Page 52 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

Fallacy: Failure Is Failure

Few phobias are more widespread than the fear of failure.
But what is failure?
Robert Townsend, who helped mastermind Avis’s dramatic turnaround in the

1960s, said two of every three decisions he made were wrong.
America’s best pro basketball teams lose the basketball every three minutes

without even getting up a shot.
The legendary golfer Ben Hogan said that in eighteen holes, he usually hit

only two or three balls exactly as he had planned.
Fred Smith got a C on the graduate business school paper in which he

described the concept for Federal Express.
The world champion in baseball has to win only 57 percent of its

championship games.
And no discussion of failure should avoid 3M. 3M went almost two years

without a sale. Then in 1904 they tried sandpaper. Two years later sandpaper
sales were averaging $2,500 a month—on expenses of over $9,000 a month.
William McKnight became the assistant bookkeeper in 1907, settled for stock
instead of cash while the company bounced from blunder to blunder, and retired
with over $500 million in 1978.

There’s little point in killing an idea by saying it might fail. Any idea might
fail. If you’re doing anything worthwhile at all, you’ll suffer a dozen failures.

Start failing so you can start succeeding.

The Fallacy of Expertise

Before you look to expert insight for help in planning, ask yourself: What is an
expert?

The Wall Street Journ a l periodically matches the nation’s leading stock
analysts against a handful of darts. Over the past year, the randomly thrown darts
consistently have hit better stocks on a dartboard than those chosen by the
experts, after months of study and years of experience.

What is an expert? Is an expert anything more than someone with lots of data
and experience? But to what end? The data on most subjects will support totally
opposite conclusions—a fact which explains the popularity of The McLaughlin
Gro u p and similar televised debates.

The value of an “expert”’s experience is dubious for another reason. Every