Be Fearless

by Jean Case

  Sony set Marvel on the unlikely course of becoming a successful film studio—so successful that it was purchased by Disney in 2009 for over $4 billion. For Marvel knew what Sony could not grasp and would not risk: that there was an appetite for a range of characters. The Marvel blockbuster Black Panther was not only a financial hit but also, with its nearly all-black cast, a cultural phenomenon. Within a month of its release, it had earned $1 billion worldwide, and it is now the third-highest-grossing movie of all time in the United States.

  There was a big player behind the scenes in this drama—the Walt Disney Company. Disney was smart enough to acquire Marvel just as it was beginning to thrive, and for the last decade, under the leadership of CEO Bob Iger, Disney has undergone its own radical reinvention to stay ahead of the times. Iger has faced threats from all sides—not the least being the growth of streaming services—with an eye to the future more than to the past. He recognizes that the Disney “brand,” so iconically built and cultivated by Walt Disney, needs to keep pace in a market that has changed rapidly. Sentimentality can lead to paralysis and narrow thinking. Iger is determined to not let that happen to Disney.

  “If you want to thrive in a disrupted world, you have to be incredibly adept at not standing still.”

  —BOB IGER

  Even individuals often are unwilling to put at risk what they have achieved. It’s not surprising that so many breakthroughs come out of desperate situations, where there is little to lose. The more we rack up success, the less willing we often are to put it on the line.

  Having said that, of course people and organizations vary in their willingness to try new things, so it’s important to measure your capacity for risk. The annals of history are replete with ideas and companies that had great ideas that failed and have now been forgotten. And for every AOL, there are lots of examples of companies and ideas that went the way of The Source and GEnie, two online efforts that didn’t break through. Once you know your risk tolerance, you can begin to build a framework that either adheres to it, limits it, or seeks to stretch it. Start by knowing who you are. Then find your courage.

  For many people, regrets in life often aren’t tied to things they have done, but rather to those things they wished they had done but simply did not. Is there a Big Bet or bold endeavor that calls to you but you’ve convinced yourself can’t be done? The stories in this chapter demonstrate the power of seizing the moment, and highlight the regret that comes from choosing a more comfortable path or tuning out the voice calling you to something transformative. When you consider getting out of your comfort zone and trying something new to advance your Big Bet, make a point of writing down the downside of not taking the risk.

  TEN

  NOW GO, FIND THE “COURAGE ZONE”

  Here’s the reality: greatness doesn’t come from the comfort zone. That’s true both personally and professionally. The “courage zone” is often where we see really exciting things happen. You might take a measured risk, or experiment until you get it right. But whatever your process, embarking on an experiment whose outcome you can’t predict takes courage.

  In her book Stop Playing Safe, author Margie Warrell introduces the concept of moving from a mind-set of fear to one of courage. She writes that the process starts with a basic challenge: “Know your why.” That is to say, the courage to pursue bold actions comes when you’re in tune with yourself and what matters to you. Warrell notes that studies done around the world show that up to 50 percent of the global workforce don’t believe that what they do matters. You can’t achieve great things if you don’t pursue what matters to you.

  In a goal-centric world, it’s easy to think of success as the point where you feel comfortable. For many people, getting established in a chosen career is grueling. During periods of struggle, one can easily linger on the vision of a time when worries cease. But if you’re trying to make a bold change in the world, you have to keep pushing forward.

  It’s this constant quest that distinguishes you. But that doesn’t mean you have to jump off the next cliff you see. Start by being a good observer. Take note when you witness a bold action. And take small bold actions yourself every day. When you do one small thing you didn’t think you could, it strengthens you for the next.

  Experiments are happening all around us. But in this fast-paced world, we can’t always wait for a thirty-year study and a double-blind test group. We can’t wait for the perfect set of circumstances—as we’re finishing one experiment, we need to be thinking about the next. And when we think a certain intervention is working, we have to take a peek down the road to see what new dynamics could challenge our assumptions or provide an even better solution. It’s this type of thinking that has kept companies like Apple ahead, while less nimble and often bigger players have fallen behind. It’s the scariest thing in the world to change your business plan, or your life plan, in midstream, but who among us would rather be Blockbuster than Netflix?

  “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  Having said that, boldness isn’t recklessness. Take a lesson from companies like Zappos, and be bold one step at a time. Advance steadily. Let iteration be your friend. Progress often means borrowing the lessons and perfecting what has come before with a bigger, better bet.

  If there’s a problem you’re burning to address—whether with a new business, a new product, or a new social enterprise—before you do anything else, educate yourself about who has done what to attempt to solve that problem. Learning what iterative steps have already been taken can save you precious time and money. Look at successes, look at failures. Remember, it doesn’t take a genius to accomplish something great. Just be a good sponge and go from there.

