The Mikitani Guide to Mistakes
We need to make more mistakes.
Of course this sounds counter intuitive – who wants to make a mistake? And in today’s competitive environment, who can afford to? But my point today is to address that very notion – that mistakes are always bad and bad for you and bad for your company. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not. The trick is to know the difference.
A tale of two mistakes:
Light mistakes. Rather than worry about making mistakes, I think we need to decide what type of risk we are taking. If it is not a big risk, then we should go ahead and do it. Even if we don’t hit a home run right away, we can test out our theory, make changes for the long term and ultimately find a solution. In doing this, we will try and fail and rack up a series of “mistakes” along the way. I call these light mistakes. I've made them from the very first days of my company when it took us six month of trial and error to create an interactive web store tool. We made many mistakes along the way, but eventually we got there. If we had avoided the effort out of fear of these mistakes, we would never have been successful.
Dangerous mistakes. Projects that involve a big risk for the company cannot be approached in the same way. These must be more carefully considered. Here is one again from my own experience. Once I tried to have Rakuten buy Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, Inc. (TBS). It was a mistake and not a light one. It cost us a lot of money and time. I am sorry I failed at that effort. It was not a light mistake.
My point is that some mistakes are worth making, because their impact is small and their possible contribution to a larger result is great. When I say, “make mistakes” I am not encouraging anyone go to go out and make the kind of dangerous mistake that hurts the company. But the light mistakes should happen all the time. We must be smart enough to know the difference.
My book: Marketplace 3.0
Of course this sounds counter intuitive – who wants to make a mistake? And in today’s competitive environment, who can afford to? But my point today is to address that very notion – that mistakes are always bad and bad for you and bad for your company. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not. The trick is to know the difference.
A tale of two mistakes:
Light mistakes. Rather than worry about making mistakes, I think we need to decide what type of risk we are taking. If it is not a big risk, then we should go ahead and do it. Even if we don’t hit a home run right away, we can test out our theory, make changes for the long term and ultimately find a solution. In doing this, we will try and fail and rack up a series of “mistakes” along the way. I call these light mistakes. I've made them from the very first days of my company when it took us six month of trial and error to create an interactive web store tool. We made many mistakes along the way, but eventually we got there. If we had avoided the effort out of fear of these mistakes, we would never have been successful.
Dangerous mistakes. Projects that involve a big risk for the company cannot be approached in the same way. These must be more carefully considered. Here is one again from my own experience. Once I tried to have Rakuten buy Tokyo Broadcasting System Television, Inc. (TBS). It was a mistake and not a light one. It cost us a lot of money and time. I am sorry I failed at that effort. It was not a light mistake.
My point is that some mistakes are worth making, because their impact is small and their possible contribution to a larger result is great. When I say, “make mistakes” I am not encouraging anyone go to go out and make the kind of dangerous mistake that hurts the company. But the light mistakes should happen all the time. We must be smart enough to know the difference.
My book: Marketplace 3.0
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