Presentation on Failure given at the Royal Academy of Engineering's Leadership Awards

1. Failure
Valuable?

2. Mike Astell
Mechanicalengineering graduatefrom
ImperialCollege and a MBA from Erasmus,
CharteredEngineer, Fellow of the Institution of
MechanicalEngineers and a Sainsbury
ManagementFellow.
Startedas a traineewith British Rail with first
appointmentas a Production
Manager. Subsequent experienceincludes
senior operations, projectand corporateroles
with Royal Dutch Shell and Alstom in locations
across Europe, Asia andNorth America. Most
recentlya Directorat CentricaEnergy
responsible for one of the company’slargest
gas businesses.

3. What is failure?

4. What is failure?
• Exams
• Love
• Technical
• Accident
• Injury
• Sport
• Personal
• Business
• Technical
• Legal
• Economic
• Political

5. Success or
failure?
Chris Robshaw is an English rugby union player. He is the
captain of the England national rugby union team.
Robshaw's position of choice is in the back-row,
specifically flanker.
Born the middle of three boys, Robshaw coped with the
trauma of his father's death when he was five years old.
His mother, Patricia, raised her sons alone. Robshaw
started playing rugby for Warlingham RFC at the age of
seven and attended Cumnor House School. He then
moved to Millfield Preparatory School and then Millfield
where he was first team captain.
What would you say?

6. Success?
Carly Fiorina is an American Republican
politician and former business executive who
currently chairs the non-profit philanthropic
organization Good360.
In 1980, Fiorina started at AT&T and its
equipment and technology spin-off, Lucent
Technologies, and rose through the ranks to
become an executive. As chief executive officer
of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005, she was
the first woman to lead a top-20 company as
ranked by Fortune magazine.
What would you say?

7. Success?
Paula Radcliffe is an English long-
distance runner. She is the current
women's world record holder in the
marathon with her time of 2 hours 15
minutes and 25 seconds. She is a
three-time winner of the London
Marathon, three-time New York
Marathon champion, and won the 2002
Chicago Marathon.
What would you say?

8. Why is failure to be avoided?

9. Why is failure to
be avoided?
• It can be terminal
• Consequences can be
catastrophic
• Implications can be
wide-ranging
• Forgiveness may be in
short supply

10. Why would you want to seek failure?

11. “If you worried about falling off your
bike, you’d never get on it”
- Lance Armstrong

12. “If we knew what we were doing, we’d
call it research”
- Albert Einstein

13. Experimentation
Useful in all sorts of areas
• Drugs research
• New materials
• Technologies
• Products
Failure is a route to finding
what works

14. Practice &
Improvement
• Builds capability
• Creates confidence
• Fosters teamwork
• Increases efficiency
• Identifies opportunity
• Reduces risk (of failure)

15. Testing
• Validates assumptions
• Proves performance
• Demonstrates interactions
• Allows control of outcomes
• Avoids more expensive
consequences

16. More on failure….

17. Failure today
Failure tomorrow
Jobs was a college drop-
out who was subsequently
fired from Apple.

18. Failure today =
Failure. period
• Those involved in major
failures may never work
again
• Some are shunned, some
are jailed
• Then there are the
fatalities, the significant
injuries, the job losses

19. BP - Macondo
• 11 killed, 16 injured
• 49 million bbls spilt
• $60bln cost
• CEO & others fired
Rigorous attention to critical
tasks in high hazard
environments

20. Enron
American energy trader. Before
bankruptcy it claimed revenues of
$111bln and was named “America’s most
innovative company” for 6 years
• 20,000 lost their jobs
• Chairman, CEO jailed
• Audit firm no longer exists
If it looks too good to be true,
it generally is…

21. Best possible chance of success….

22. No short cuts
- Generally there are no
easy routes to success
- This shouldn’t blunt
your aspirations
- Diligence, hard work,
persistence is
unavoidable
Sorry!
“You cannae change
the laws of physics”
Montgomery Scott,
Chief Engineer
USS Enterprise

23. Success today
Success tomorrow
• 50% of entire phone
market profits in 2007
• 3% market share in 2013
Classic case of being
enthralled by past successes

24. Nothing is
risk-free
And standing still may not
be an option either

25. Goldilocks and
the 3 dilemmas
• Standing still may be precarious
• How much risk to take?
• Fortune may favour the bold
Fast
Slow
Cheap Expensive
Conventional
Innovative

26. Risk,
experimentation,
conservatism
…and why your parents
might be right (sometimes)
Risk,
impact
Experimentation

27. Reaching for the
stars
Or going to the Moon in 3
easy steps

28. Playing to
strengths

29. Avoiding the consequences….

30. Systems, processes
are useful
• People make mistakes
• You can’t remember and
check everything
• Systems, processes help
avoid such
• A way to capture learning
• Repeat mistakes are painful

31. Preventing and
minimising
• Achieving your goals
• Preventing mishap
• Minimising the
consequences
• Recovering

32. Culture
Lessons from the VW scandal
• CEO, Martin Winterkorn, oversaw an unquestioning culture in which
discouraged challenging decisions and speaking up.
• This culture, in which people did not feel able to say ‘that will not
work’, or ‘that isn’t right’, was a key contributory factor.
• Flash back to 2008 and the banking crisis. UBS investigated why some
of the bad decisions that were made were allowed to happen.
• Two of the key causes they found were that senior executives did not
fully understand the intricacies of the products being used; and that
speaking out and challenging decisions were implicitly discouraged.
These were not unique to UBS either, as it is widely accepted that they
were just as rife at other banks.
• The similarity between Volkswagen and the banking crisis then, then,
lies in the way in which the prevailing leadership style limited the flow
of information and quality of debate within firms.
YSC, October 2015
Buried beneath the headlines about
the recent revelations at Volkswagen
are some worrying details,
reminiscent of the banking crisis.
At their heart are some stark lessons
for leaders and organisations;
lessons that firms have been slow to
learn, but which will not go away and
need to be addressed.

33. Many, many
failures on the
road to success
James Dyson was vacuuming his
house when he realized his top-of-
the-line machine was losing suction
and getting clogged.
An industrial designer by training,
Dyson went to work reengineering
vacuum cleaner technology to fix
this problem.
But that wasn’t his only challenge.
Fifteen years and more than 5,000
prototypes later, he launched
Dyson Limited to produce his
design when no other
manufacturer would take it on.

34. Is failure…valuable?

35. Some final thoughts…
• It is complicated out there; short-cuts are rare and to be avoided
• Failure (in small doses and early) can be instructive
• Failure (later and on a larger scale) can be terminal
• Risk is unavoidable, standing still inadvisable
• Working hard is no guarantor, but it’s a start
• Experience, capability is vitally important, but not everything
• Neither success or failure is instantaneous
• Play to your strengths