Quotes About Failure

Probably the most daunting challenge in delivering growth is that if you fail once to deliver it, the odds that you ever will be able to deliver in the future are very low.

Incompetence, bureaucracy, arrogance, tired executive blood, poor planning, and short-term investment horizons obviously have played leading roles in toppling many companies.

In a modular world, supplying a component or assembling outsourced components are both appropriate "solutions." In the interdependent world of inadequate functionality, attempting to provide one piece of the system doesn't solve anybody's problem. Knowing this, we can predict the failure or success of a growth business based on managers' choices to compete with modular architectures when the circumstances mandate interdependence, and vice versa.

Innovation, in a very real sense, exists in a "pre–quality revolution" state.1 Managers accept flaws, missteps, and failure as an inevitable part of the process of innovation. They have become so accustomed to putting Band-Aids on their uneven innovation success that too often they give no real thought to what's causing it in the first place.

One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.

Most schools don't do this job well at all. Instead, most children feel failure when they go to class. They could also hire athletics to do the job. For a few, sports do the job well. But for the less gifted, athletics makes students feel failure, too. So they hire electronic games to feel successful. And yet for many, even such games yield failure. So they hire friends who have feelings of failure, too—and engage in drugs and other things to feel successful.

Managers who don't bet the farm on their first idea, who leave room to try, fail, learn quickly, and try again, can succeed at developing the understanding of customers, markets, and technology needed to commercialize disruptive innovations.

Why do well-managed companies fail? He concludes that they often fail because the very management practices that have allowed them to become industry leaders also make it extremely difficult for them to develop the disruptive technologies that ultimately steal away their markets.

Tell them that if they're not occasionally failing, then they're not aiming high enough.

We know that people who fail in their jobs often do so not because they are inherently incapable of succeeding, but because their experiences have not prepared them for the challenges of that job—in other words, they've taken the wrong "courses.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing." After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I've come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do?

They planned to fail early and inexpensively in the search for the market for a disruptive technology. They found that their markets generally coalesced through an iterative process of trial, learning, and trial again.

Companies stumble for many reasons, of course, among them bureaucracy, arrogance, tired executive blood, poor planning, short-term investment horizons, inadequate skills and resources, and just plain bad luck.

In America," I said, "if you can't pay back a loan, you declare bankruptcy and that's the end of it.

They would fail. We would always fail. We weren't built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn't change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we traveled…

Mohammad, left a lot to be desired.

While we avoid taking credit for success, women leap at the opportunity to take responsibility for failure. Men tend to externalize the reasons for their failure, putting it off on something or someone else. Not so women, who absorb blame as if they were born to be societys doormats. (Some women like to speak of their willingness to take blame as if it were a form of altruism. It isn't. Women take the blame because they find it scary to confront those who are actually culpable of wrongdoing.)

Look at your failed life, Joffrey: It is standing right in front of you

Failing at everything except his fear of success. Passed over yet again. Archivist of slights. Everyone else's good fortune is food out of your mouth or a hug you never got from someone who should have loved you better. Halfway through lunch she realized glass ceilings allow glimpses up into another person's hell.

I wrote two five-page short stories, two five-page epics, to audition for my college's creative writing workshops, and was turned down both times. I was crushed, but in retrospect it was perfect training for being a writer. You can keep 'write what you know'—for a true apprenticeship, internalize the world's indifference and accept rejection and failure into your very soul.

There was something of the beautiful failure about her.

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max's Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn't get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another. if only we had been so careful with ourselves.

Failure is good. Failure admits ambition. Failure admits bravery. Failure admits daring. It requires courage to fail and even more courage to know that you're going to fail...And in the end there's only one real failure - and that's the failure to be able to fail. Having tried is the true bravery.

Pity is such a shabby thing. I can torment myself with wanting to feel pity, and yet I don't succeed.