Gareth Bezett

Read this article about the latest patches from Google for the Chrome browser.

The Art of Admitting Failure: "

This post is part of HBR's special issue on failure.

When it comes to business, we are incredibly unaccepting and fearful of making mistakes. And forget about admitting to our mistakes, as that may be construed as a sign of weakness.

But business and leadership is all about relationships. And in any relationship, things go wrong, mistakes are made, ups are followed by downs. The strength of a relationship is not how perfect it is, but how resiliently it deals with the inevitable failures.

In a world filled with real-time, tell-all social media, your ability to hide from your failures is, well, non-existent. You are much better off admitting that something is wrong and addressing it in as authentic and transparent a way as possible.

That's what Domino's Pizza CEO Patrick Doyle did in national television ads this past year. Domino's is known for primarily one thing — delivering pizza to your door in 30 minutes. Domino's gutsy move was to acknowledge that its pizza was far from stellar. In the ads, the company flashed quotes from customers like "Domino's pizza crust is like cardboard" and "Microwave pizza is far superior." One customer suggested, "I think Domino's pizza should start over."

That's what Domino's did. The company reconfigured its core product, testing combinations of dozens of cheeses, 15 sauces, and nearly 50 crust seasonings to find one that satisfied customers. In the ads, Domino's admitted that its pizzas were terrible, explained that it redesigned them, and asked people to give them a try.

Viewers of these ads described them as 'bold' and 'refreshing,' and gave the company credit for acknowledging what everyone already knew. More important, people tried the pizza and found they liked it. The result: store sales rose and quarterly profits doubled.

Domino's took a failure point — its horrible pizzas — and made it a rallying point. The company saw negative comments as a gift from customers, an opportunity to improve the product, rather than a liability.

How To Fail Successfully

Dealing with failure is part of being a leader. Rather than expend enormous energy to avoid it, you should build an organization that is resilient in the face of inevitable failures. Here are three steps that you can take:

1. Create a culture of sharing failures as well as success. When then-new Ford CEO Alan Mulally held his first staff meeting, he asked members of his team to give an assessment of their businesses as a "green," "yellow," or "red" light. They all gave their businesses a green light — and Mulally challenged each of them to come back the next week with a more realistic assessment of their businesses. The first executive to stand up and say "I have a red light" received a standing ovation from the CEO. They then sat down to tackle the problem as a team. Mulally had to create a new culture that could admit when something was going wrong, and do so early enough so that the organization could still have an impact on the outcome. Creating this culture has to come from the top. As a leader, you have to think about how you will set the stage for failures to come forward.

2. Reward the act of risk-taking. How many times have you heard a leader exhort, "We have to take more risks!" and then walk off the stage? In one organization, the executives decided that words had to be backed by action. They started highlighting when risks were being taken and showcased people who were sticking out their necks. They then came back and celebrated the results — regardless of whether it was a success or a failure. Without this, no one is going to take a risk that is meaningful — people will act only if they think there is a high chance of success.

3. Define the limits. While the admission by Domino's was refreshing, the company didn't open the door to everything it was doing. To make transparency and risk-taking more palatable to risk-averse executives, create "sandbox covenants." Figure out how what risks and failures are acceptable. Clearly define the walls of this sandbox and communicate the rules of engagement within those walls. Also explain what the consequences are if people step outside of the sandbox, both to them and to the company. By agreeing to these covenants in advance, there is greater confidence and security in knowing that the risks — and the failures — will be accepted.

Charlene Li is founder and partner at Altimeter Group, author of Open Leadership, and co-author of Groundswell.

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Worth a read if you're into other people's ideas.

http://hbr.org/web/extras/hbr-agenda-2011/home

I bit the bullet this week and merged my cellphone contacts with Gmail. To do this, I used my Android phone's manage contacts function and copied all my phone contacts (and a couple from my sim that hadn't yet made it over) to my Google account. I then synced my contacts so that they were all available in Gmail on the web. I then turned off (using the display options) all contacts from my phone book (the contacts tab in the same bit and the dialer) except those from my Google account that had phone numbers. This still allows contacts without phone numbers to show up in the Gmail app in the phone.

I then went through the process of merging my contacts in gmail. Gmail has a built-ion facility to do this and before too long I had most of my email and phone number records together for each person. Pretty painless in the end.

Boss: what's the purpose of a Data Warehouse?
Gareth: to enrich SQL consultants

Not wanting a year to tick by without blogging, I guess a post is in order.

2010 has been an interesting one. I was unemployed for a good chunk of it. I finally got a job as a Systems Analyst which is a role that has me spending a lot of time producing documents, especially design documents. In the past I've largely been a one-man band so having to communicate my ideas to others in a structured way has been a challenge.

I'm now the chair of the Finance Committee for the Anglican Diocese of Wellington and have just been appointed to the board of a church school.

We went to the UK so attend my sister-in-law's wedding. Saw a bit of London and the English countryside plus Edinburgh and quite a bit of rural Scotland.

Not having a laptop from work while I wasn't working and not having one with my current job, I've moved most of my communication, organisation and documents to Google services. Considering I'm not paying for any of them, I'm very happy with how they work. I recently got an Android phone and have got my Google account set up on it. The only thing I haven't consolidated is my phone contacts with Gmail contacts as it'll be a bit of work to reconcile duplicates. I may or may not get round to it.

The weather in Wellington has been fantastic lately. I've been here for over ten years now and I can't remember hot weather this early. Hopefully we get a long hot one. I reckon we are due.

Once again, Wellington's Summer City programme has been fantastic, and it's not over yet. Tracey and I have taken advantage of a couple of the ASB Gardens Magic free concerts and might even get to one or two of the films in the gardens too. The only bad bit has been the weather. There have been a couple of concerts that we would have loved to see if not for rain.

I'm unemployed. I left CSL at the end of November. I applied for a couple of jobs before Xmas that would have suited me well. It seems I was seriously considered as I had two interviews for each position which was encouraging. Since I started hunting again since 11 Jan I haven't had much in the way progress but it seems there are still jobs to apply for.

My CV has come along way since I first started out. I think I assumed that people reading my CV would be able to infer all manner of things that they never were going to.

We've had a long-standing problem at work where appointments added to Blackberry handset do not show up in Outlook.

We run Balckberry Professional Software 4.1 which is a cut-down version of Blackberry Enterprise Software (BES) for small businesses and Exchange 2000. The problem only affected a small number of out users but was naturally frustrating. I searched for solutions via Google and tried my own troubleshooting. Evenually, I asked for support form Gen-i who sold us the software.

They pointed me in the direction of the "send as" and "receive as" permissions on the mailboxes in question. I could see that the BES account was denied those permissions on the affected accounts, but this setting was being inherited and I could not figure out from where. Further research showed that some built-in accounts are denied these permissions by default.

I needed to use the Exchange System Manager program to change the permissions on the Organisation to eliminate the "deny". The problem is that that program doesn't display the permissions by default and a registry hack is needed to make them accessable. The other option would have been to use a new account for the BES service.

Once I had done this, the problem disappear and I now have (probably temporarily) a couple of very happy users.