Michael Jordan’s “Failure” commercial for Nike takes an interesting look at how negative experiences, or experiences that don’t turn out exactly the way we planned can become game-changing experience through hard work. In this commercial, Michael explains through this commercial he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career; he has lost almost 300 games; he has failed 26 times when trusted to take the game winning shot. If people are accountable for their failures and handle them correctly, failure can be a tool for greatness. “Accountability” refers to a person’s taking ownership and acting in a responsible way, despite personal feelings, potential outcomes, or even possible consequences of his or her actions.
Being accountable for one’s failures can be frightening for many individuals, but sometimes we have to realize that recognizing our failures, and learning from them, can actually help us become more successful in the long run. If we are able to change up our game we will become more effective and produce results that will benefit us along with our organization.
As seen in Michael Jordan’s commercial, a positive mindset turns failure into feedback. Scorekeeping can really help in turning failure into success, allowing us to receive visual feedback by tracking our performance on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Even though our performance may initially seem like a failure, if we use this information to our advantage. If we are able to better master these tasks, we can produce bottom-line results. In Michael Jordan’s situation, he learned to make the free throws, he learned how to lose, he learned to work hard, and after improving upon and harnessing his talents he was able to become legendary. If we can take the disappointments and failures and view them with a positive attitude, we can become successful and reach our bottom-line goals.
Scorekeeping allows us to visually understand how successful we are being in our work. By being able to see where we currently fall on our “Goal” Line, we can tweak the way we are performing and allow these changes to make us successful. Change is a process, and in order for our scorecards to really speak to us, we will need to make more than one tweak before we are perfect contributors to the bottom line. Michael Jordan understands this. He failed over and over again. Failure doesn’t make us successful, but taking that failure and allowing it to speak to you so that you can change for the better, is what brings true success.
For example, in a scorecard that I use at CMOE, Invoice to Payment, we measure the number of days between when an invoice is sent to a client and the day we received payment. Most of our clients pay within thirty to forty days. However, by monitoring the scorecard daily, I noticed that some of our clients were taking to up five months before they paid the invoice. This made the performance line fall above the target goal of 35 days on our scorecard. My question was why?
Me: I noticed your leaderboard on the wall; it looks interesting. It appears to be tracking certain success factors and percentages. Do you get rewarded when you hit certain levels of performance? The reason I ask is I work for an organization where we use effective management, measurements, and scorecards to drive bottom line profitability.
