The Wisdom Of Deliberate Mistakes

If you're like most managers, you frown on mistakes - yours and others. Why? Your organization demands optimum performance. And it rewards you based on the height of your successes, not the depth of your learning from failures. Yet mistakes - done right - accelerate learning, thereby enhancing competitiveness for your firm. Consider advertising pioneer David Ogilvy. In ad tests, Ogilvy deliberately included "Mistake" ads he thought wouldn't work. Most of these "Losers" bombed as expected. But a few succeeded - and they pointed to innovative approaches in the fickle world of advertising. Mistakes are costly, so how do you extract profitable learning from them?