Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Failure as an Option - Part 2

The ubiquitous iPod in all its various iterations are now seen as a standard of sorts in terms of what design is all about. Shapes, Forms, Functions...in fact the overall user-experience, whether it is the joy of listening to a well-made product, the coolness at being the owner of of the hippiest gadget on Earth, or simply being spot-on in your decision to buy one when you are making that decision to change your old multimedia player...I think the branding and cultish nature of iPod is something that perhaps very few products can emulate. But whether Apple in itself has been successful in all her previous endeavours is something that I have found a little surprising, because they have not! This article entitled "Learning from Failure: Apple's Most Notorious Flops" from Wired.com is a case in point.

What I can glean from this article, and all the various articles on 'Successes' and 'Failures' are that:

- Success in itself is not necessarily the sum total of previous successes, but a confluence of factors that would result in a success if well-managed
- There is no such thing as a Bad failures, only a stupid one, if one do not learn from it and avoid repeating the same failures
- There are always Successful Failures, those that results in a situation or a person becoming an even better individual as a result of tasting failure (or defeat)

The trick here then is to see to it that whatever adverse outcomes that shall come our way, it must be seen as one that would lead us to a greater degree of sucess. To end, I'd just like to share a story on "Why Failures Can Be Such Success Stories" here at BusinessWeek.com. Enjoy.

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