A Good Word about Failure
General George S. Patton summed up most Americans' feelings about winning and losing in his famous speech to his troops during World War II: "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. The very thought of losing is hateful."
Unfortunately, such distaste for losing doesn't generate heroic tactics as often as timid ones. With the emphasis on not losing rather than on winning, leaders often elect to follow a seemingly safer, less risky course and invite disaster by their defensive posture. American business history has had hundreds, even thousands, of cases of companies that were once innovative, aggressive, and highly successful, but stagnated as they matured while "dancing with the gal who brung them".
No contemporary company illustrates this better than IBM. It had to be brought kicking and screaming into the personal computer business through the spectacular successes of other companies. But it never grasped the little desktop computer's full significance. IBM even gave away the MS-DOS software to Bill Gates while continuing to pour effort, money, and people into the mainframe business that accounted for more than half its revenues.
Most people will see the main problem at IBM as neglectful, visionless leadership. That is partly right, but an even more important reason for its unprecedented earnings drop is that it hadn't had any grand product failures over the past 20 years. Its once-envied drive for innovation stalled as managers began to think more about not failing than about the excitement and profitability a good idea or new product might bring.
When business begins to plunge, most companies resort to trench warfare and start competing on the basis of price alone. Rather than remaining competitive through their product innovation or specialized marketplace knowledge, these companies begin to slash prices while simultaneously cutting overhead (read: firing people). Such strategies almost always backfire, and in the process companies lose a good part of their most important resource--people they have carefully nurtured who can come up with the innovations they need to once again be competitive. At this point it might be instructive to remember that people have ideas; machines don't.
Paul Ehrlich transformed medicine and civilization with the discovery of the first antimicrobial drug, Salvarsan, which he first named simply "606". That name wasn't catchy, but it bore testimony to the 605 spectacular failures that preceded it. Progress in business and science is never a straight line, but a zig-zag course of detours and blind alleys.
Ted Levitt of the Harvard Business School summed it up succinctly: "Experience comes from what we have done. Wisdom comes from what we have done badly." I can certainly identify with that. Nothing dismays me more or instructs me better than my colossal failures. But if we are to believe Tom Peters, failure, more than a string of uninterrupted victories, guarantees the vitality that resists stagnation, professional boredom, and burnout.
No less a savant than F.A. Hayek, the Nobel economics laureate, made failure a cornerstone of his economic theories. He understood that we move forward only by many trials and many errors. Denying that error plays an important part in our economic and social evolution results in stagnated societies like those we now see all over Eastern Europe. In fact, misunderstanding the role of economic failure is the biggest political obstacle to achieving free-market prosperity in former socialist countries.
Orthodontists are no different from business people or political systems in this regard. We don't voluntarily display our failures, much less celebrate them. A study club I belong to once encouraged its members to bring some failed treatments, since we all agreed we could learn more from our failures than the near-perfect cases we usually showed. However, from that pitifully meager display of models, we all got the idea that the only failures orthodontists ever had were small rotations of lower incisors.
As editor of JCO, I can never recall receiving an article describing and illustrating a failed treatment with an accompanying remedy for the failure. Without a doubt, such cases would hold much more instruction than the flawless ones we usually receive. Orthodontists may intellectually endorse the idea of failure's important role in corporate and personal progress, but we don't seem quite ready to embrace it by sharing our worst errors of judgment and skill and risking peer ridicule or, even worse, professional pity.
Failure serves several functions. First, it provides an antidote for professional hubris and reminds us rather forcefully that we, like others, are flawed and incomplete and could use some improvement. It also provides the emotional stimulus needed to start us in a new direction; it forces us to re-evaluate our knowledge, beliefs, and experience and discover errors of fact that may cripple us. Finally, failure confirms our God-given optimism that keeps reminding us there must be a better way. Alfred Perlman's counsel is certainly appropriate: "After you've done a thing for two years, you should look at it carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. After 10 years, throw it away and start all over."
My assistants always dread my return from professional meetings because they've learned to anticipate changing techniques and totally disrupting our ordinary routines. Only a few of the ideas I gather have lasting merit and become part of our office culture, but the value of those few good ideas more than compensates for the numerous, discarded fiascoes.
Hardly any of the recent Class II therapies published in JCO, such as the Jones Jig, the Jasper Jumper, the Hilgers Pendulum appliance, and the Herbst appliances, sprang forth unaided from the fertile minds of their inventors. Rather, they evolved only after frustration with the classical techniques each of these practitioners had previously learned. With perfect patients, the development of alternative treatments would have been unnecessary, but this is an imperfect world and the ability to respond quickly and creatively to threatening defeat is mandatory for even a measure of success.
In this issue of JCO, Ed Sullivan talks about a system for identifying and remedying problems early in treatment to avoid the outright failures that problem patients can become. Just about everyone can benefit from his suggestions, but I guarantee you that his fail-safe methods didn't develop without several frustrating experiences that finally spurred him to a remedial counterattack.
So rather than kicking yourself emotionally the next time you buy an expensive piece of equipment that never performs up to the salesperson's description, congratulate yourself for exercising a liberating spirit of boldness. And the next time a new employee repudiates your best judgment and training by not learning, forget the recriminations and celebrate the lessons learned. If you aren't having experiences like this, you're a sitting duck for economic and professional disaster.
Life seems designed to have more disappointments than victories, or as Damon Runyon said, "Life is five to three against." Yet even with odds that bad, progress occurs, and that's worth celebrating. I think the French novelist, Colette, had it about right in the advice to her daughter: "You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm."