Do Business with Failure Embracers
Making a list of who you don’t and do want to be in business with is an interesting exercise in discovering the aspects you value within employers, partners and clients. But you first have to differentiate between working with the motivation to make money and working with the purpose to fulfil a social need (making somebody’s website or filling a position within a company).
Accepting that differentiation you can see that given the choice you would rather work with and for some entities, but you would not like to work with and for others. Do you want to be involved with arms manufacturing? No. Do you want to be associated with your industry best practioners? Yes, certainly.
To this end its not a bad idea to start a codified list to assist you in your day to day pursuit of a career. Rules such as Never do Business with Litigious Assholes, Hire and Do Business with Problem Solvers, Do Business with Value-Aligned Professionals, and Do Business with the Critique Enlightened.
Another attribute that makes my personal list is to do business with failure embracers. By the term failure embracers I mean those people and companies who support failure rather than punish failure. Innovation through failure is an important trade route for the makers and shakers of new ideas. The concept that somebody should be rewarded for failure may sound counter-intuitive but its through experimentation and feeling free to put new ideas forward that we have the opportunity to discover something worthwhile.
Failure to embrace failure itself will translate to projects that fail to innovate and which prefer to stick to tried and proven solutions. Nothing new into the process means nothing new out of the process. The result of this failure to accept failure is a mediocre product, at best.
The bottom line for your career is that failure embracers offer you the abilility to be all that you can be (to coin the army recruitment posters) and the opportunity to be a part of interesting and ground-breaking work. Your ideas will be supported, rather than pushed aside. You will have the opportunity to take a certain amount of risk and explore avenues that may or may not prove beneficial to the overall project.
The very next time you’re in a job interview ask the interviewers this question: does your organisation reward failure? Because its something you, the potential candidate, should be interested in knowing about them.
