Want A Strong Company? Find People Who Have Failed
By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL
“When I chaired Bradley Pharmaceuticals, they were a commercial–product-driven company,” states Leonard Jacob, M.D., Ph.D. “But they weren’t executing to create the shareholder value people expected from them.” According to Jacob, it is situations like this when people within a company become a driving force as to its success or failure.
Communicating Failure Is Key For Small Companies
Jacob is the former chairman of the board of Bradley Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Nycomed in 2007. Today, he is the chairman of the board for Antares Pharma (NASDAQ: ATRS), a developer and marketer of parenteral pharmaceuticals. He says you can learn a lot from failure, especially in how people not only deal with it, but communicate it to teach others. When it comes to evaluating people within an organization, Jacob looks at some of the typical attributes such as intelligence, educational background, training, and experience. He even tries to uncover the intangible of people being lucky. But unlike many executives who focus on successes, Jacob is looking for people who may have also experienced failures. “You have to be able to integrate those failures to make them successes going forward,” he shares. “A lot of people’s egos will only allow them to remember the successes, which leads to problems.” In a SMB , the ability to conduct onsite training is often limited. “You don’t have the luxury of big-company financial or human resources to teach from the ground up,” he explains.
Put Your Ego Aside
Jacob doesn’t want to have all his employees to have to learn lessons the hard way. In his model, he seeks leaders and individuals who have experienced failures, and are not so egocentric they can’t communicate these to other members of the team who can benefit from the wisdom. This teaching may come from top down, bottom up, or laterally. When evaluating people, Jacob believes you can learn a great deal from evaluating their failures as well as their successes. If you find someone who doesn’t have any failures, proceed with caution.
A recent article on the under 30 CEO website highlights five lessons you can learn from failure.
- Explore strategies that work
- Know when to cut your losses
- Fine-tune your instincts
- Start fresh
- Evolve along-side your business
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon isn’t afraid to communicate lessons he has learned from failure, and neither should you. One of the greatest basketball players of all time, Michael Jordan is credited with saying, “I’ve failed over and over and over in my life, and that is why I succeed.” If you want to build a successful company, find people who have not only failed, but are good at communicating their failure to others, as well as the lessons learned.