In an earlier video in this module, I talked about the firm with Tom Cruise. Let me give you another story about another movie. It goes back a little bit that I think is a good segue into an important point. And the movie is called The Perfect Storm. Do you remember that starring George Clooney? And if you remember in that movie, George Clooney is the captain of a ship of fishing vessel and the Perfect Storm referred to literally three storm systems that were hitting all at once. So very unusual doesn't happen too often, but they were hitting all at once. And so in the movie, George Clooney's, he needs the money and his crew needs the money. And so while a lot of ships were not going out because this Perfect Storm is being, was forecast, he goes out. And he's out and see out to sea and things are going okay and they're getting a great catch of fish. They're starting to begin their return back to ports. But the storm hits water flying everywhere and tremendous rocking of the ship and they're fighting valiantly and they're trying to keep the ship afloat. But in the end they couldn't do it, and in the end the ship went down and sank and the Crew died and George Clooney died. And I most certainly have told you how this movie ends if you haven't seen it before. So, spoiler alert out the window, but the term The Perfect Storm has since that time entered our kind of business vernacular. And I've heard a lot of people say it over the years. And what are they saying? You see a senior executive get up in front of a town hall or a meeting or it could be in the business press on TV. And he says we didn't, we ran into some trouble, we didn't do so well, and here are the reasons why it happened. In fact, I even interviewed for one of the books that I wrote why smart executives fail. I even interviewed a CEO of a company in the healthcare business actually was in the, it was an HMO, Health Maintenance Organization. And it's a company that has fallen apart. And I asked him what was going on and he said it was a perfect storm. And what did he mean? He says well, in fact what happened is it was my CFO, my Chief Financial Officer really didn't keep us in the best shape financially throughout this problem. And the regulators in New York State, it was a New York state based company. The regulators in New York State didn't, they had it out for me, I don't know why they had it out for me. And the doctors that were using, they were part of our system, they didn't really understand how the whole thing was. I mean, he went on from one thing after another, after another. And had all these reasons and he said it's this perfect storm of all these quote, unquote, unexpected things happening all at once. And what are we really talking about, right? It's not The Perfect Storm, it's The Perfect Excuse. And what you're really saying is don't blame me, it's not my fault, right? That's what we're saying. And that is no way to run a company, again, it gets back to this kind of cultural thing. And here's the thing I want you to keep in mind. If something goes wrong, that you had a role in that you were responsible for in some way, whether it was really all about you or you were one of many people, what should you do? What would make you better off, would you be better off kind of sweeping it under the rug? Not telling anyone hoping it goes away or would you be better off talking to your team and sharing with your team and trying to learn from it? It sounds like a debate, right? But let me ask you, which will give you more credibility? Do you think that if you were involved with a mistake and by the way, this is the same question you could ask yourself within your own family in your own personal life? If you did something wrong or bad or involved somehow in a mistake business or personal in your personal life, do you think you're the only one who knows it? Do you think it's a secret? It is not a secret, people know it, everyone, almost everyone is going to know it or usually knows it. And therefore the question is, do you get more credibility by kind of pretending it didn't even happen when everyone knows it happened? Or do you get more credibility by saying, you know what it didn't work out? So well, I had something to do with that, I could have done this a little bit differently and then in a business setting in particular. But same thing applies for personal lives as well. Well, this is what happened, this is what went wrong. I want to learn from this, and this is what I want to do to make sure it doesn't happen again, which gives you more credibility. The way I just said it's pretty clear, right? Logic tells you that when you own up to what went wrong because people know about it and you try to make a negative into a positive, you're going to get respect. You're going to get credibility, but so often we do this kind of sweep under the rug and we're just hurting ourselves. So you only can learn from a mistake if you want to learn from a mistake, right? People often say, how many times have you said? Yeah, we people learn from their mistakes. I could tell you having spent a lot of time studying this and working with a lot of people on this. People don't learn from their mistakes, it's not automatic. You have to work hard, you have to invest some of your own ego into trying to learn from mistakes. You will not learn if you don't, first of all acknowledge really, step one that you had a role in it. You had something to do with it, if you've got to acknowledge that. And then you've got to say, here's what I'm doing to make sure I'm not going to make the same mistake, and I want to share that with everyone else. I want people to know about that, I want us to understand that. So learning from mistake requires number one actually admitting something went wrong, and then going about the task of trying to figure out what you can do to try to solve that. This idea I'm talking about is very, very simple, but because it's about human nature. And because we have so many barriers and protective barriers around us, it becomes much more complicated than it really needs to be. There's a famous story about Tom Watson who was a longtime CEO at IBM for decades. And it was about a young person that made a big mistake, an accounting error. And it was like almost a million dollar mistake and you go back a few decades, a million dollars was real money. And he was called up to the to the CEO's office to Mr Watson's office and he was several levels below. He was terrified and he comes in and he's shaking and he's sitting down in his chair and he's waiting to hear. Tom Watson kind of throw the book at him and kick him out and tell him you'll never work again and all this. And they talk a little bit about what went wrong and then Tom what Mr Watson says, okay, you can go back to your desk now, I'm expecting more from you. And this young person couldn't help himself and he says, you mean I'm not going to get fired? And Watson says why would I fire you? I just invested a million dollars in you, different way to think about things, right? All of us can do that.
