Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015: Failure IS an Option
Successful companies are the ones that let—no, encourage—their employees to fail. It’s what Pixar does, and there’s no arguing the successes it’s had.
October 7, 2015
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Successful companies are the ones that let—no, encourage—their employees to fail. It’s what Pixar does, and there’s no arguing the successes it’s had.
Such was the tenor of the conversation between Bob Safian, editor in chief of FastCompany, and Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, during the Wednesday keynote discussion at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015.
“There is a real palpable danger around failure,” Catmull said. “It’s impossible for people to emotionally separate both the negative and the positive meanings of failure.”
Positive failure enables people to view the experience with more perspective, ultimately regarding it as a lesson learned. But negative failure carries baggage—feelings of inadequacy, embarrassment, depression—that does more harm than good.
“Failure is a necessary consequence of doing something new,” he said. “If you’re able to realize [positive failure and negative failure] are two different things, you can separate the emotion from it. They have both meanings, and if people are not aware of them they will fall back to the negative meaning. But if you allow them to fail, you turn it into a learning experience.”
Companies, he said, too often focus on failure as a negative, which leads to an unhappy and ultimately less productive workforce.