Peter Drucker is always an interesting read and clearly was way before his time. BusinessWeek.com provides an article titled Drucker’s Take on Making Mistakes. The article is filled with many great points so it is difficult to highlight just a handful. Here is the gist of the article (emphasis mine):
A batting-average mentality, he added, allows for companies to accommodate different kinds of talent. “One man will consistently do well, rarely falling far below a respectable standard, but also rarely excel through brilliance or virtuosity,” Drucker wrote. “Another man will perform only adequately under normal circumstances but will rise to the demands of a crisis or a major challenge and then perform like a true ‘star.’ Both are ‘performers.’ Both need to be recognized. But their performances will look quite different.
“The one man to distrust, however, is the one who never makes a mistake,” Drucker continued, “never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do. He is either a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.”
And then there is this one:
“Nobody learns except by making mistakes,” Drucker wrote in his 1954 landmark book, The Practice of Management. “The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make—for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top-level job who has not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise, he is sure to be mediocre. Worse still, not having made mistakes he will not have learned how to spot them early and how to correct them.”
Spot them early, a great point wouldn’t you say? Read the entire article.