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Dr Mehmet Yildiz
I Increase My Failure Rate To Double My Success
2021-01-14
From decades of experience, I learned that starting small, acting quick, failing fast and frequent are the best strategies. As Watson advises, if we want to increase our success rate, we need to double our failure rate. Creating the first version of a venture is more important than refining the next version.
Over the last two decades, I observed a tremoundous shift towards agility in business organization.
Entrepreneurs started acting with agility embracing failure. Failure equated learning and learning led to success. The faster and more frequent they fail, the more successful outcome they generated.
These brave leaders can speed up innovation and create business value by learning quickly and delivering iteratively. They showed us that perfectiona was hurdle to innovation and growth.
Rather than perfecting something, having a minimum viable product (MVP) can produce better outcomes.
Innovation and agility are primary pillars in Architecting Digital Transformation and critical attributes of entrepreneurs and exceptional leaders.
In the current economic climate, entrepreneurs and business leaders must focus on agility, act quickly, think on their feet at all times, keep innovating and creating a minimum viable product. Competition is tough. Speed to market matters.
Our agile approach at work, in our interactions, and relationships with business and technical stakeholders can make us more influential, competitive, and productive leaders to create desired and expected business value from our distinguished leadership.
From my experience, I can assure you that it is not feasible to undertake successful digital transformation initiatives with old methods and approach anymore. They need speed.
As this became a harsh reality, many business organizations had to accept the situation and embrace agility in rapidly delivering their services and products.
Therefore, agility became a particular concern for enterprise modernistic and digital transformation goals as consumer demands increased with fast-paced delivery requirements for generating business value.
Speed to market became the most fundamental requirements of businesses organizations and set senior leadership teams' agenda in many enterprises.
The speed-to-market requirements caused the agile approaches to become the new norm in modernizing and transforming ecosystems.
We know that business products are expected to be released faster than they were in the past. Security updates and bug fixes of digital products are required more frequently than the older ones. In short, agility can affect all aspects of enterprise modernization and digital transformation initiatives.
From an organizational culture perspective, promoting agile in transforming ecosystems became relatively more comfortable due to its nature and compelling business value. Generational perspective became more evident. For example, there appears to be a dichotomy between two generations in many business organizations.
More specifically, agile approaches turned to be a particular interest to the new generations, especially to the millennial, because members of this generation grow with agility in all walks of life. They learn differently, experimentally, and rapidly.
However, the older generation still holds a sentimental attachment to the waterfall methods and monolithic approaches. From my observations, there appears to be some comfort zone created for using a waterfall and monolithic methods regularly by the older generation.
Besides, the older generations have a common perception that agile methods can cut things short hence reduce the quality. From my experience, this is not true, or at least context-specific therefore cannot be generalized firmly.
This perception must be challenged with cogent business value arguments.
For example, it is empirically and logically evident that an agile approach can increase the quality due to iterative progress by checking quality more frequently in every iterative milestone.
In digital transformation initiatives, as intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs, one of our essential questions is: how to make our business and technology footprint more intuitive, responsive, and agile to meet the growing demands of our consumers, add better business value, and serve them better. This powerful and fundamental principle can keep us laser-sharped-focused on our critical mission.
Agility is critical in Information Technology, Engineering, and Manufacturing. Whist dealing with legacy business and technology footprint concerns by analyzing and understanding them with an agile approach, we also must hold the vision of transitioning, improving, modernizing, and transforming our services and products strategically, tactically, and always with agility.
This fast yet balanced act for business as usual and transformation domains can make the most significant difference for generating desired business value for our organization and customers. We must put our energies on constant rapid-paced iterative deliverables in this dynamic ecosystem made up of a mixture of legacy and modern components.
The onus is on the transformational leaders in a large business organization to find ways to articulate the benefits, compelling reasons, and influence the stakeholders to use the agile approach in digital transformation initiatives.
I always highlight to my stakeholders the importance of small step approach. It is not feasible to wait and see the end of a gigantic digital transformation initiative. There are many unknowns; hence, it is impossible to see the end product without constant experimentation with trial and errors in smaller scales.
From an innovative leadership standpoint, an agile approach can allow the digital transformation team members to test their ideas iteratively and proactively. If they fail, they fail fast, and cheaply without costing prohibitive funds to the initiatives. This principle poses positive business, financial, and commercial implications.
This compelling business value must be understood by all stakeholders establishing critical success factors and must be embedded in the culture of innovative business organizations striving for improving, modernizing, and transforming the legacy ecosystem.
As transformational leaders with the healthy entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial mindset, we must be the pragmatic change catalysts for conveying this critical message, infusing a paradigm shift to the culture with fusion principles, adapting to the constant change for digital fitness, and making the necessary cultural adjustments iteratively, productively, and effectively.
Thank you for reading my perspectives.
If you enjoy this article, you might also check my other leadership articles published on News Break.
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