In today’s competitive business environment, the pressure to maintain a perfect record can often be a silent killer of innovation and calculated risk-taking. That’s why this week, we’re sharing a powerful reminder of the true cost of perfection, from the ultimate disruptor, Richard Branson:
“Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.“
Branson’s insight is the foundation of resilient leadership. It’s not about avoiding failure; it’s about making sure your team learns and adapts faster than the competition, treating every misstep as a necessary data point for success.
How This Resonates in Business Leadership
1. Building Agility in Product Development
Leaders must foster an environment that views setbacks in development as fuel for better solutions, not reasons for blame. This is crucial when developing new products, features, or services.
Example: A company develops a new beta feature, but early testing reveals critical flaws and poor user adoption. This is seen as a necessary “failure.”
- The Iteration Mindset: Instead of scrapping the project or punishing the team, the product or team leader celebrates the rapid identification of flaws and immediately facilitates a post-mortem to understand the engineering and market gaps. The learning is instantly applied to the next phase, leading to a much more robust and market-aligned v2.
- Scrapping a Bad Idea: A team spends three months developing a new service line based on market research, only to have a soft launch completely fail to gain traction. The CEO quickly acknowledges the hypothesis was wrong, stops funding the project, and reallocates the talent to a more promising area, prioritizing the savings in time and budget over the sunk cost fallacy.
- Learning from a Feature Flop: An application update leads to a major dip in daily active users (DAU). The lead developer uses this moment to conduct a comprehensive user survey, discovering that a new complexity made the app unusable for core customers. They reverse the feature and use the specific user feedback to guide the next three months of development, ensuring the next release is centered on simplicity.
2. Optimizing Customer Onboarding and Success
Failures in implementation or adoption are prime opportunities to perfect the customer journey. A resilient leader transforms a difficult customer situation into a new standard for best practices.
Example: A new client’s platform implementation goes sideways, resulting in high frustration and a churn threat. The initial rollout is a significant “failure.”
- Fixing the Onboarding Blueprint: The customer success lead views this not as a personal failure, but as a systemic one. They “start again” by re-mapping the entire onboarding workflow and involving engineers and support staff. The team identifies missing documentation and creates a new training module based on the exact points of confusion from the failed implementation.
- The Service Recovery Win: A high-value customer experiences a major service interruption due to an unforeseen bug. The head of support not only resolves the issue quickly but uses the incident to trigger an in-depth system audit, identifying a single point of vulnerability. This proactive learning turns a catastrophic failure into a huge win for system reliability and strengthens the client relationship through transparent communication.
- Addressing Churn Root Causes: When a specific customer segment exhibits high churn rates, the leadership team resists the urge to offer immediate, costly discounts. Instead, they launch an exit interview program to meticulously document the reasons for departure. This honest feedback reveals a gap in mid-level product training, leading to a company-wide recalibration of the training curriculum that drastically reduces churn long-term.
3. Fostering Innovation in Operations and Strategy
Operational improvements and strategic shifts require trial and error. Leaders must encourage teams to test new tools and integrations without fear of being penalized for a lack of immediate success.
Example: A business invests in a new internal data management platform designed to monitor operational efficiency, but the initial rollout proves unreliable and difficult for department staff to interpret.
- The User-Centric Redesign: The IT Director uses the poor rollout as a learning exercise, gathering candid feedback from the operational managers who struggled with the platform. The team reconfigures the user interface for simplicity and establishes a new, mandatory training protocol. The “failure” of the initial launch results in a more user-centric, effective tool.
- Rethinking the Remote Model: A company shifts to a permanent fully-remote work strategy that initially leads to major communication breakdowns and a dip in team morale. The HR Director and leadership team don’t declare the model a “failure.” Instead, they treat the first six months as a learning phase, introducing new collaboration tools, mandating digital “water cooler” time, and training managers on virtual performance coaching, ultimately perfecting the hybrid model.
- Budgeting and Resource Allocation: A divisional head champions a major investment in a new market segment, but after one year, the division generates minimal return. Instead of internal blame, the leader presents a detailed analysis of the miscalculations (e.g., misjudged competitor strength, incorrect pricing). They use this clear, data-driven failure to justify exiting the market quickly and reallocating the remaining capital to a core business unit, thereby making a better long-term strategic decision.
Book Recommendation: To Master Perseverance
For those looking to dive deeper into embracing resilience and learning from adversity, I highly recommend:
“Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth.
Why this book? Duckworth’s research-backed insights perfectly complement Branson’s quote. She argues that sustained passion and perseverance (grit) are more important than talent in achieving long-term goals. The book provides frameworks for cultivating grit in ourselves and our teams, showing how to learn from challenges and maintain focus on our “start again” moments. It’s an inspiring and practical guide for anyone looking to build a resilient, high-growth mindset.