Tag Archives: definition of success

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Understanding Failure

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To know if you have failed you must first understand what it means to succeed. Basically failure is associated with a lack of success.  If you don’t know what success looks like you can never know if you have failed.

This concept is really about objective setting or defining yours goals.  Success requires planning.  This starts with a clear understanding of what is to be achieved.

Measurable

The best way to measure success is through the use of facts, that is something that is known or has been proved to be true.  Facts are objectively determined.  It is or it isn’t.

Our goals can contain some subject components and while they may be valid aspirations determining success or failure can be somewhat judgmental.

For example, on entering a confectionary shop you charge yourself with selecting (and consuming) the best tasting chocolate in the store.  Taste is a very subjective measure and as such, claiming success (or failure) can change for each person.

Defining Failure

Being able to know when you have failed (because success was clearly understood) is an invaluable skill.  Without clearly believing and accepting failure we are unlikely to re-plan and try again, perhaps with a different approach.

In essence after undertaking a challenge you may just decide to live with the results (to your detriment) and ignore the fact you did not actually succeed, i.e., you failed.

Taking Action

Clearly understanding what you want to achieve also enables you to decide when and how to change course, perhaps modify the goal or even drop it entirely.

Knowing whether you failed or not is a prerequisite for this.

Random thoughts – keeping you on your toes

Context Counts

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The answer to the question, “Is this a successful outcome?” can be dependent on your perspective.  Although the result can be agreed to objectively, that is everyone accepts what happened, whether it was positive (sucessful) or negative is very much contextual.

For Example

The owners of the majority of shares in a large company develop a plan of subsidary asset sales and excess cash divestiture through stock repurchase and dividend payouts.

The result is beneficial to exisitng shareholders of the parent company.  The value of the subsidiary drops but the holders of equity in the parent company gain (dividends, parent company stock price increases).

Ultimately the subsidiary may go bankrupt having a very negative impact on its employees, suppliers and customer base ( they need to go elsewhere if they can even find an alternative)

In this case, the shareholders deem the result a success, the other shareholders not so much.  The outcome, bankruptcy of a viable enterprise, is not disputed, whether it was a good or bad outcome is.

In case you did not recognize it, this  story is one way of describing the recent Sears Canada bankrupty.  My telling of the tale is from a cynical perspective, but does have some validity nether the less.

That is the facts, allbeit interpreted liberally, are provable facts.  So clearly your place in the story, rich owner profiting from others loss or poor employyee without severance really speaks to how the outcome is viewed.