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E. Why Leaders Dont Learn From Success
E. Why Leaders Dont Learn From Success
Failure: Understand It
Why Leaders
Don’t Learn
From Success
Failures get a postmortem. Why not triumphs?
by Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ritu Gupta,Prof. Srinivasan Tatachari,Prof. Shruthi Mayur and Prof.Pratyush Banerjee's Individual and Group Dynamics 21.06.2019 at
Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Jun 2019 to Dec 2019.
Failure Understand It
Why Leaders
Don’t Learn
From Success
Failures get a
postmortem.
Why not triumphs?
by Francesca Gino
and Gary P. Pisano
2 Harvard
This document is authorized use onlyApril
BusinessforReview 2011
in Prof. Ritu Gupta,Prof. Srinivasan Tatachari,Prof. Shruthi Mayur and Prof.Pratyush Banerjee's Individual and Group Dynamics 21.06.2019 at
Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Jun 2019 to Dec 2019.
For article reprints call 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500, or visit hbr.org
April
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ritu Gupta,Prof. Srinivasan Tatachari,Prof. Shruthi Mayur and Prof.Pratyush Banerjee's 2011 Harvard
Individual Business
and Group Review
Dynamics 3
21.06.2019 at
Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Jun 2019 to Dec 2019.
UNDERSTANDING FAILURE why leaders don’t learn from success
Focus on Failure
I was considered by
software industries and performed experiments in
all my masters and the laboratory and in executive education classes.
my father a very Again and again, we saw the same phenomenon. Ul-
timately, we recognized that there was a common
ordinary boy, rather cause: the three impediments to learning.
below the common
Making Dangerous Attribution Errors
standard of intellect.” In racing, many interdependent factors affect out-
perceived failure caused it to start of Discounting Easy Successes.”) In business this bias
can affect many critical decisions, including whom
again. After its disappointing third- to hire or promote, which products to launch, and
place finish, the team reexamined which practices to spread throughout the organiza-
its approach to developing bikes. tion. Someone who has led a thriving business in a
highly profitable industry, for instance, often ap-
4 Harvard
This document is authorized use onlyApril
BusinessforReview 2011
in Prof. Ritu Gupta,Prof. Srinivasan Tatachari,Prof. Shruthi Mayur and Prof.Pratyush Banerjee's Individual and Group Dynamics 21.06.2019 at
Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Jun 2019 to Dec 2019.
For article reprints call 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500, or visit hbr.org
Idea in Brief
Virtually all leaders recognize the 1 When we succeed, we tend Recognizing that these impedi-
need to learn from failures, but to give too much credit to our ments exist is a big first step in
amazingly few try to understand talents and our model or strategy overcoming them. Some basic
the true causes of their firms’ and too little to external factors practices also can help: system-
successes, which helps explain and luck. atic after-action reviews, tools
why great companies fall into like Six Sigma, and experiments
2 Success can make us so over-
decline. that test assumptions about
confident that we believe we
The reality is, success can what is needed to achieve great
don’t need to change anything.
breed failure by hindering performance.
learning at both individual and 3 We have a tendency not to
organizational levels, in three investigate the causes of good
interrelated ways: performance.
pears more attractive than a similarly skilled or even 2008, Greenspan acknowledged his own shock that
more qualified candidate who has struggled to lead the models had failed. And, of course, he was not the
a firm in an industry in which most companies are only one who succumbed to excessive confidence.
failing. During the housing boom, many leaders of large and
We repeatedly observed pharmaceutical com- small banks and managers of mortgage lending, in-
panies making these kinds of attribution errors in vesting, and trading operations stopped examining
choosing which drugs to kill or push forward. They the key assumptions that underpinned the models
selected drugs whose initial tests were successful they were using.
as potential winners and allocated more money to Success can make us believe that we are better
them for further testing and development. But often decision makers than we actually are. In a simple
managers assumed a success was due to the unique recent study of managers in various industries, we
abilities of their in-house scientists and didn’t con- asked members of one group to recall a time when
sider whether it could be due to greater general they experienced a success in their professional lives
knowledge in that particular scientific area, which and members of a second group to recall a time when
competitors might have, too. they experienced a failure. We then asked people in
In addition, we found that long lead times can both groups to engage in a series of decision-making The Challenge of
Discounting Easy
blind executives to problems with their current tasks and embedded measures in the exercise that Successes
strategies. Again, consider the pharmaceutical in- allowed us to assess their confidence, optimism, and
dustry. Because it takes 12 years, on average, to get a risk-seeking behavior. Compared with the execu- The inability of people
to adjust for degree of
drug from discovery to market, a company’s perfor- tives who’d recalled a failure, those who’d recalled a difficulty when assessing
mance today has relatively little to do with its most success were much more confident in their abilities, accomplishments was
recent actions and decisions. Yet both managers and made more-optimistic forecasts of their future suc- clearly demonstrated in
a study that one of us,
investors often attribute today’s high performance cess, and were more likely to take bigger bets. These Francesca Gino, conducted
to the company’s current strategy, management, findings are consistent with research examining how with Don Moore of Berkeley
and scientists. success breeds overconfidence in other contexts. and Sam Swift and Zacha-
riah Sharek of Carnegie
(See the sidebar “How Power Causes Us to Ignore Mellon. Students at a U.S.
