This morning Tarun Khanna spoke to our class. Tarun’s focus is on entrepreneurs and emerging markets. He’s the author of Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures-and Yours and Winning in Emerging Markets: A Road Map for Strategy and Execution. There were a lot of great ideas I still need to digest further but one quick thought was from an experience he shared when visiting the appliance manufacturer Haier’s show room in China. 
Haier specializes in niche customization of their products. In the US they created a laptop table refrigerator after discovering that because dorm rooms are so small, students were using their mini-fridge’s to set their laptops on. In China they adapted their washing machines to wash clothes, beats and peanuts because that’s what people in the rural areas were using them for.
As Tarun toured the 3 story showroom, each model of washing machine, refrigerator or whatever had a picture of the person who thought of the idea and why it failed. Yes, that’s right I said why it failed. A 3 story building dedicated to all of their failures. Awesome.
A lot of cultures talk about celebrating failures but do they really? Do they celebrate, learn from and share that learning not just across the company but outside the company? I work at an agency and every agency out there has a portfolio site. What if agencies had portfolio sites of failures and what they learned from them. Now we could probably never get clients to agree to it but I think it would be cool.
Would you think less of an agency that showed you their worst failures and what they learned from them?
Do you celebrate your failures? How?
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