HIghtlighting Your Greatest Mistakes

    As “The Office” fans get ready to bid farewell to Steve Carell others are mourning the short life of a show you might not have heard of: “The Paul Reiser Show,” which was supposed to help NBC with its ratings. Why they’d put the show up against “American Idol” I don’t know, but that’s another story and perhaps another post by another, more knowledgeable blogger. What’s interesting here, something we can all learn from, is how one actress, Amy Landecker, is using the cancellation of the Reiser show as just another learning opportunity. It’s about taking failure in stride.
    Canceled after just two shows, “The Paul Reiser Show” wasn’t able to help NBC with its ratings, but that didn’t deter Landecker or Reiser for that matter (he was able to get in a few digs during an interview on The Tonight Show) from showing the world that, yes, she’s moving on, but this “failure” isn’t the worst thing in the world. In fact, she finds it kind of “comforting.” Here’s what she told the Chicago Tribune: “It used to be (that) my show at (the since-closed Lakeview space) Caf? Voltaire got a bad review, and now it’s my sitcom on NBC got canceled. I actually find that comforting.”
    I totally get that and I’m sure many of you reading do as well. If you run a company, you’re almost constantly flirting with failure; that’s what happens when you push yourself to do your best. Anytime you put yourself out there (a new store, having a book published, offering a little known but incredibly promising product/service, etc.) you risk failure. But often, even if you do fail, you are closer to perfecting whatever if it you’re working so hard to achieve. I think that’s what Landecker was getting at.
    Clearly, publicizing certain failures is probably not a good idea. But in some cases, letting people know that things didn’t turn out as well as you planned isn’t such a bad thing, particularly if you’ve got some potential successes waiting in the wings. Some publications feature columns like “My Biggest Mistake,” which offer an object lesson on where someone went wrong in business. Usually, it’s a mistake that most people could relate to and therefore learn from.
    Of course there are those legendary mistakes that have led to monumental, prize-winning successes like Post-Its, the beloved Slinky, and others. Consider the story-telling potential of your company’s mistakes. Did the mistake lead to a surprising success?  Are there lessons to be learned? Can you come out smelling like a rose? A little bit? Think about it.
    Read about one of my failures on Twitter @LeslieLevine