Transcriber: Chiara Mondini Reviewer: Anna Sobota
“You should talk more about your greatest failures.”
I’ll start.
At the beginning of my career,
I was recruited into a prestigious management consulting firm.
I was fairly fresh out of university,
but I came in and I said that I wanted to manage my own clients
and I wanted to manage my own projects.
Before long, I got my first client.
It was a technology firm out of Sylicon Valley,
and it was exactly the kind of firm that I wanted to be seen with.
My technical area of expertise is executive compensation.
That means that I design mutimillion dollar bonus packages for corporate CEOs.
And this client, they did have an executive compensation policy,
but that policy was so bad,
we used to use it as an example in our internal trainings
on how not to design and executive compensation policy.
It was my task to bring it into alignment with best practices in the market.
I poured my heart and soul into this finely crafted proposal
and sent it off to the client.
And then, just two days later nothing happened.
A week - nothing.
Two weeks passed - no response.
The client did not reply to my emails,
they did not pick up the phone when I called.
Soon it was clear that I had lost the project. I had lost the client.
I had failed.
At this time, my boss comes and talk to me,
and he says, “Markus, I think it’s time for us to have a little chat
about your future in our company.”
(Laughter)
He sits me down and he says,
“I think you’ve the potential of advancing faster in your career than your peers.”
What?
I had just failed spectacularly and he’s praising my career prospects.
But he explained it to me,
he said, “Yes, you lost your first and only client.
(Laughter)
But out of everybody at your level in the company,
you’re the only one who even has your own clients to manage,
and to lose.
(Laughter)
You had insisted on it.
And you showed me that you were willing to risk failure
in order to be successful here with us,
and in my team you are free to fail.”
Then he explained his philosophy.
He said that we have to get rid of this culture of failure avoidance,
if we want to innovate.
That means that we have to take risks without the fear of failure.
So in my team failure is not only tolerated,
it’s not only encouraged, it is required.
We have to take risks.
And what that means is that, yes, every now and again we're going to fail.
But the key is to fail quickly, get rid of all those bad ideas
and focus our efforts on those projects
that will actually move the needle for our clients.
That conversation was already more than 10 years ago.
And ever since, I’ve practiced what he taught me.
That means, I’ve failed a lot since then.
About five years ago, I started doing stand-up comedy,
and that has failure written all over it.
(Laughter)
And I'll give you some examples in a bit.
But here is how I got started.
I was speaking at an executive compensation conference
in Brussels, Belgium.
And in my talk I was contrasting different ways of disclosing
the forward-looking earnings per share targets
that we used as performance measures
in our executive long-term share-based incentive plan.
Riveting topic, I know. Ha ha. Funny topic, right?
But I had jokes in my presentation.
I was the only one who had jokes in their presentation.
So in this break this lady came up to me and she said,
“Hey, Marcus, that was funny. You should do comedy.”
(Laughter)
I don’t understand sarcasm, so I took her seriously.
But here’s the thing with doing comedy, you have to be willing to fail.
Sometimes your joke is not going to work.
So what she was really saying to me is,
“Marcus, you look like somebody who’s intimately familiar with failing.”
(Laughter)
I didn’t get into comedy to fail,
I got into comedy to meet women.
(Laughter)
That’s where the failure started.
(Laughter)
But what specifically does it look like when you fail?
You tell a joke and nobody laughs, right?
A few years ago, I was performing at the Comedy Store in London.
The Comedy Store is a legendary comedy club.
It’s an underground location,
there’s 400 seats, and the place was packed.
It’s my turn to speak,
I get up to the mic, I give them my opening joke,
the delivery is perfect and the crowd goes wild ... with booing!
(Laughter)
They booed me!
400 people booed me!
Even the staff joined in.
(Laughter)
After a while, the host grabs a hammer and he bangs a big gong on stage -
and as the gong rings,
that’s the end of my performance.
I lasted 18 seconds.
(Laughter)
It’s not the first time I’ve been booed after an 18 second performance.
(Laughter)
But here’s the silver lining.
Number one, previously I really thought
that the worst thing that can happen is that nobody laughs at your joke.
(Laughter)
That is not the worst thing ...
(Laughter)
Getting booed is a lot worse!
(Laughter)
And number two,
now I know that regardless of how badly I do in the future,
it will never be worse than being booed by 400 people.
Even if everybody in this room today booed me, it wouldn't be worse.
There’s only 300 people here.
(Laughter)
So my recommendation to you today is simple,
start talking about your failures.
On a very basic human level, failures make for interesting stories.
And this applies to your personal stories,
but it also applies to corporate storytelling.
And let’s actually start with the company example.
If you show your employees and your team members
that in our company we are free to fail,
then they will be encouraged to take those risks
that will lead to the breakthrough innovations that you’re looking for.
And for you individually,
there’s two specific benefits from talking about your failures.
Number one, is that when you start opening up about your own failures,
other people will do the same.
And you can create amazing connections with other human beings
when you share a story about failure.
Number two, you can actually come across as more confident and more competent
when you talk about your failures.
Because when you talk about your failures, people will not see you as a failure.
Rather, they will see you as somebody who learned something
and somebody who was clever enough to figure out what went wrong,
and they will see you as somebody who took the risk.
So go out there and talk about your failures
and you will see that it’s only when we’re free to fail
that we are truly free to succeed.
Thank you.
(Applause)
I’m not leaving the stage until somebody boos.
(Laughter)
Thank you everybody!
(Applause)