Risk Archives - Page 4 of 15 - understand-culture

Moonshots and Career-Limiting Moves

Moonshot. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an extremely ambitious project or mission undertaken to achieve a monumental goal.”

Swing for the fences. In baseball, this means to swing as hard as possible to hit a home run, which increases the chance of missing the ball. At work, it means to do something extremely ambitious, “especially rashly.”

Career-limiting move. This is an action that endangers “one’s future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one’s job.” It is also called a CLM.

A Bonus for Ending Your Project

X, the research lab of Google’s parent company, calls itself “the moonshot factory.” Its head, Astro Teller, explained the name in a 2016 talk: “We use the word moonshots to remind us to keep our visions big, to keep dreaming.”

In the same talk he described a rule. “We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.” One project that X ended was automated vertical farming. Teller explained the reason for the bonuses: “We work hard at X to make it safe to fail.”

What Did You Fail at This Week?

Sara Blakely, who founded Spanx, tells a story about her father. At dinner he asked his children: “What did you guys fail at this week?” If they had nothing to report, he was disappointed.

Blakely says the question “taught me to define failure as not trying something I want to do instead of not achieving the right outcome.”

A Conference About Failure

On October 27, 2009, the first FailCon met at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco. There, startup founders and investors talked about their failures. The conference came a year after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By 2013, local organizers ran FailCon events in ten cities.

Cassandra Phillipps, a co-founder, told Fortune that failure is not taboo in the Bay Area. Then she added that “being in the midst of a failure still is.”

Nine Thousand Shots

In a 1997 Nike commercial, Michael Jordan arrives at a stadium and walks to the locker room. His voice says: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs ended his 2005 commencement address at Stanford with a farewell he had read as a young man. The last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, from October 1974, had a photograph of a country road on its back cover. Under it were the words “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Jobs told the graduates that he had always wished this for himself, and now wished it for them.

Here’s to the Crazy Ones

In 1997 Apple launched an advertising campaign called “Think different.” It began a few months after Steve Jobs returned to the company as interim CEO. The television commercial, narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, opened with these words: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.”

It ended: “Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.” The agency was TBWA\Chiat\Day. The campaign went on to play a key role in Apple’s recovery.

The Man in the Arena

On April 23, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the Sorbonne in Paris. One passage became famous in the United States. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” This man, “if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” His place will never be with “those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Americans still quote the passage. Richard Nixon used it, and so did Barack Obama. Cadillac built a 2015 advertisement on it that ended with “dare greatly.” Tom Brady named a documentary series Man in the Arena. In 2012 Brené Brown called her book on vulnerability Daring Greatly.

To Boldly Go

Almost every episode of the original Star Trek opened with the same narration, spoken by William Shatner. “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!”

The series began in 1966. Star Trek: The Next Generation kept the narration in 1987, spoken by Patrick Stewart. The “five-year mission” became a “continuing mission,” and the crew would now go “where no one has gone before.” The split infinitive “to boldly go” became widely known through the opening of the series.

The Debt Bankruptcy Does Not Erase

Most unsecured debts can be wiped out in bankruptcy. Student loans are an exception, and Congress narrowed the way out in stages. In 1976 it made “undue hardship” a condition for discharging government student loans in their first five years. In 1998 it removed the last other route. In 2005 it added private student loans to the list.

In practice, most courts apply a strict test. Among other things, the borrower must show that he or she “cannot maintain, based on current income and expenses, a ‘minimal standard’ of living.”