You have financial budgets for everything in your business, right?
Budgets allocate financial resources to the various departments in your business so that they can succeed in achieving their objectives.
But are you ‘resourcing risk’ – are you allowing for failure in your budgets?
Because on the road to creating something remarkable, you will almost certainly fail more than you succeed.
Even Bezos doesn’t always win.
In fact, on the way to creating the success story that Amazon is today, he sunk money into over 50 failed ideas, projects and products.
To the tune of over a billion dollars.
The Fire phone for example was a high visibility failure that burned through $170 million dollars in less than 2 years.
Bezos’ reaction?
“If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now — and I am not kidding,’ he said, ‘some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”
And he told Ian Freed, a key person in the Fire Phone project …
“You can’t, for one minute, feel bad about the Fire Phone. Promise me you won’t lose a minute of sleep.”
Bezos resources his failures.
He wins big by failing often.
He’s able to do that because he’s given his people the ‘emotional freedom to fail’.
And he backs them by creating the ‘financial freedom to fail’.
In other words, those failed ideas, projects and products need to be paid for in advance, because if they are not allowed for in today’s budgeting, they will have to be paid for out of tomorrow’s operational budgets.
And no one wants to shoulder the blame for that happening.
