A CEO Role Model for Smart Failing

It’s very refreshing – and also very rare – to come across a CEO who is willing to talk about his company’s failures in public in a forthright manner. Most would rather just forget about flops and move on without ever publicly acknowledging the failure, never mind the reasons why things didn’t turn out as hoped. Some, when pressed, give disingenuous responses, such as “The market just wasn’t ready yet for our great new thing” – implying that it is those stupid consumers’ fault for not recognizing a genius idea when they see it.

That’s why I found this article, entitled “Identify and Learn from Mistakes,” by Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, so refreshing. Branson writes candidly about two new product initiatives that went seriously astray, Virgin Coke and a Virgin credit card introduced by Virgin Group’s financial services arm, Virgin Money. With Virgin Coke, he readily acknowledges that his company seriously underestimated what it would take to loosen the grip Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have on the cola market. And with Virgin Money, he talks about the lessons they learned that will make their current attempt to re-enter that market stronger and more likely to succeed.

Taking away lessons from failure isn’t possible unless the failure is acknowledged in the first place. Branson sets a fine example of how it should be done by the person at the very top of the organization. If only he were more the rule than the exception when it comes to CEOs.