The essence of success in digital transformation is leadership. But what nobody tells you in business school is that the very fundamentals of successful true leadership are inevitably rooted in a series of failures progressively building knowledge and experience eventually leading to your desired success. For leadership is about achieving something you never had, by doing something you never did. The fact remains that if you as a leader have never failed at anything, then I am sorry to say that you are not even trying to lead, to inspire others or to drive change.
History is replete of highly successful people who have experienced major failures. Sir James Dyson created 5,126 failed protypes before inventing the highly successful bagless vacuum cleaner. Thomas Edison conducted 10,000 failed experiments before creating the light bulb. Walt Disney was told that he lacked creativity. Steve Job was booted from his own company. But all of these people share one common characteristic. That is resilience and stamina to use their past failures as a launching pad for their eventual success. Edison himself once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work. What would have happened had I given up after the 9,999th time?”
Left on its own, resilience for failure is tantamount to an arduous suicide mission unless backed by an appropriate vision and proper risk management practices. All great leaders have dreams for a better future which are likely to significantly deviate from traditional norms. But dreams become mere fantasies unless backed by a proper vision including clear and measurable objectives that would need to be achieved by a certain date. Similarly a proper vision and objectives are simply the core ingredients of an untested theory unless properly communicated and readily accepted by your key stakeholders. Stakeholder buy in and acceptance becomes more likely if such stakeholders are involved at the outset in shaping the vision for your digital transformation.
So the bottom line for becoming a successful leader is to have a clear vision, manage risk, embrace failure, learn from your past mistakes, generate stakeholder consensus, but above all build resilience to withstand the interim failures until you too create your light bulb moment.
So are you ready to take on this path? Do you want to lead a digital transformation programme with impact? Do you need support to smoothen the interim failures to achieve ultimate success? We can definitely help. DM for support.