Why you should embrace failure
What do you do when everything has gone wrong?
Here’s a story. I’d just been appointed to the board of Hindustan Unilever: the first woman on the board, the youngest ever director, the first woman leading HR. I was being praised to the skies. My face was in magazines, everyone was saying how I was so great, and that it was fantastic that HUL were showing such confidence in young people, and taking such a bold step in hiring a woman.
But a month into the job, there was a strike in one of our largest factories. The factory contributed a third of HUL’s profitability. A third! It went on for two months with massive negotiations going on.
The VERY SAME people who wrote articles saying I was the greatest thing since sliced bread wrote articles saying this is what happens when you entrust inexperienced people with the top job.
I was completely shattered.
Now I hadn’t created this problem — I’d walked into it. But who cares? To the outside world, to my critics in the media, it looked like I was failing, and really that was all that mattered. I inherited it, I was going to solve it. When I looked at the details I discovered that across our factories — which had 96 trade unions — we were losing 50,000 days per year on strikes. Fifty-thousand man days! Nobody had paid attention to it because it hadn’t really been enough of a problem until this big, two-month strike happened.
So I decided to make a big promise.
In a normal year, if I had said I was going to make this 20% better, people would have said, “Yep, that’s a good stretch target, let’s go for it!” But no! I had been humiliated, so I was determined to set it right — and my team was determined too. So we set an audacious target. We said that over the next couple of years we would work hard and ensure that NOT A SINGLE DAY was lost due to employee relation struggles.
From 50,000 to zero in a few years.
And what happens when you set a target like that? One that is so audacious and has never been done before?
You’ve got to do things you’ve never done before.
So we jumped right in. We set up meetings with all 96 trade unions. We took factory leaders to Japan to see how manufacturing is changing, and to consumers’ houses to see how consumers have become more demanding over quality. We set up a scholarship for all our employees’ children and pledged that every child of HUL would get an education no matter what.
We did things we hadn’t done before.
And you know what? In the first year the number came down from 50,000 to 100. And the next year? Zero.
My point is, if you embrace failure, it’s always the moment when the best creativity and the best ideas happen. It provides a perfect platform from which to leapfrog. Embrace failure, just grab it! Say to yourself:
“Ok, this is it, this is a moment of misery. Now how do I make it a moment of happiness?”
Because when you do that, you can achieve truly remarkable things — things you wouldn’t have imagined possible if you hadn’t leaped in and embraced your failure.
(By the way, I’ve discussed failure before in my advice for young people piece).
