«I Can Manage Failure on My Own, Thanks»: Why Analysing Failure Is More Useful Than Idolising Success.
«I can manage failure on my own, thanks.» The phrase sounds ironic, but it contains an uncomfortable truth: failure doesn’t require a great strategy. It’s enough to copy without understanding, to assume that context doesn’t matter, or to believe that others’ success can be replicated without nuance. Yet in the business world, we do exactly the opposite of what we should: we obsessively analyse successes and avoid looking at failures — when it is precisely there that the most useful lessons are hidden.
Survivorship Bias: Learning With Incomplete Information
We love studying companies that succeed: Spotify, Amazon, Tesla. We look at the decisions they made and turn them into dogma. The problem is that we are only looking at those who survived.
This is survivorship bias: we ignore the thousands of companies that followed similar strategies and failed. Not because they did everything wrong, but because context, timing, or small decisions made the difference.
Learning only from winners is like analyzing only the planes that return from a mission and forgetting those that never came back. Critical information often lies in what we don’t see.
Business Autopsies: When Failure Teaches More Than Success
Analyzing failures is not about assigning blame; it’s about extracting patterns.
Blockbuster didn’t fall because it failed to see Netflix coming, but because it defended its revenue model for too long. Nokia didn’t lose the market due to lack of technology, but because it treated the smartphone as a minor evolution. Many startups don’t fail due to lack of ideas, but because they scale before validating their economic model.
In all cases, the mistake wasn’t isolated but strategic: decisions that were rational at the time and, when accumulated, led to collapse.
Failing Well: Culture, Learning and Competitive Advantage
The most innovative companies are not those that fail less, but those that learn faster. To do so, they need cultures where mistakes are not punished but analyzed.
When errors are penalized, they get hidden. And hidden errors are always more expensive. Psychological safety allows teams to experiment, adjust, and correct before the market does it for you.
Failing intelligently is not about romanticizing failure; it’s about turning it into actionable information.
Key Lessons From Processes Reviewed by ST Strategy
After many years in consulting, we repeatedly encounter the same «common mistakes» across many of the companies we support. The most frequent are:
- Confusing growth with profitability.
- Failing to professionalize management.
- Lack of reporting.
- Misaligned shareholders.
- Excessive dependence on the founder.
- Growing without sufficient financing.
- Not preparing the company before seeking investment or pursuing a sale.
We always tell the companies we advise that the right question is not: «How did they succeed?»
Instead, it is: «What caused the other ten similar companies to fail?» We spend more time identifying risks than imagining perfect scenarios.
From our perspective, strategic thinking is about reducing the probability of failure, not chasing magical formulas.
Conclusion: We All Know How to Fail, Few Know How to Learn
Returning to the original idea: failing is something we can all do on our own.
What is difficult is learning from failure—both our own and that of others—before it becomes irreversible.
Success stories may inspire, but analyzing failure protects us. In strategy, avoiding repeated mistakes is often far more profitable than chasing exceptional success stories.