Everyone makes mistakes—every entrepreneur, every business leader, every employee but changing them in to a great opportunities is a great thing . The mark of a great company isn’t that it avoids failures—that’s impossible—but that it has the wisdom to take full advantage of them.
History is in fact full of such brilliant mistakes. A notable one occurred in the early 1960s at MIT. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz had just completed a large round of simulations of a weather system and wanted to repeat the experiment over a longer time frame. Rather than waste valuable processing time, he manually typed in final numbers from the results table. To his surprise, the second simulation diverged radically from what he expected. He puzzled about it for days. Then it struck him: he had entered numbers using a computer printout that rounded all numbers to three decimal places, whereas the computer stores six decimal places. This tiny rounding error pushed the second simulation onto a markedly different path. In that sense, the exercise was a failure.
The Lorenz example illustrates the two prime ingredients of a brilliant mistake:
1. Something goes wrong far beyond the range of prior expectation; and
2. New insights emerge whose benefits greatly exceed the mistake’s cost.
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