Falling Prey to the Advice.”) university assumed the role
Overconfidence Bias Overconfidence inspired by past successes can of admissions officers for
an MBA program and were
Without some confidence, we could not make deci- infect whole organizations, causing them to dismiss presented with informa-
sions or tackle any kind of risky endeavor; we would new innovations, dips in customer satisfaction, and tion about candidates’
be constantly second-guessing ourselves. That said, increases in quality problems, and to make overly grade point averages as
well as the average GPA
too much confidence can be a problem, and nothing risky moves. Consider all the companies that grew at their colleges. In their
inflates confidence like success. Take Alan Green- rapidly through acquisitions only to stumble badly decisions, the participants
span, who until the near meltdown of the financial after biting off one too many; the countless banks overweighted applicants’
nominal GPAs and under-
system in 2008 was considered one of the best Fed- that made ever-riskier loans in the past decade, sure weighted the effect of the
eral Reserve chairmen in U.S. history. Afterward, it of their ability to sort good borrowers from bad; and grading norms at different
became apparent that Fed policy makers, led by all the darlings of the business media that had win- schools. In other words,
they didn’t take into ac-
Greenspan, had placed too much faith in their fi- ning formulas but did not try to update or alter their count the ease with which
nancial models. In testimony to Congress in October strategies until it was way too late. grades were earned.
April
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ritu Gupta,Prof. Srinivasan Tatachari,Prof. Shruthi Mayur and Prof.Pratyush Banerjee's 2011 Harvard
Individual Business
and Group Review
Dynamics 5
21.06.2019 at
Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Jun 2019 to Dec 2019.
UNDERSTANDING Failure why leaders don’t learn from success
Failing to Ask Why guide their actions. Your choices about the people
When you’re confronted with failure, it’s natural to you hire, the projects you fund (or terminate), the
ask why disaster struck. Unfortunately, success does features you include in new product designs, and
not trigger such soul-searching. Success is commonly the business strategies you pursue are all influenced
interpreted as evidence not only that your existing by them. Sometimes theories are quite sophisti-
strategy and practices work but also that you have cated and rooted in science or decades of practical
all the knowledge and information you need. Several experience. But in many other cases, they are pretty
studies, as well as our own research, show that most informal—and we may not even be aware that they
people tend to think this way. (See the sidebar “How are swaying our decisions.
Success Makes Us Less Reflective.”) Learning is the process of updating our theories.
We have seen the same pattern in the real world. In some cases personal experience alters them. For
The efforts invested in understanding the causes example, Steve Jobs recounted in a 2005 graduation
of the recent financial crash dwarf the efforts that speech at Stanford University how the inclusion of
were made to understand why things seemed to be multiple typefaces and proportional spacing on the
going so well before. In hospitals, doctors conduct first Macintosh stemmed from the calligraphy course
How Success rigorous “mortality and morbidity reviews” of cases he took after dropping out of college. But members
Makes Us Less that ended badly, but little systematic effort is made of an organization also learn together. Experience
Reflective to understand why patients recover. Even Toyota, with both winners (the iPod) and losers (the Newton)
which built its vaunted production system around has caused Apple, as a company, to update its theo-
In a recent study we
conducted in a controlled vigorous learning, was much better at uncovering ries of what leads to successful products.
laboratory setting, students the causes of its problems than of its success. This From this perspective, learning is all about un-
from U.S. universities were was revealed by its recent recalls, when its leaders derstanding why things happen and why some deci-
asked to work on two
decision-making problems. admitted that their success in pursuing higher sales sions lead to specific outcomes. This understanding
Learning from experience and market share had blinded them to the fact that does not come automatically. We make a conscious
on the first problem could operations had essentially compromised quality to choice to challenge our assumptions and models.
help them perform well on
the second. After submit- achieve growth. And usually, we do so as the result of a failure. This
ting their solutions to the has been true from the time we first tried to walk or
first problem, the partici- A Simple Model of Learning ride a bicycle. We fall down, it hurts, and we try an-
pants were told whether or
not they had succeeded. To avoid the success-breeds-failure trap, you need to other approach. An amazing number of high-ranking
They were then given time understand how experience shapes learning. Learn- executives report that early failures in their careers
to reflect before starting the ing is, of course, a highly complex cognitive and or- taught them lessons that ultimately led to their suc-
second problem. Compared
with the people who failed ganizational process, and numerous models have cess. Failure provides a motivation for organizations
at the first problem, those been developed about it in the academic literature. to learn, too.
who succeeded spent sig- Drawing from those, we present a simplified model But what about success? Success does not dis-
nificantly less time reflecting
on the strategies they’d that highlights the effect that success and failure prove your theory. And if it isn’t broken, why fix it?
used. This had a cost: Those have on learning. Consequently, when we succeed, we just focus on
who succeeded on the first We start with the premise that individuals and applying what we already know to solving problems.
task were more likely to fail
on the second. They had organizations at any point in time hold certain the- We don’t revise our theories or expand our knowl-
neglected to ask why. ories, models, principles, and rules of thumb that edge of how our business works.
