No failure

Didn't you ever fail in anything? The answer must be "yes" for everybody. I probably think that there are few people who never fail in anything. If someone answers "no", he or she just doesn't regard the lack of success as failure. This is a very stupid question. So changing this way, can you try anything new without the fear of failure? It seems to me that the answer may be divided into yes and no. The response depends on the ways of thinking people have or the feature of something new itself. Some positive guys do that without thinking of any failure and some negative people hesitate to do that for the fear of the failure risk.

There are, of course, acceptable failures and not. The failure or mistakes done by specialists taking someone's life in hand such as doctors or politicians are too fetal although some of the people themselves don't recognize. They are severely selected by the highest standard of the license or if they are politicians who take responsibility for protecting citizens, strict checks by votes must work. It's very difficult to judge whether this failure or that mistake is acceptable. This is a mater of degree. As far as business is concerned, however, failures or mistakes are inevitable accompaniments.

Many Japanese companies still adapt so-called demerit mark system for evaluation. Every time employees fail in some projects or jobs, there are given demerit marks in the assessment of employees performance. What's happening to them next is that the employees under those circumstances won't make any new challenges for the fear of failure. This situation may lead a company to the first stage where the company collapses. Such companies don't evaluate the process of employees' challenges but see only the result of failures. In today's business environment performance-based evaluation system is a matter of course in terms of company's profitability principle. But in order to make satisfactory profits we should not forget the process. Visible results come from a lot of invisible failures. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

American venture businesses are a good example. How many companies are newly born? As it's clear to see the ratio of the number of start-up businesses to that of closing companies, behind successful venture businesses there are much more failed businesses. Nevertheless the US has a business culture that accepts such failures. Venture capitalists often inject money into the new business plans come up with by the changeable guys who failed at least for a couple of times in their business life. There is a milieu where investors bet on the challenging spirits and the great lessons of the past failures for success.

Back to the Japanese business, generally speaking, Japanese people lack a sense of learning something from failures. At work too, once salarymen fail in companies, it seems to be very difficult to come back to promotion races because of the demerit mark system as I mention. They find something to live for in the same companies except promotions, otherwise they change jobs or companies. Someone who lets a company bankrupt is also given the label as a failure. There have been some signs that even though employees fail in business, they still have chances to join consolation matches. But, the bosses in many Japanese companies today have been promoted in the way as there were almost no big failures. If they made a mistake to such an extent that it's not retrievable in the responsible positions, the failure would not be just a failure subordinates experience. People get strong once gained immunity. Here is a risk of no failure.