Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Fail Often, Fail Fast, Fail Cheap

I see we will soon have 12 planets up from the existing 9. I like change and have largely made it where my business opportunities have come from. I capitalize on change. Not sure how this one will help though.

Like my environmental brothers, Glen and Lyle say "Earth first, we can mess up the other planets later".

I have had a great time at the Seagate conference. This one had lots of free space which is highly unusual. Space, I could use to stay on top of things and to plan.

I have been thinking lately about failure. Failure is a good thing. One of my favourite expressions is "Fail Often, Fail Fast, Fail Cheap". We will not move forward if we do not try new things. New things that involve a bit of risk. The key is to minimize the risk while at the same time testing the business opportunity. And if the project or business opportunity is not likely to work out, shut it down quickly. Time can be the enemy to business. Expenses tend to tick on while companies wait to make decisions.

Off to dinner.

5 Comments:

At 3:41 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fail Often, Fail Fast, Fail Cheap.

Good motto for us.
thanks.

 
At 10:06 PM, Blogger serenity said...

Jim,
For me, failure only occurs when we stop trying new things or we give up.

Everything else is just an experiment.

Thank you for your wise words today. I couldn't agree more with your comment.

peace and well being.....

 
At 5:22 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

i've been thinking about this recently. i work for a software company and at our recent kickoff the head of Development department stood at the front and said this year we are likely to "fail fast forwards". in the sense of, what they are coding they are doing as much as possible as fast as possible and if they make mistakes along the way then that's ok as long as it came out quickly. i work in support so i have to deal with the angry customers who have just been sold the latest and greatest version of our products only to find that something that used to work for them now doesn't any more.... surely it's not such a good plan to upset our existing client base just because we're powering full steam ahead trying to win more and bigger clients..... it only takes a few of them to start spreading rumours oh what went wrong in their last implementation before the whole "bubble" bursts... i don't know who came up with the "fail fast forwards" concept, but to me failure is not good in our game...
then again i guess Microsoft has been getting away with it for years and they're doing ok... they don't have the competition that we have though.... and their shareholders seem far less demanding...

 
At 5:28 PM, Blogger Jim Estill said...

I agree that failure is not good. The reason to encourage failure is the opposite usually does not work either - never trying anything new, never getting close to the edge etc.

 
At 6:17 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, failure is definitely a bad thing.
But it's absolutely impossible to avoid failure at some point or another.
And when that happens, you want to do it in the best way possible.

It's better to fail on a rough draft than a final draft.
It's better to fail on homework than a test.
It's better to fail at compile-time than runtime.
It's better to fail at prototyping than production.
etc...

 

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