Plan to Win by Planning to Fail

Good managers plan to succeed. Great managers plan to fail.

Like learning how to walk, learning how to manage is an acquired skill. It’s a mountain of success built on rocks of failure. Some big, some small.

Great managers can size up a situation, consider options and make a choice. And become skilled at doing it quickly, and almost effortlessly. Early in their journey they learn, as Benjamin Franklin wryly mused, that nothing is certain in this world but death and taxes. They come to know there are no “sure things”. So they test for failure. Things overlooked. Assumptions generously made. Cause-and-effect where none exists.

Great managers are champions of the null hypothesis. They have acquired the discipline of turning every promising solution upside down on its head and figuring out how to make it fail. They take nothing at face value. They are the Chief Quality Control Officer of their own ideas. Confident, yes. Arrogant, no.

They’re quick to take a proposal from a staff member and subject it to swift and demanding scrutiny. They dissect it to find out what will cause it to fail. Then send the staff member back to the drawing board.

In doing so they are neither cynics nor tormentors They know that failure is best discovered in the meeting room rather than in the marketplace. They are preventing a colleague from making a poor choice.

If you yearn to become a great manager, develop the discipline of planning for failure. By doing so you are less likely to encounter it.

Written by Michael

Michael Douglas has held senior positions in sales, marketing and general management since 1980, and spent 20 years at Sun Microsystems, most recently as VP, Global Marketing. His experience includes start-ups, mid-market and enterprises. He's currently VP Enterprise Go-to-Market for NVIDIA.

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