I have been thinking recently about what Obeo has-and has not-accomplished in the past year or so and I got a serious case of vertigo! But then the dizziness left and clarity set in.

What we have accomplished in the past year is impressive. Among other things, we have a completely new customer service department and telephone system, our IT department and associated build and deploy philosophies have been almost completely revamped, we have a first-time-ever outbound sales team that is doing a terrific job, our servers are now located in an off-site data center and last, but not least, we now have in place a very capable executive management team.

Unfortunately, we also failed in certain ways. We didn’t quite hit some of our new product launch dates, we’re still struggling with certain aspects of our back office systems and we still occasionally experience performance problems on the servers.

What dawns on me most of all, however, is how easy it is to focus on failures and dismiss the accomplishments! It’s easy to think that we are the “same old Obeo”, but that is simply not the case. It also occurs to me that failure is part of business and always will be. It hurts, but lessons are learned and progress is made. The ability to move on from failure is something that we all must learn. Stephen R. Covey said, “When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it – immediately.”

I have enjoyed playing a lot of sports in my life and one of the things that I learned early on is that you win some and you lose some. It always hurts to lose, but it’s part of the game. And sometimes, actually a lot of times, you can miss points, but still win the game, if you don’t lose heart.

I like several of the points made in this excerpt of an article that was in Business 2.0 magazine a while ago. We, Obeo aficionados should be able to relate …

“Failing fast isn’t just a strategy for startups. One of Silicon Valley’s best companies at managing failure also happens to be its hottest. “Fundamentally, everything we do is an experiment,” says Douglas Merrill, a Google vice president for engineering. “The thing with experimentation is that you have to get data and then be brutally honest when you’re assessing it.” When introducing new features, Google has remained true to a “fail fast” strategy: launch, listen, improve, launch again.”

“During the brainstorming for the Google Toolbar, for example, the development team tried about five times as many key features as made the final cut, and most were discarded within a week of testing. Several of the features in the final version, including custom buttons and shared bookmarks, were prototyped in less than a week.”

“Even when a feature is a full-blown failure, Google prefers to view it as an experiment that yielded useful information. That’s what happened with Google Answers, a four-year effort to build an expert answer service that was shuttered in November. “I don’t think Answers was a failure, because we incorporated a lot of what we learned into our new custom search engine,” Merrill says. “The failures are the things where you don’t learn anything.”

We’re not Google and we obviously can’t afford to fail as often as they have, but like Google, we are learning from ours and becoming a better company every day. Confucius says: “The greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fall.”

Have a great month!

Brent Gray, COO