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  Culture of Failure or Success?

  "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.

  Posted 18 Feb 09 in General Conversation