The Importance Of Failure And Success

1 INTRODUCTION “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill

Failure and success are often seen as dichotomies of one another in the context of business, that is failure is the opposite of success or vice versa. However, in recent history the business landscape particularly that of the rise of entrepreneurs has led the ground work towards embracing failure as an important constituent for future accomplishment. Many of the world’s most successful business man come from a background of both personal and professional failures, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, both of whom dropped out of colleges and have a long list of botched ventures prior to achieving the successful ventures that have established

One could assert although a business may have been discontinued it could be seen as a success given it introduced a new way of doing things or dramatically changed the way in which consumers interact with a product, such as the example of Napster. While the business failed as a result of many legal challenges from the music industry (King, 2015), in due course this business venture succeeded in altering the way in which people can listen, share, and acquire music, paving the way for many copycat ventures, including ITunes, Spotify, and Tidal just to name a few. The implications for this lack of clarity on defining failure, perhaps suggests that failure can mean many different things to many different business ventures and people, consequently so should the measures of success. For the purposes of this paper we argue that business failures should be loosely defined as ventures that have failed to meet a minimum level of feasibility as set out by the business. And for the case of entrepreneurial ventures, it would be the hopes of the entrepreneur themselves that have not been met by the undertaking. Just has failures adaptable definition provides for many different interpretations so too does how such failure is perceived, with a particularly important moderator of this perception being that of the external