Goldman's post notes that social entrepreneurs are especially bothered by failure. No surprise there. Nobody likes to go down in flames, but watching your dream die with you? Now, that really hurts. Goldman advocates for a larger body of research on the failure of social ventures, as well as more open sharing about failure by social entrepreneurs. She says this may allow us to extract lessons and historical insights. We can thereby learn about failure's positive effects on entrepreneurs, their fields and the other/future players in them, which Emily alluded to in her blog post last week.
I would argue that when it comes to social ventures, we need to avoid equating failure with its definition for standard business ventures. For the latter, staying in business equals success. But for social ventures, I believe it is enough simply to test a theory of what the world could be. If you believe in the potential for your venture to change the world, then whether or not it actually does, you succeed simply by putting it out there and finding out whether it sticks.
Guy Kawasaki's blog post Art of Bootstrapping recommends "Ship, then test," and while I would usually raise an eyebrow at such advice, I have to agree insofar as getting feedback is already one form of success. I would even take Kawasaki's advice one step further in light of social entrepreneurship--shipping is testing. Because as much as you believe you are experimenting with a social venture, you are at the same time testing and teaching yourself.
Coming back to Goldman, every kind of experience is a good experience when you learn from it. So thank you to Paul van der Boor, and thank you to all of you who teach the rest of us from your mistakes along the way.
Russ,
ReplyDeleteExcellent post and reflections on failure on Paula Goldman's blog and responses from social entrepreneurs in the field. It vividly brought up the fact that while we want to distinguish ourselves doing something "unique" that benefits society, we ourselves are all-too-human as individuals living within society. The posts of entrepreneurs who paid a high personal cost for the success/failure of their ventures were very poignant. So did Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi and every other reformer who challenged prevailing social norms and power structures and effected soical change. While social partnerships make powerful allies, one also creates powerful enemies. It is a scary thought, but if you die doing something you loved and were passionate about seems to me, to be the best way to live one's life to the very end. One's family may not agree with this view, and do pay a high price, but death, divorce, disease are factors we cannot control.