The Meaning of Failure

It's always interesting to read about, talk with, and learn from CEOs and leaders in various industries. Many of the challenges they face are no different than the ones faced by you and I every day - often times they only differ in magnitude. The strategies, perspectives and ideas they have are often helpful to those pursuing a greater leadership legacy in their own life.

For example, in a previous issue of Fortune magazine, the author asked two CEOs and one business consultant about failure and what it means to them. Four goods points:

1. You can be tolerant of failure, but not of mediocrity and incompetence. Incompetence is a lack of commitment to excellence.

2. Failure is a motivator. Thomas Edison achieved his great success through repeated failure.

3. Give people who have failed another chance. Give them more resources or the opportunity to institutionalize what they've learned.

4. The only way to come up with a breakthrough is to take bigger risks.

The final point echos a point made by Richard J. Machowicz in his book: Unleash the Warrior Within.

It’s not until you risk it all and go for the thing you really want that life becomes unlimited. All the shackles are released.

The Risk vs Reward Ratio

Snowboarding is a comparatively young sport, debuting at the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan, that has some of the most daring stunts, among them the Crippler 540 and double cork. James Moeller, the chief doctor for the U.S. Olympic team says, "they're pushing the edge of what they can do. The bigger the trick, the bigger the air, the more risky it appears, the more points they'll score."

Statistics from the Consumer Product Safety Commission make clear just how dangerous winter sports can be and not just for Olympians: 139,332 Americans were injured while skiing in 2007 and even more, 164,002, got hurt while snowboarding that year. And when looking at all winter-sport injuries, including sledding, snowmobiling and ice skating, 10 percent involved a head injury.

Yahoo!Sports has a great article on the risk factor associated with the snowboarding events that we will watch in the Vancouvor Olympic Games.

Two years ago competition officials made the decision to raise the walls on the halfpipe from 18 to 22 feet gave riders a blank canvas. The way the world’s most famous snowboarder looked at it, the sport could go one or two ways.

One option—admittedly the safer one—was to pack more dizzying spins into a run.

Where some saw danger, Shaun White and his high-flying buddies saw possibility.

Higher walls meant bigger jumps and more air time. Why spin when you could flip and spin?

“With the other direction you’re sacrificing a certain style other snowboarders have in being creative,” said the defending Olympic gold medalist, who will go for a second gold Wednesday night on Cypress Mountain. “It’s cool to see that that’s the direction that we’re going, the creative route and kind of expressing your own strengths of snowboarding.”

Even if that creativity carries considerable risk.

“You get an injury and somebody that goes down and crashes and it just really shocks people,” White said. “I think I can speak for everyone in saying that’s just a part of what we do. We fall, get back up and we try it again. It’s the best part of our sport. You can take a crash and come back and succeed over it and it’s just the best feeling you can have.”

For a video example, here is Shaun White practicing what he calls the "Double McTwist 12"

Leadership Involves Taking Risks

Play to win. It is an easy thing to say; the words flow naturally enough. It is a harder thing to do, though — harder and harder as the pages of the NFL calendar turn, and the games get bigger, and the regular season melts into the playoffs, and the playoffs finish in the Super Bowl.

But as they often say, 'fortune favors the bold.'

On Sunday, it was Sean Payton, the coach once stripped of his play-calling duties while he was the Giants’ offensive coordinator, whose game plan kept the ball away from quarterback Peyton Manning and the Colts’ productive offense. At the big game, it was Payton, not Peyton, whose team produced 31 of the final 38 points, matching the biggest deficit overcome in Super Bowl history.

For the New Orleans Saints’ the decision that ultimately turned Super Bowl XLIV in the Saints' favor came before the game even started. Prior to kickoff Sean Payton told the Saints team that they would go for an onside kick in the second or third quarter.

At halftime, with the Saints trailing the Indianapolis Colts 10-6, Payton made the call.

Saints Coach Sean Payton understood that if he wanted to reap the greatest reward, he needed to take some risks.

Statesman.com did a good job of putting the call into perspective:

To call an onside kicks in that situation is to risk disaster — and, worse, in today's world, it is to risk ridicule. There is a reason people go by the book — because, if it all blows up on you, you can shrug and say, "I went by the book."

Sean Payton? He called the onside kick — and it worked. And as he said afterward, "At halftime, I just told those guys, 'You've got to make me look right here.'"

In the end, leadership is the act or bringing about positive change. This requires leaders to initiate, to blaze new trails, to venture into the unknown and unexplored terrain. All of this entails risk. Kouzes and Posner in their bestselling book, “The Leadership Challenge” describes it this way:

“Leaders are pioneers – people who are willing to step out into the unknown.
They are people who are willing to take risks, to innovate and experiment in
order to find new an better ways of doing things.”

Leaders take these risk because they have a vision, they see a future and a new world that inspires action and makes the risk worthwhile. Leaders are pioneers… not settlers. Great leaders take risk. They push past the edge of their current reality. Striving to bring their vision into today.

Sean Payton did just that. He dared to be great - he pushed the envelope because he saw his team as a Champion and took the risks necessary to get them there.