Are we Learning from our mistakes 

Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft

Gates had one of his infamous “Think Weeks” where we locked himself in a retreat for 1 – 2 weeks — no telephone calls, no email – with nothing but time to think.

He realized he totally missed the Internet opportunity.

The next day, he issued a company wide memo that pretty much said EVERY project and product in Microsoft had to incorporate the Internet.

Warren Buffett, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

"I started out to buy Fannie Mae, for example, back in 1988 or so. And for what reason or another, I just didn't follow through. We'd have made about a billion and a half dollars on that. I think we made about 5 million. Those are the mistakes you don't see. The mistakes you don't see are way bigger."

From a video on the WarrenBuffettBlog YouTube channel

Richard Branson, founder and chairman, Virgin Group

"I find it very difficult to think of mistakes; not that I don't make any but because I was brought up to look only at the good things in life ... As for what lost the most money, probably Virgin Cola. It is still No 1 in Bangladesh though."

From a 2006 interview with the Guardian

Mickey Drexler, CEO, J. Crew

Financial Times reporter Vanessa Friedman sat down with Mickey Drexler for lunch in 2011:

"After our lunch [Mickey Drexler] had been thinking about the mistake question and reading the news about Gap closing stores in America to expand in China. That had made him realize what his mistake was. So, though he was in California, he called to tell me.

The mistake happened when he was at Gap and the brand was undergoing a “rapid expansion”, increasing its real estate holdings by almost 70 percent, a move he opposed but ultimately oversaw. Now he says, “I didn’t fight the board hard enough to stop it. I should have fought harder.” He isn’t blaming them for a bad decision; he’s blaming himself for caving in."

Reid Hoffman, co-founder, LinkedIn

"Probably the biggest mistake that I made personally is I knew early on that I wanted to go into start-ups and creating the kind of software that could help change the lives of millions of people.

And basically what I did is I kind of went, okay, I need a set of titles and I need a checklist of skills, and I ran through all that, and that wasn’t a useless thing, but no one gave me the right advice for doing this — is that actually your network, in essentially, is your career. ... If I had had that realization, I probably would have gone and begged my way into a job at Netscape."

From a 2009 interview with Big Think

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO, BlackRock

Bloomberg TV

“Back when I was leaving my job at First Boston, I was going through a lot of turmoil about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to do it. It was pretty clear to me that the buyers of securities didn’t understand the risk of the securities that they were buying ... so I came up with this idea that we should start an investment management firm that focused on risk management.”

Brilliant idea, right? Unfortunately, Fink “didn’t have the confidence” in himself to start the company. “It was huge self-doubt,” he said pausing for emphasis. “So I went to see Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson at Blackstone and they loved the idea,” because who wouldn’t? Wall Street had never seen anything so awesome. “Within 3 days we came to terms of a partnership. They gave us a 5 million line of credit to start this company and I in turn gave them 40% stake. They believed in me more than I believed in myself. They made the right investment decision. I didn’t.”

From a 2010 interview with Dealbreaker

Carol Bartz, former president and CEO, Yahoo!

"I've made a lot of mistakes. There isn't one that stands out. I make mistakes every week, every month, every year.

"I would say. . . I actually wish I had started having children younger. I was 40 when I had my daughter. And I wish I would have started that younger so I could have had more children."

From an interview with theTech Museum

Raul Vazquez, EVP global e-commerce, Walmart

"When I was an engineer at Baxter, we developed a new cap for an iodine bottle that would save hundreds of thousands of dollars. We did a ton of analysis and were confident that the caps would work, so we decided to make the entire change at once.

Then, we started hearing reports that the caps were leaking — it was very stressful. I learned that it can pay to be patient, and do things in a planned, rolled-out fashion."

From a 2009 interview with Fortune

Jennifer Hyman, CEO, Rent The Runway

Screengrab from BusinessOnMain on YouTube

"One issue was on technology. We always knew we wanted to have an in-house technology team but we also wanted to get the site up very quickly and in order to do so we used an outsourced team based in India. This meant that our site got up in time for the holiday season, which was great in terms of sales, but at the end of the day, there was a lot of work to clean up on the back end of our site. Another mistake is that I wish we had ordered more inventory. We never predicted this much demand, which is a good problem to have."

We never predicted this much demand, which is a good problem to have."

