The Entrepreneurial Mind

Over the years I have become more comfortable using my missteps and failures as lessons and examples for my students. Of course, they seem to love to hear the success stories. But they need to learn that hardship, challenge and failure all teach us important lessons about our business, our customers, and ourselves.

Bill Hobbs sent along a good post from The Executive Update that speaks to learning from failure.

[W]e tend to live in an avoidance society, where failure is often overlooked or ignored and we only focus on successes. That’s a mistake. Leadership comes from learning lessons taught by failure. People rebound from failure because they choose to learn from their mistakes.

Posted by Jeff Cornwall at 06:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Barry Moltz's long awaited second book, titled Bounce, has finally arrived. From his website:

Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true--sometimes it just stinks! Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system.

Barry's gift is that he uses humor to offer lessons that all entrepreneurs can learn from. During his last visit to Belmont, Barry offered some glimpses of what he planned to explore in his new book. Just like with his first book You Need to be a Little Crazy, this book is a must read for entrepreneurs at any stage of their development.

Barry demonstrates that developing the resiliency to 'bounce" through these cycles determines who ultimately will succeed. Using real life business examples, he shows that with true business confidence, we can face our fears, let go of shame and failures, use all our choices, be better risk-takers, and define our own brand of success.

Barry offers advice on how to use the potholes, detours, and wrong turns along the road that is our our entrepreneurial journey to reach our ultimate goal of entrepreneurial success.

Posted by Jeff Cornwall at 06:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wanna thank everyone who ever told me no, Pack it up and get back home, It kept me going knowin' I would prove them wrong. Yea I knew it all along, Without 'm I might have given up a long time ago, and so, I wanna thank everyone who ever told me no.

Buddy Jewell

Because we live in Nashville, I am often reminded of how much failure goes into creating success. From the outside, it seems that music stars just suddenly appear on the scene. The truth is that for most of them it took years of hard work and many, many failures to finally find success.

The same is true for entrepreneurs. Most highly successful entrepreneurs will tell you that along the road to success in their businesses they were often on the brink of failure. But they persevered. They found a way to make payroll. They found a way to make that critical sale. They found a way to keep the wolves away from the door just long enough to make it through the tough times. They found a way to pick themselves up from a business that did not succeed and move on to the next one that might. As Thomas Edison once said, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

Our culture seems to be drifting into an alarming view of success and failure. We seek quick or even instant success. I see it in entrepreneurs who look at their businesses as deals to yield a quick, short-term windfall rather than as a sustainable source of income and good jobs. We seek our fortunes through lotteries and lawsuits rather than hard work.

We also try to protect ourselves from any adversity or failure. There are the "helicopter" parents who hover over their offspring trying to shield them from any chance of failure, even as these children become young adults. We have politicians who have created the illusion that government is there to protect us from any harm and to rescue us from all adversity. America has become a society of people who blame everyone and everything else for our own failures.

We seem to have forgotten that failure, in fact, builds character. And it is the fear of failure that inhibits creativity and keeps us from learning.

Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.

John Keats

You will fail. Failure is a prerequisite for success.

Posted by Jeff Cornwall at 01:02 PM | Permalink

I invited Bobby Guy, a local attorney with Waller/Lansden here in Nashville, to speak in my MBA class last week. While it may not seem that unusual or blog-worthy to mention that I had a lawyer in my class, it is his area of law that makes his visit unusual. For you see, Mr. Guy practices bankruptcy law. How often do entrepreneurs get to hear from a person who understands business failure from the inside before they start their ventures?

From this perspective, Mr. Guy clearly has a very instructive message for entrepreneurs. He likes to give a talk called "A View From Down-Under: The Top Ten Reasons Companies That Should Make It ... Don't."

And here are his Top 10:

10. Over-expansion. The need to get there first or to demonstrate revenue growth to anxious investors leads businesses to grow too fast.

9. Poor Capital Structure. Companies take on too much debt....Enough said!

8. Failure to Control the Controllable Costs. Businesses spend down the initial cash before it is flowing in at a positive rate.

7. Failure to Prepare for Volatility of Uncontrollable Costs. For example, energy, materials, labor, or insurance.

6. Add New Products or Divisions that Drag Down the Profitable Ones
5. Poor Internal Controls and Execution -- customer service, accounting controls, theft, fraud

4. Poorly Designed Business Model

3. Reliance on Critical Financing that Dries Up

2. Failure to Adapt to a Changing Market

AND THE #1 REASON? Management in Complete Denial......

Posted by Jeff Cornwall at 05:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Rob at BusinessPundit suggested a post at The Occupational Adventure about failure. It is worth a look. Failure, or the fear of failure, is what has kept many a potential entrepreneur on the sidelines. Failure is something we all have learned from along the way if we let ourselves take some risks. It reminds me of the first time I really got tackled hard in Junior High football. I was really afraid of how it would feel, and although it really did hurt (the guy was the star line backer of the eighth grade team), I learned from it (stay away from his side the rest of the game and go out for cross country next fall).

We can all learn from our own failures. That is an important part of entrepreneurial learning. We can also learn from the failures and mistakes of others (I picked that up and a young age being the youngest of four boys--thanks for all the lessons on what not to do Tom, Scot and Steve). Some of my best lectures center around mistakes and failures I had in business and how I tried to learn from them going forward.

Posted by Jeff Cornwall at 07:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)