memorable business training films, said, “It’s self-evident that if
we can’t take the risk of saying or doing something wrong, our
creativity goes right out the window.... The essence of cre-
ativity is not the possession of some special talent, it is much
more the ability to play.”
He continued, “In organizations where mistakes are not al-
lowed, you get two types of counterproductive behavior. First,
since mistakes are ‘bad,’ if they’re committed by the people at
the top, the feedback arising from those mistakes has to be ig-
nored or selectively reinterpreted, in order that those top peo-
ple can pretend that no mistake has been made. So it doesn’t
get fixed. Second, if they’re committed by people lower down
in the organization, mistakes get concealed.”
The leaders I talked with are far from believing that mis-
takes are “bad.” They not only believe in the necessity of
mistakes, they see them as virtually synonymous with growth
and progress.
Former Lucky Stores executive Don Ritchey said, “Even if
you’re pretty analytical by nature, you have to be willing to
make a decision somewhere short of certainty. You just haven’t
got the time or the resources, even if it was possible to actually
get that last finite piece of information that lets you deal with
certainty. You have to get 80 or 85 percent of it and then take
your best shot and go on to something else. That means you’ll
blow it now and then, but you also develop a momentum and a
pace that gets to be exciting.”
Like Barbara Corday, leaders don’t always see “failures” as
mistakes. “My favorite project,” she said, “a TV series called
‘American Dream,’ had a lot of things to say, was executed bril-
liantly, written and acted well, and produced beautifully. It was
a critical success, but for whatever reason, the public chose not
Knowing the World