I read a fantastic post the other day by Kevin Roberts, worldwide CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi and prolific writer at his own blog KRConnect. Kevin’s post covers to a number of factors:

1. It’s time to learn how to take smart risks.
2. Learn from your mistakes quickly – siting an example of Warren Buffett.
3. Get out quickly when you sense something is wrong. Something that Felix Dennis (of the book “How to get Rich” – not to be mistaken with any of the Kiyosaki books) suggests.

Smart risks are still risks that we take, but are not random attempts to come up with something dramatic. To take a smart risk you still need to know what you are trying to do and at the same time you’re sensitive to the course that you are following so that you can quickly respond when it or an aspect of your product becomes a lemon.

This implies:

• Trying stuff because experience tell’s you it should work without the years of research and focus groups etc that most large corporate’s invest in before they come up with something “new”.
• When you see something going wrong, identify it and get out or even better,
• Fix it and move on.

But for corporate’s where this agile culture is aggressively discouraged it is difficult because:

• The sponsor is rarely directly involved in the work.
• Management of the outcome is often decided by committee.
• The motivation to succeed is often driven by the wrong incentive – deadlines and short term incentives – and the ultimate recipient (consumer, end user) is often disappointed with the final result.
• The Risk Management Committee and executive often stamp out any likelihood of innovation – preferring the conservative.

Could you imagine if companies flaunted focus groups in favour of evolving products with our help. If companies actually tried to get things right through incremental experimental, simplicity and continual improvement.

Would we be in this financial global crisis right now? Companies often spend millions on long term developments that finally tank because the business case was blown or simply because noone can remember why they are doing it. Sometimes these things are perpetuated because noone has the cajhones to stop or even reevaluate.

This is obviously a little harder to run with in the wine industry because the chances you take on a varietal take 3 years to produce enough of a harvest to even make wine with. And if it tanks then…it’s more than an oops. But this is where experience counts the most – you kinda know what works, you have your finger on the pulse and are able to make these decisions based on sound logic – and more than a little risk.

Most of the great entrepreneurs have failed many times before they succeeded. Where is this pioneering spirit now? Time’s are tough, but the best time to change that stiff corporate thing is now. I am not saying “throw caution to the wind”. I am saying pull your best together and see what they come up with. Spend where it will make a difference.

Try, fail, learn and fix – FAST!!! And be remarkable.

Thanks to Kev for the inspiration.