Failure and the Courage to Risk

What’s so free about free enterprise? We hear an awful lot about business leaders who build successful enterprises, and we love to stress the freedom to succeed that our business system provides. What we often prefer to forget is that a free enterprise system implies the freedom to fail as much as the freedom to succeed. The function of failure and the courage to take risks are keys to effective leadership.

Students of social and organizational effectiveness are quick to stress flexibility, adaptability, and innovation as critical virtues in any organized enterprise. Underlying those virtues is the courage to risk failure in pursuit of worthy goals. In a changing and uncertain world, success can never be guaranteed, and very often the attempt to guarantee security or protection from change and competition will backfire and cause stagnation and rigidity. Where no risks are taken, nothing new is created.

This is why the most successful creators and founders of business empires often achieve success only after a painful string of failures. Thomas Edison, for example, expected his experiments to fail hundreds of times for every time they worked. The trick, of course, is to keep your eye on the goal, to avoid taking failure personally, and to think in long-range terms. It may be true that nothing succeeds like success, but it’s also true that nothing teaches like failure.