Despite the noise from the success preachers around this time of year; no amount of positive thinking, attraction techniques or charging onward in blind faith would have helped Sir Clive sell his C5 electric vehicle in 1985.

Like the C5 some things in our service businesses are dead ducks, we just don’t know it yet! Others are slow starting winners. The difficulty we share with Sir Clive of course is knowing the difference.

Thing is, the closer our idea of reality is to how things actually are then the better we are able to make the right decisions. Don’t get me wrong, success is our best teacher in this but trying and failing is much better than doing nothing because when we try and fail at least we have tested reality and learnt something.

Every business failure give us this benefit of testing reality- you have sharpened your sense of reality up, you have estimated your mark, you have become slightly better at the game.

Whilst all failures give us this same benefit, failure costs can be huge so its the expensive failures we need to avoid.

A cheap and quick failure is in reality a real blessing because failing cheaply and quickly (and often) is the practice we need to master our game.

Distinguishing between the degrees of failure intellectually by their cost and not emotionally gives us the practice time to get good enough at our game. Good enough to recognise and pursue the expensive winner when it appears and good enough to see it through to completion when the going gets tough.

“the problem is never apart from the answer, the problem IS the answer, understanding the problem dissolves the problem.”
Bruce Lee