Make Smarter Mistakes

To be sure, the process of manufacturing mistakes requires real diplomatic skill and tenacity. Sara Hobart had long discussions with her lead programmer about his career goals. "I needed to convince him that he would be on another project that would be just as cool," she says. She also did a lot of "hand-holding" with her other developers. The Oracle manager "wisely understood that if you do it by fiat, you'll only get a lot of resistance, anger, and backlash," says executive coach Karen Otazo. "You have to allay fears, let people see what's in it for them."

Still, even the most avid proponents of doing the right thing acknowledge that there's a danger in doing it too often. "A person who is highly self-coached is aware that he or she can improve in virtually every dimension," says Matthies. "But you can't have 15,000 lessons. You have to pick those that are ripe to be learned now."

Otazo agrees: "If you're constantly tweaking, you're going to be constantly throwing people off their stride."

VI. Sometimes the best fix is a quick fix.

Moments of truth. opportunities for improvement. captured learning. For people struggling to keep up with the dizzying pace of life inside startups, professional service firms, and other fast-growing companies, getting smarter about mistakes can seem like a worthwhile goal that's out of reach. Who has time for official postmortems or learning plans? Especially when, as Matthies puts it, "the next round of mistakes is around the corner."

If you're adept at self-coaching, he says, you can learn the most valuable lessons from your mistakes within minutes after they happen -- if you actually use those minutes to think about what went wrong. "Never miss a chance to be observant and evaluative," Matthies advises. Even groups of people can work together this way, picking up lessons without the benefit of formal sit-down meetings or elaborate lesson plans. "A good team doesn't need to do a formal evaluation any more than two musicians hanging out together do," says Matthies. "They need to be co-coaches, constantly asking one another questions like 'How are we doing?' 'What did we get out of this?' 'What did you see?'"

That's precisely what happened with the executives at US Interactive. During the course of one 20-minute conference call among President and CEO Larry Smith and his five partners, the team decided to sell the company's struggling ad-sales unit and shift the resources to their main business, which is building Web sites and helping their corporate clients develop Internet strategies. "The reality at this company is that my partners and I share information all the time," says Smith. "So by the time we had the meeting, all I needed to say was, 'Here's the situation and here's the opportunity,' and everyone agreed."

Smith has a point -- up to a point. Most experts are skeptical of people who claim that their business simply moves too fast for them to analyze their mistakes. "Speeding up the process doesn't mean turning off the reflective part of your brain, which unfortunately is what a lot of people do," says Matthies. The quick fix, he warns, usually is just a cop-out - an easy way to avoid taking a tough look at what went wrong and at what it's going to take to prevent it from happening again.

"In companies that value passion and creativity over discipline and focus, people often claim they don't have the time to evaluate their mistakes. I would argue that you don't not have the time," adds Bill Rosenzweig.

There's no mistaking the wisdom of that point.

Pamela Kruger (kruger@is4.nyu.edu) writes on business and women's issues from New York City.