Enjoy making mistakes!

I love teaching at Business Schools because it gives me an opportunity to interact directly with the bright young minds that are going to be involved in managing India Inc., in the future. I get to see them here, as it were, “in-process”; in a formative stage. They are fluid; somewhat confused; yet rigid in their confidence in their own inte

lligence.

I tried to make this current group of MBA students at GITAM appreciate the need to be flexible in their approach to resolving managerial issues.

Most engineers as well as finance professionals have passed through an educational system that consistently rewards being right and punishes being wrong. While this approach is perfectly justifiable with respect to exact sciences and like Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Arts like Accountancy, it is dangerous in an MBA program where abstract ideas are being shared and compared.

To demand a right or wrong answer for a case study would be inappropriate. Approaches can be discussed and their pros and cons analyzed or even debated. Reasons can be attributed for success for success or failure of a company. Generic learning should be derived there from.

When a participant in an MBA program sticks to his view as the “only” correct one, he is regressing back to his “Right vs. Wrong” learning patterns that exclude by definition all information that contradicts this view. This could even lead to totalitarian attitude that could be dangerous to the organization if present at the middle or senior levels of management.

During the session, I made an impassioned plea to the students to “enjoy making mistakes i.e. being wrong!” One of the students a smart and vociferous communicator, Indrajit Bannerjee stood up and politely made this point:“Sir, we do things to be right. We don’t do things to be wrong! So you are wrong to say that we should enjoy being wrong!”

This was followed by heavy applause from the class.

I was impressed by his words. I decided to take my own advice and enjoy being wrong! Yes! He is right! You don’t set out to make mistakes and get things wrong. You plan to get things right!

The point is what you do when you are clearly shown as being wrong. Are you willing to listen and see other perspectives to understand where you went wrong or are you busy defending your concept of “Right”? This is the essence of the art of learning from mistakes with joy. How we deal with failure determines our ability to succeed. What you do when you’re wrong influences your ability to be right!