Kodak, Yahoo, Polaroid, Blackberry are some examples of companies that in the recent past have been leaders and now have either disappeared or have an almost irrelevant presence within their markets. Some of the issues pointed out as main causes for the failure of these companies are the their failure to adapt to changes in their market and/or the reduction of investments in innovation, all part of one big idea of inability to learn from previous successes. While learning from failures is something we got used to, learning from successes is as important as or even more important, but often get forgotten in the business world.
Many companies fail to learn from their success due to 3 main factors:
Errors in diagnosis: not having a discipline to measure KPIs and not analyzing results in detail will lead companies to not being able to determine which the success factors were, making the decision process to be carried out more by intuition than by facts.
Excess of self-confidence: It is believed that a significant number of managers have based part of their decisions on their intuition leveraging their professional experience. Overconfidence may lead them to consider themselves better decision makers than they really are, leading to take many risks that might provoke a significant impact for the company.
Not asking why: asking why something happened is often used in failure, but almost never in success. If we do not reach a result, we invest endless hours to reach the conclusion if the issue was at the product, the lack of customer knowledge or market aggressiveness. In the case of success, the manager takes ownership and credit the result to his actions.
Our goal, as risk capital managers, is to segregate capital gains on the investments we make. From our experience, we can indicate a process with 5 steps that could be important to learn from success
1. Measuring results:
- Obtain data and base all diagnosis and action plans on the analysis of the results effectively obtained.
- Use the 80/20 rule to focus the analysis on relevant factors to the company under analysis.
2. Repeatedly:
- Measuring outcomes must be continuous, in order to obtain the correct monitoring of the results obtained.
- Analysis continuity may improve the sources of data collection.
3. In the correct timeframe:
- To have the appropriate term to measure the impact of actions that have taken place. It is significantly different to measure the impact of a long-term investment than a short-term action.
4. Set in a particular environment:
- Try to adjust the measurement of results to specific environments. Measuring the impact of a product in a remote area can be quite different from an urban area and will have to be considered in the learning.
5. And also open to the possibility of testing:
- Try to stress some of the variables to understand the amplitude of the impact they can produce in measuring results.
- Get a test scenario for new variables or competitive environments.
“With these 5 items, we believe that managers will be able to set up a discipline in the measurement of results that not only create a path to learning from failure but also create the conditions to know the basis of success.”
