Perfect never happens, so don’t wait

Yesterday I was reading through the current edition of the Expert Access, and one of the phrases that caught my attention that was written by my friend at Cincom, Jim Hessin – “Perfect never happens, so don’t wait”. The article themed around IT deployments, its failure and hoping of near perfection implementation, which I agree with Jim does not exists. The articles highlights elements of IT deployments or initiative and interestingly touches points of its failure. Jim articulates that despite what many companies claim as near-perfection in IT projects, an industry analyst firm Gartner says that 83 percent of IT projects fail to achieve their anticipated return on investment. The majority of companies struggle with IT projects and if Gartner is to be believed, eight out of 10 fail. It is surely a recommended read however the point I would like to make here is about failure. (* note – here I am generalizing failure as noted in some part of our society and not in relation)

I struggle to understand that why so much of negativity is allied to failure.  Is that the world great leaders, politicians, entrepreneurs and so on never failed? Yes, we all know that they have failed. But even then the correlation of failure and being wrong or negative still prevails. Currently I am reading a book titled Men of Steel that has candid conversations of Vir Sanghvi with the India business leader like Azim Premji(Wipro), Nandan Nilekani (Infosys), Sunil Bharti Mittal (Airtel), and so on. Once again a recommended read. Moving on…and to the point of failure, aren’t these people failed in their lives. Sunil Mittal once at a point when Airtel was going through bad times said to his people “I know we are not expected to win. But I would tell them, if we can win against the odds, then we make history”.

So what does that implies? All the great leaders knew they can fail, but the key is, they always failed to loose. They created and still creating history(s). Every big thing starts from a small seed. Scientist and researchers tries and fails over and over again before they come up with the success formula. Does this imply that these “few” people never correlated failure to negativity but rather an opportunity to learn or success? I believe problems come with a bag of opportunity and my thought gets stronger when I read about these people.

Tom Nies, a person who started a company – Cincom, with $600, a card table, and a dream; now is the longest-serving CEO in the computer industry and the company serves thousands of clients on six continents. Nokia a company out of Finland; from roots in paper, rubber, and cables, today is a well known leader in mobile technology. Not only these companies and leaders helped themselves but helped people, employees, stakeholders, states and even countries. They learned through their failure(s) and tired extensively over, over and over again to achieve. And with many failures in their bags, they achieved the unachievable, in their own rights. I used these two examples as I have been fortunate to work and currently working with the named organizations, respectively.

These great leaders, company(s), and so on never had (as I believe) the so called “perfect environment” to succeeded. But they had one thing with them, (again as I believe) their failure(s).

Hence I would end at saying failure is the inception point of success, as doubt is the inception for learning.

Don’t wait for the “Perfect” weekend…Just Enjoy!

Have a good or preferably a great weekend.