From an April 2010 interview with Kembrel.com.

Jamie Dimon, chairman, president and CEO, JPMorgan Chase

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

“My biggest mistake, probably of my whole career, was not closing down our mortgage broker business sooner."

From a 2009 interview with Bloomberg

Jack Welch, former CEO, GE

"My biggest mistake by far was not moving faster. Pulling off a Band-Aid one hair at a time hurts a lot more than a sudden yank. Of course you want to avoid breaking things or stretching the organization too far — but generally human nature holds you back. You want to be liked, to be thought of as reasonable. So you don't move as fast as you should. Besides hurting more, it costs you competitiveness. EVERYTHING should have been done in half the time.

When you're running an institution like this you're always scared at first. You're afraid you'll break it. People don't think about leaders this way, but it's true. Everyone who's running something goes home at night and wrestles with the same fear: Am I going to be the one who blows this place up? In retrospect, I was too cautious and too timid. I wanted too many constituencies on board. Timidity causes mistakes."

From the 1993 book "Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will" by Noel M. Tichy and Stratford Sherman

Lee Iacocca, former chairman, Chrysler

“I think it was the biggest mistake of my business career,” he says of hiring Bob Eaton from General Motors Corp. in 1992 as Chrysler's president and chairman-in-waiting.

Eaton was chairman of GM Europe at the time. “I got the wrong guy. I wanted Hughes or Smith (Louis Hughes or John F. Smith Jr., then both high-ranking GM executives).” Iacocca blames himself. “I didn't do my due diligence,” he says. “Eaton was always a staff guy. He never ran a division.”

From a 2003 interview with WardsAuto

Alexis Maybank, co-founder, Gilt Groupe

"When you scale so quickly, you inevitably make some hiring mistakes. And every part of your business is going to break at one point or another. In 2009, we launched a business that took a more mass market approach to brands. But our customers wanted luxury."

From an interview with Business Insider

Ted Turner, founder, TBS and CNN

"The biggest mistake I ever made, really, and Malone told me not to do it, was bringing Time Warner into the consortium of cable operators for that five hundred and something million that we needed to pay down the debt that we incurred when we acquired MGM. I shouldn’t have done that, I shouldn’t have let them have the veto, but I was tired too. That was the other thing. I was tired. After thirty years of working 18 hours a day, five or six days a week with one crisis after another for twenty years, I was tired. And when you’re tired you don’t make the best decisions and I knew we were selling out. I didn’t know what the consequences would be.

"I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would actually lose my job. I just couldn’t believe that, but it happened. It happened. So my advice to any younger people in the room is be real careful who you sell to if you sell your company. Be prepared to leave it."

From a 2001 interview with the Hauser Project

Marc Andreessen, co-founder, Netscape

Bloomberg Television

"The biggest one that we're still kicking ourselves over is probably Square. I think Jack Dorsey is one of the most phenomenal founder-CEO's in the industry and we probably made a huge mistake on that one when he first came in.

"We overthought the deal and we probably just should have said Jack Dorsey, check. And write the check. That's probably the big one."

From a 2012 interview with Bloomberg TV

 

Rio Caraeff, president and CEO, VEVO

"When I was much younger, I was traveling on a business trip when a close family member passed away at home and I decided to not travel home for the funeral as I had made the decision that my work was more important at the time. I look back in regret at that decision frequently and have now since realized that family does come first."

From a 2009 interview with Fortune

Max Levchin, co-founder, PayPal

"I am not much given to regret, so I puzzled over this one a while. Should have taken much more statistics in college, I think."

From a 2009 interview with Fortune

Mark Cuban, chairman, HDNet

Business Insider / Matthew Lynley

"Professionally, it was not aggressively going after the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) in negotiations for the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Another mistake was not applying for patents. I personally think patents are for the most part worthless and don’t protect your business, but at Broadcast.com we did so many original and unique things in streaming, multicasting, uploading of content that now that the climate of litigation has changed, that portfolio would be worth a ton of money."

From a 2011 interview with TechCrunch.

Thomas Stemberg, co-founder and former CEO, Staples

"About two years later than our competitors, we also began to deliver. Probably over time that mistake cost us $100 million in sales and $10 million in profits. Today our delivery business represents $2.5 billion.