  The truth is, I was uncomfortable with risk for most of my life. I still struggle with being fearless. But what I can do is find the discipline to face down my fear and take those first steps forward. My guess is that you can too.

  PART THREE

  MAKE FAILURE MATTER

  * * *

  Crash and learn

  Fail in the footsteps of giants

  Beat the odds

  Take the long view

  Now go, learn from failure

  ELEVEN

  CRASH AND LEARN

  My heart still skips a beat or two when I talk about my own failures. I’m not being glib. It’s easy to fall into self-doubt, recrimination, and even despair. Everyone has felt these emotions at some point in life’s journey—everyone! It’s what happens next that defines what we make of the experience. While not all failures have a happy ending, most happy endings have a failure story.

  If you examine the life of anyone who has achieved something extraordinary, you’ll find a story of failure somewhere along the way. Sometimes you really have to look for it, because too often as people advance through life they sanitize their stories, making it sound as if everything was carefully planned. But we do a disservice to others—especially to young people—if we aren’t honest about our failures. When I spend time on college campuses, I go out of my way to talk about my own “failure résumé,” recounting what didn’t go so right on my career journey, including some pretty epic failures. I usually do this after receiving a glowing introduction, and as I recount my failures, I see at first looks of disbelief in the audience. As I continue, however, I begin to see another emotion on the students’ faces—relief at the realization that you can fail forward to something better, or, as I like to quote from the Japanese proverb: “Fall down seven times; get up eight.”

  “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

  —ROBERT F. KENNEDY

  We all face personal failures, whether in marriage, in relationships, in social situations, or by letting others down. I certainly have. These are painful. However, failures in our professional lives are often much more public. I know this from experience. As I faced one of the most difficult failures of my career, I knew that I had a choice to mak
e: I could try to sweep it under the rug, sugarcoat it, or come clean.

  The program in question, PlayPumps, was one of the most ambitious and exciting initiatives launched at the Case Foundation. Our goal was to bring clean drinking water to ten sub-Saharan countries and hundreds of villages. We loved the technology—a way to generate clean water by using children’s merry-go-rounds to pump the water. Think of the merry-go-round as a windmill on its side. We knew people need clean water, and that children love to play. It seemed like a win-win.

  When we were first introduced to the technology and saw the business model for its deployment, we believed it had enormous potential. We jumped in to help create PlayPumps International–US as a fund-raising and marketing organization to support the initiative. We launched the effort with great fanfare at the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative, with First Lady Laura Bush on one side of me and former President Bill Clinton on the other. Also onstage with me were my husband, Steve, and fellow philanthropist Ray Chambers (now the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Health).

  There was a lot of early excitement about this new technology. Dozens of partners joined us in supporting the effort. There were some hiccups in the early years, but we patiently worked with partners on the ground to get things right, and we felt good about the progress.

  But as the years passed, questions continued to pop up, and we realized that the program wasn’t meeting the high standards required. Our team spent a year trying to address some of the shortcomings being reported in the field so we could get the initiative back on track. We came to realize that we couldn’t assure the scale or quality of the program on the ground. We had a hard choice to make, with three options. One was to stubbornly continue on a path that growing evidence suggested was unwise. A second was to pull the plug and invest the time and capital elsewhere. And the third option was to take a step back, regroup, and attempt to go forward in a new and more effective way. We decided that the third option was the right way to go. After all, our belief that clean water is one of the great causes of our time hadn’t changed. But we had to acknowledge that there were likely better ways to advance this cause. In May 2009, our board made the fearless decision to take a new course.

  I remember sitting around the board table, discussing how to make the announcement. We have glass walls at the Case Foundation, and everyone who looked in at us could see our dismay. It was excruciating, because in nonprofit work, people don’t want to talk about failure. We discussed backing out quietly, in the hope that perhaps the failure would escape public scrutiny. But in the end, we knew we had to own the fact that the opportunity we were chasing had turned into a challenge we could not meet. We hoped that by acknowledging our shortcomings, we could share lessons that might allow us and others to try new approaches that could work better.

  With my heart in my throat, I decided to make the most public pronouncement possible—to name the failure in a written piece, which I titled “The Painful Acknowledgment of Coming Up Short.” After I finished writing it, I had a moment of fear as I recognized what a big step it was to announce to the universe, “We failed!”

