Learn from Your Mistakes

‘Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.’
BILL GATES, BUSINESS @ THE SPEED OF THOUGHT, 1999

     It is notable that many of the world’s greatest sportsmen report that the satisfaction they get from their greatest victories is relatively short-lived. Their desire to go on to scale new heights depends less on recapturing the joy of triumph than on avoiding failure. This is a trait that Gates shares.


Revelling in success is not for him. Instead, his face is always turned towards the next challenge. As he put it in 1995’s The Road Ahead: ‘Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.’

It was a topic he had discussed a year earlier in an interview with Playboy. Then he had observed, ‘Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I have some latent fear. I consider failure on a regular basis.’ It is the ever-present concern that one is about to be found out that has driven him to cast an ultra-critical eye over achievements that most mere mortals would take as evidence of sublime excellence. In his 1999 investigation into modern entrepreneurship, Masters ofEnterprise, H. W. Brands quoted Gates thus: ‘I’ve always been hard core about looking at what we did wrong. We’re not known for reflecting back on the things that went well. We can be pretty brutal about the parts that don’t do well.’

Despite creating the world’s leading software firm and becoming the richest man in the world, Gates still has a few mistakes to mull over. In the early stages of Microsoft’s growth, his single biggest regret was allowing a Utah-based software business, Novell, to steal a march in the then emerging field of local area networks (LANs). LANs are networks into which several computers may be hooked up within a defined geographical area. In replacing the previously dominant mainframe computer model, they were vital in birthing the PC age. And Gates hated missing that particular boat.
Another notable failure was Microsoft Bob, an animated character the company released in the late 1990s to provide user help. Unfortunately, it was a piece of software that required such high-spec hardware on which to run that it often proved more a hindrance than a help and failed to win many fans. On that occasion, Gates concluded that the company had overdelivered beyond what the market was ready for. (For the record, it is to be hoped he did not go to town berating the project’s manager, who just happened to be one Melinda French – the future Mrs Gates.)

But for Bill Gates, every failure is ultimately an opportunity to be better next time. As he put it in 1998:

There is a tendency in companies to let good news travel fast. Oh, we just won this account. Oh, things went so well. But the thing about good news is, it’s generally not actionable … Bad news, on the other hand, is actionable … The sooner you get the bad news, the better off you’re going to be, in order to kind of absorb it, to change your product plan, to go back and talk to the people, really dig into it.