That was one of the few times in our corporate history when we made a decision based on cost factors as opposed to customer preferences. It reminded me once again that whenever you plan your business, you're way better off starting first with the customer and moving next to cost rather than the other way around."

From a 2001 interview with Inc.

Willie Walsh, CEO, International Airlines Group

"Haven’t made it yet! People shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes as long as they learn from them and don’t make the same mistake twice."

From a 2011 interview with Marketing Society

Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix

Hastings said his biggest mistake was trying to phase out Netflix's once-trailblazing DVD-by-mail rental service more quickly than millions of customers wanted. He and his management team concluded a few years ago DVDs that are destined to obsolescence, so they began concentrating on streaming video over high-speed Internet connections.

Ending Netflix's practice of bundling DVD-by-mail and Internet streaming subscriptions together so people are forced to buy them separately was meant to push more households into weaning themselves from discs. Customers instead saw the move as a betrayal by a greedy company and canceled their subscriptions in droves.

From a 2011 interview with the Associated Press

Alan Mulally, president and CEO, Ford

When asked what his biggest mistake on the job has been, [Mulally] falls uncharacteristically silent, then says: “I don’t have a good answer for that.”

From a 2011 interview with the Financial Times

Recruiting ,Training and Retaining The Generation Y

Much has been heard about the generational differences in the workplace. These differences could not be more evident than in the issue of training. Who me as a member of Generation Y, I can personally attest to the difficulty in creating a training program that addresses the needs and demands of today.

Who is Gen Y?

Generation Y, are employees born between 1980 and 2000.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, by 2014 Generation Y will make up close to 50 percent of the 162 million total work force. With these employees quickly becoming a large part of the workforce, understanding how they function and how they learn is imperative in order for these new workers to reach their full potential.  Appreciating and adapting to the way this generation learns is the key to embracing and valuing this generation.

How do they learn?

Training is and can be complex as their learning style greatly differs from our precursors of Gen X. This is mostly due to the vastly diverse worlds in which the two age bands were raised.  Being exposed to the most advanced machinery and being not only aware of but very reliant on those technologies has caused workers of Gen Y to necessitate advanced technologies in the workplace and in their training. Otherwise they will definitely loose.

Generation Y is flooding into the workplace in unprecedented numbers and is reshaping the foundations by which many organizations were built, managed and lead. This disruption is leading to many questions, concerns and points of contention among the business community as a whole.

How can we get work done out of them .

Let’s re-visit Eric Chester’s principles and add one more:

1.       Let them know that what they do matters.  When was the last time that you shared your guest service scores with your employees or read the good comment cards at a meeting of your employees? (When was the last time you had all-employee or departmental meetings?)

2.       Tell them the truth.  When did you last indicate exactly what was going on – as in we have half the house checking out today, it is going to be stressful but we can do it.

3.       Explain why you are asking them to do it.  When did you last explain to your employees that an athletic group might be difficult to serve but that it is a slow period and they account for revenue that helps the hotel achieve its budget?

4.       Learn their language.  When was the last time that you took the time to sit down and communicate to your employees, one on one, about what they did on their day off – the things they like to do?

5.       Be on the look out for rewarding opportunities.  When did you last hear or see an employee providing good customer service and praise them on the spot for a situation well handled?

6.       Praise them in public.  How often do you use an employee meeting to praise a housekeeper on bringing a lost item to your attention so you could contact the guest?

7.       Make the workplace fun.  Have you ever brought bubbles bottles to work and taken them to housekeeping just to be silly and play before they pick up their carts?  This works with any generation in any language.    

 

8.       Model behavior.  When did you last work the desk during a difficult check-in and show your associates the correct way to handle a difficult guest?  Do you say negative things about guests within earshot of your employees?

9.       Give them the tools to do the job.  Why is it that our front desk, housekeeping and maintenance training is focused upon technical skills but includes virtually no training on the soft skills of customer service?  Don’t assume that they have empathy for the guest, know how to handle a difficult customer situation or understand what you expect in terms of servicing the guest if you don’t communicate the expectations and give them concrete skills to turn basic customer service into good or exceptional customer service.

Understand and appreciate the challenges of Generation Y , in order to recruit and retain this new wave of potential employees. But try applying rules to all of the employees.

It is the best practice. 

 Subhan Sharif