6 Harvard
This document Business
is authorized use onlyApril
forReview 2011
in Prof. Ritu Gupta,Prof. Srinivasan Tatachari,Prof. Shruthi Mayur and Prof.Pratyush Banerjee's Individual and Group Dynamics 21.06.2019 at
Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Jun 2019 to Dec 2019.
For article reprints call 800-988-0886 or 617-783-7500, or visit hbr.org
Focus on Failure
SEMANTICS
The word “failure” appears in HBR with regularity,
Does success mean “it isn’t broken”? Not neces-
but the context in which it is used has changed along
with the times.
sarily. The reality is that while a success (or a string of
successes) may mean you’re on the right track, you
EMPLOYEES
can’t assume this to be true without further testing, 2000–2003
experimentation, and reflection. You should use suc- SERVICES Risk
1990–1992
2007–2009
cess to breed more success by understanding it. Con- THE CEO
sider Jobs’s decision to launch the iPhone, learn from 2004–2006
that experience, and apply that knowledge to launch
the iPad. Jobs and others at Apple were undoubtedly
wary of plunging ahead with the iPad first because of
failure
The terms most frequently used with failure,
the failure of Apple’s Newton tablet in the 1990s. In according to semantic clustering analysis
a brilliant move, they recognized that a touchphone
Source Haydn Shaughnessy, Leximancer
would be easier to launch, given the existing smart-
phone market, making it the ideal vehicle for Apple
to learn about and perfect touch devices.
This example points to a better model for learning, cate. In one project we studied, a group responsible
one in which failure and success are on equal footing for developing the software for a complex electronic
and both trigger further investigation that helps us system was so far behind, it risked delaying a stra-
revise our assumptions, models, and theories. tegic launch. By doubling the size of the team and
working 80-hour weeks, the group finished in the
Five Ways to Learn nick of time. The product was a major commercial
How can you avoid the traps we have discussed? hit. Even so, the company wisely conducted a de-
Here are some approaches and strategies that you tailed postproject assessment. While lauding the
and your organization can use. software development team’s dedication, the assess-
Celebrate success but examine it. There is ment highlighted critical problems in its process that
nothing wrong with toasting your success. But if needed to be fixed.
you stop with the clinking of the champagne glasses, Institute systematic project reviews. The
you have missed a huge opportunity. When a win is military holds “after-action reviews” (AARs) of each
achieved, the organization needs to investigate what combat encounter and combat-training exercise, ir-
led to it with the same rigor and scrutiny it might ap- respective of the outcome. As in business, the rea-
ply to understanding the causes of failure. sons for success or failure in combat often are not
Recognize that this may be an uncomfortable clear. AARs are debriefs that, when used properly,
process. You may learn, for instance, that success generate specific recommendations that can be put
was achieved only by happenstance. A biotechnol- to use immediately. Companies can employ the
ogy company we studied, which faced a serious same process, which is relatively straightforward.
shortage of capacity to produce an important new Like sports coaches and players who convene right
product, is a case in point. Just when it appeared after a game to review a team’s performance, AAR
that the firm would not be able to meet demand, its participants meet after an important event or activ-
leaders discovered that a competitor had put a plant ity to discuss four key questions: What did we set out
up for sale—a stroke of luck that allowed the com- to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen?
pany to buy all the capacity it needed. The product What are we going to do next time?
launched and was extremely successful. Instead of Pixar, which has had 11 hit animated films in a
simply rejoicing in their good fortune and moving row (and therefore is an organization that would be
on, the company’s leaders revisited why the intro- very vulnerable to the kinds of traps we have dis-
duction had gone so well. That review highlighted cussed), conducts rigorous reviews of the process
the part luck had played. And when they examined used to make each of its films. In “How Pixar Fos-
why the company had been so vulnerable in the first ters Collective Creativity” (HBR September 2008),
place, they learned that its demand-forecasting and Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, confessed that
capacity-planning processes were broken. people don’t like to do them and would prefer to just
The search for causes of success may also identify celebrate victories and move on. So Pixar employs
factors that may be hard or even undesirable to repli- various methods to ensure that team members don’t
April
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Ritu Gupta,Prof. Srinivasan Tatachari,Prof. Shruthi Mayur and Prof.Pratyush Banerjee's 2011 Harvard
Individual Business
and Group Review
Dynamics 7
21.06.2019 at
Ta Pai Management Institute (Tapmi) from Jun 2019 to Dec 2019.
UNDERSTANDING FAILURE why leaders don’t learn from success hbr.org