At my company we've been talking about how web startups, especially those in Sydney and Australia need to be more accepting and proud of their failures.

So I tweeted that it's good to celebrate failure.

A guy I don't know but who obviously cares about the subject tweeted back;

http://twitter.com/surfnturf/status/1225117808

@liubinskas ref:su fail disagree su failure sux its acceptance breeds more failure. Best to build a culture of success wo/fear of failure

This is an important subject and there is no right answer.

And since Twitter is a bad place to discuss this. So I brought it into Tangler.
 

I agree that failure is not awesome and you can't build a business on it by itself. But your attitude to failure is important;

1. Is it ok to fail in your company? If it is, it means it's ok to try and if it's ok to try then you'll get leaps of improvements, innovations and also care about fixing problems.
2. When you fail, do you learn from it? If you don't or if you give up, then you are a fail failure.
3. Are you failing in order to succeed? If you are just failing, then you're lacking direction. That's not a failure fail, that's a leadership fail.

What about a culture of success? Is that perfect?

1. A culture of success can lead you to try harder, think bigger, differently, etc.
2. Pressure to succeed stifles creativity and innovation.
3. Success can breed complacency. Stay number one by training like you're number 10.
4. Success can lack substance. You might be aiming at the wrong goals, or you might change the goals so you make sure you succeed but you are not really.

I don't understand how "Pressure to succeed stifles creativity and innovation."

Pressure to succeed can also bring out the creativity and innovation. In what context does it stifle it?

Success can lack substance. You might be aiming at the wrong goals, or you might change the goals so you make sure you succeed but you are not really.

It might be argued that the wrong goals, or changing the goals isn't success 

If you have to succeed, then you won't try too hard otherwise you might fail. You will set goals that are so low they will move you no where.

Yes - wrong goals and changing goals ISNT success. That was a negative point.

If you have to succeed, then you won't try too hard otherwise you might fail. You will set goals that are so low they will move you no where.

So that isn't a factor of failing, but a factor of the attitude towards failure.

I tend to agree with surfnturf. What we need is an attitude, within companies and within the community, to accept failure, learn from it and move on.

"its not glory grace nor gear, nor easy meat and drink,

but bitter pinch of pain and fear that makes creation think..."

Rudyard Kipling

The lower the cost of failure the higher the price of success.  If you make it okay to fail then, well, its okay to fail. If you are a start-up flush with cash you tend to fail more often.  If you are a start-up with little cash you tend to fail less, I think its a matter of survival.  As a manager I reward success and punish failure in this way: I set goals and monitor performance; at the end of the year I let the bottom 10% go with the aim of adding to the top 10% on the next hire.  Top performers know that they need others to achieve thus they pull the lower performers up.  Lower performers want to achieve else they lose out on working with a bunch of success minded winners.

I think it boils down to resources, passion and vision, in short culture.  Passion and vision heighten when resources are scarce ("easy meat and drink").  Throughout my career the most successful start-ups were the ones with less cash.  The most successful was one I started with $1000.  The least successful was the one that raised $500 million in seed money.

Pressure to succeed leads to conservative decisions and less risk taking; that is how it stifles creativity and innovation.  If you know you will be called to carpet if you fail, you will think twice about doing something differently.  To put it another way, "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM."

Looks to me like it boils down (once again) to the culture the leadership sets.

If you can reliably make the distinction between "I tried this thing that could have been a success, but it went down the pan" and "I didn't try, we failed" (or failure due to pure incompetence for that matter) then the way ahead becomes clear...

In the scientific world, they call it experimentation.  In the business world they call it failure.

Unless of course you do some science and the explosion destroys your entire lab and a good part of the surrounding area. That's generally viewed as a failed experiment. Or at the least, a failure of safety protocol.

Fair point...

so was the LHC a failure or success? I mean, they didn't get any experimenting done which suggests failure, but they didn't obliterate the universe which suggests a success.

I think the official line is that "it is a success in waiting"

ah..so they've deferred failure til a later date...

and then deferred it again

LOL just like the Large Hadron Collider...

Oops... I just read the last 3 posts in order of Dek, Sir M, and AD, and then posted that.. and then realised thats what you were actually talking about, courtesy of Sir M...

*note to self.. read down the page*

HAHAHAHAHA

hahaha

aaah...the first laugh of the morning....thanks morgan