The Tipping Point Between Failure and Success

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dashun Wang, associate professor at Kellogg School of Management, crunched big datasets of entrepreneurs, scientists, and even terrorist organizations to better understand the fine line between failure and success. One surprising finding is that people who experience early failures often become more accomplished than counterparts who achieve early successes. Another insight is that the pace of failure is an indicator of the tipping point between stagnation and eventual success. Wang is a coauthor of the study in the journal Nature: “Quantifying the dynamics of failure across science, startups and security.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone it's Kurt we need your help with our annual survey this is your last chance to help us get to know you so we can make idea cast even better for you
0:09.8	it's easy just go to HBR.org
0:13.0	podcast survey.
0:15.0	Again, that's HBR.org slash podcast survey.
0:19.0	And, thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickif. Long before Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in Disneyland, he was fired unceremoniously from a newspaper.
0:57.0	An editor at the Kansas City Star told the young animator that he lacked imagination and had no good ideas. So then Walt Disney went out and
1:05.8	bought an animation studio, but it's not the famous one you're thinking of. He ran
1:10.5	that company Laffagram into the ground.
1:13.7	Only later did he create his Disney Brothers studio
1:17.3	and the animated films that define the genre.
1:20.6	Stories like this are told again and again. An early stumble helped someone learn and they
1:25.8	went on to earth-shattering success. Failure is typically derided in the moment and celebrated only after the fact.
1:34.0	And it's also usually depicted as black and white,
1:37.0	when in fact success and failure are often very close.
1:41.0	Someone might win by just a hair or narrowly miss out.
1:45.0	Today's guest has studied large-scale data sets to better understand the fine line between those two outcomes.
1:52.0	By researching entrepreneurs who
1:53.8	eventually go public with their companies, scientists who apply for money to
1:57.8	run research labs, and even terrorist organizations, our guest has found
2:02.0	insights into failure that anecdotes don't capture.
2:06.2	Dash and Wong is an associate professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
2:11.8	He's also a co-author of a recent study in the journal Nature,
	...

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