Secret of Edison Lamp
Secret of Edison Lamp:-
In October 1879, Thomas Alva Edison made a breakthrough with a bulb that used platinum filament. The glow on his face would have been brighter than the light of the lamp itself. How one single invention revolutionized human civilization is an amazing journey.
The success story of Edison is not new. We revisit this story during school, college days and management classes. The story has a series of failures, a pursuit of excellence and achievement of a grand success. When Edison himself was asked to describe his success, he said, “I have not failed; I have just found 10000 ways that will not work”. Today, the life of a student in a school, a professional in an office, a model in the film industry and also that of a husband or a wife at home is governed by a “performance management system” that revolves around the words “success”, “failure” and “excellence”.
Every time the story of Edison is repeated in discussions, but one is not sure if the importance of his statement is understood in its entirety.
In my early life, I came across a case of a final year student who falsified of records of his competitor which were sent to a top class university by cleverly bypassing certain controls within the system. The competitor lost the chance to get the admission; the matter came to light too late when the entire process was over. It was a fraud– a fraud that involve “success” and intelligence. I used to recall this episode whenever I came across stories of brand failures like Satyam and sure that it is the students that I came across were involved somewhere in these failures. It is not that these brands did not know about systems, controls, processes but their definition of success itself was faulty.
Second type of success is completion of an activity without creating a value. It can arise out of monotony or out of micromanagement. It does not involve skill development. These activities operate in closed environment giving an illusion of success. Such environments do not encourage lateral thinking, do not take an all-round view and cannot correlate events. Anyone who does not know why electricity cannot be produced by 10000 ways has not learned electricity at all even if he lights a lamp. Not only do such systems kill excellence, but often deprive their teams of original skills as well. A lion jumping through fire-ring under the supervision of ring master cannot be considered a success, even if the ring-master gets standing ovation. The lion is performing a monotonous task, there is nothing new for him to learn.
Success that has arisen out of dishonesty, without any effort is a fraud. Success that has no learning, and no future path is an illusion. Success that has not created a base for the next step is only task completion. Success that is not associated with preceding failure a coincidence. All of these are probable precursors to future failure.
One of my colleagues was a business development person in a small organization. He was responsible for selling technical solutions. He had to deal with highly valued and tough clients and getting breakthroughs was not easy. He made sincere efforts. This became a classical case for HR persons to intervene and became difficult to differentiate between reason as ‘an excuse’. To his disbelief, he was given an interim incentive even without bagging an order. The entrepreneur at the top had evaluated his approach, quality of interaction and innovative approach during his discussions with the client. He had actually generated new ideas, kept the client interested and engaged, sensitized internal teams, identified deficiencies in the product that needed to be plugged, aligned internal teams, removed internal sense of complacency and above all created a goodwill at the client end that enhanced the brand image of the organization. The performance measurement yardstick was changed from the task of bagging an order to generating innovative ideas. The entrepreneur realized that internal breakthrough was as important as client breakthrough, and penalizing the person for ‘non achievement of goals’ would have continued to be detrimental to the system itself. Success, failure and excellence were put in the right context.
The movie “3 Idiots” questions the very meaning of success at every stage. Rancho, the central character questions evaluation systems and artificial deadlines. He emphasises on innovation, ideas, the joy of learning. For him success that is de-linked from excellence is no success at all.
There is plenty of literature available about how success is the ultimate measure of performance. So much so that there exists a loss of ability to differentiate between effort and excuse, value generation and task accomplishment. There are very few who have the ability to redefine and challenge the meaning of success itself and they differentiate .
There are a lot of managers in the corporate world who boast that the sky is the limit and in the same breath state that failure is not tolerated. This is an inherent contradiction The larger the expectation, the larger should be the tolerance for failure. On the contrary, successful managers do not talk about sky but stay on the ground. They do not talk about failure, but consolidate success at every stage.
First kind of managers believe “creating fear of failure” is the strictest way of achieving success. They consider controlling the people is the best way of preventing failure as people are the greatest source of failure. They tend to micromanage people. When you interact with such managers closely, some of them are uncertain of results, methods and directions. Empowerment to the right persons is also a big no-no for them. They cannot remove hurdles and frequently change decisions. This may result in success or failure, but certainly not in excellence.
Second kind of managers, micromanage process and provide only a framework with empowerment. They are certain about the success from the phase of conception. They consider micromanagement as necessity for providing a discipline for success and not an instrument of penalizing for genuine failures or a substitute for creativity at every step. This certainly would result in success and excellence.
Success and failures are outcomes of specific activities under specific conditions. Activities and magnitudes by themselves do not signify anything in specific, excellence is the true measure of performance.
The question that arises is what all these examples mean in reality. What is the true relationship between success, failure and excellence? We need to realise that true success and genuine failure both are linked to excellence. True success is like the tip of the iceberg. The invisible ice below stands like a rock that will not allow that tip to get washed away. It is a consolidated, hardened base built from genuine failures.
Excellence, Success and Failure are interwoven. Revisit this statement with all practical examples around you; you shall realize they cannot exist without each other. All efforts to isolate them are misdirected. Any person who demands success by killing excellence and penalizes for failure cannot light the Edison lamp irrespective of how many times he reads or hears his story.
The statement of Thomas Alva Edison, “I know 10000 ways that will not work before the first success” is genuine and arises from humility. It is as illuminating as his invention itself.:-
Bol Madhavache 