if they didn't try.
"People were being allowed to fail," said Ian Heller, an employee of Grainger during its launch of a CD-ROM catalog. "If something didn't work perfectly during the process of developing the e-commerce platform, 'heads didn't roll.'"