  What I could not have known as I sat there, too terrified to hit the send button, was that once my piece appeared online, I would begin getting emails and phone calls from people across the field thanking me for owning up to the failure in such a public way, and for revealing just how hard it is to get it right when you take on really thorny challenges. Reflecting back on our decision to be so transparent, I realize that, as difficult as it was, that moment represented the beginning of our Be Fearless efforts. And a new suggestion emerged from some of the respondents—the creation of a “safe table” for partners to come together to talk about their own failures, so the learning could be shared. The idea took hold, and some of the early meetings became broader gatherings. They were “fail fests” where we openly recognized that in trying to innovate and solve big problems, we wouldn’t always get it right. They represented a commitment to make failure matter by allowing others to learn from our mistakes.

  We also changed the way we assessed the outcomes of our work at the Case Foundation, instituting a green-yellow-red assessment scale. Green indicates that things are humming along, yellow that adjustments are needed. Red flags, an effort that may fail. Surprisingly, one annual review when I saw no reds on our various initiatives, I was concerned. I had a frank discussion with the team, pointing out that if we didn’t see at least some reds in our portfolio, we weren’t being bold enough.

  We at the Case Foundation dislike failure as much as anyone, but we know that if we chase extraordinary outcomes, we must take some extraordinary risks. No one gets fired or docked for outcomes that fall short if we are doing our part. Instead, there is a reward for going above and beyond to make Big Bets, take risks, and build unlikely partnerships.

  Sometimes pivoting off a failure means helping others win where we ourselves have failed. After we discontinued our support for PlayPumps, we created a new partnership with Water For People, which added PlayPumps as part of a larger portfolio of solutions from which rural African communities could choose. It’s a process that philanthropy expert Lucy Bernholz has described as “failing forward.”

  Since the work of the social sector often directly impacts people, and nonprofits are highly reliant on donor support, there tends to be less tolerance for mistakes, which leads many organizations to become risk-averse, and to hide errors. But when nonprofits aren’t transparent about their failures, they deprive others of necessary lessons.

  Making failure matter is also important for the private sector. Look at any great business today, and chances are that their road to success included low moments that required fresh thinking and important course corrections. Earlier in this book we introduced the X project, led by Astro Teller. Astro is not just comfortable with the idea of failure—he and his lab are in pursuit of it. Workers at X are expected to fail—it’s the way they figure out what works and what doesn’t. “The moonshot factory is a messy place,” Astro said in an exhilarating TED talk titled “The Unexpected Benefit of Celebrating Failure.” “But rather than avoid the mess, pretend it’s not there, we’ve tried to make that our strength. We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove that we’re wrong. That’s it, that’s the secret. Run at all the hardest parts of the problem first. Get excited and cheer, ‘Hey! How are we going to kill our project today?’ ”

  Astro isn’t being facetious. “We work hard at X to make it safe to fail,” he says. “Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they’re rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than thirty. We believe in dreams at the moonshot factory. But enthusiastic skepticism is not the enemy of boundless optimism. It’s optimism’s perfect partner.” It’s not for nothing that Astro has been dubbed “the father of modern failure.”

  However, Astro is walking in the footsteps of great inventors from long ago. Thomas J. Watson Sr., who built IBM, once said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” Good advice—and he would know. Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who shepherded IBM through the most difficult transition into the computer age and wrote Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? about his experiences, tells a story about Watson. In the years just after the Great Depression, Watson increased IBM’s inventories, hoping for revived demand for office machinery. He was counting on winning a government bid of a million dollars, a very large sum at the time. But his salesman failed to get the contract. Ashamed, the man showed up in Watson’s office and handed him a letter of resignation. “What happened?” Watson asked. The salesman launched into a thorough account of the deal, noting where mistakes had been made and what he might have done differently. When he was finished, Watson handed back the resignation letter and said, “Why would I accept this when I ha
ve just invested one million dollars in your education?”

  IBM has been a model of fearlessness for over a century. Under Watson’s leadership, it provided equal pay for women in 1935 (!) and took a stand against segregation in the American South in 1956, becoming one of the first companies to do so. It was also among the first to include sexual orientation as part of its nondiscrimination policies. Socially responsible and consistently innovative, IBM definitely embodies the spirit of its longtime leader. And today, Ginni Rometty continues this tradition as the first woman to serve as IBM’s chair, president, and CEO.

  • • •

  Meg Whitman, the only woman to have led two major US corporations, has demonstrated her own fearlessness in acknowledging and learning from very public failures. While serving as CEO of eBay in 1998, Meg had a choice—invest in upgrades for eBay’s existing website, or invest in a new, emerging Internet market, Japan. She chose the website investment. “That miss of eBay Japan is one of the big failures of my time at eBay,” she said in a CNBC interview. At the time, eBay was a young start-up with just $5 million in revenue, and struggling to scale the business. And while the failure cost the company an early lead in an important market, over time under Meg’s leadership, the venture grew to more than $8 billion in sales with operations in more than thirty countries.