See how an infant, when she sees a new object, immediately reach out for it, her natural curiosity and lack of fear evident in the instinctive response of reaching out. While adults, conditioned by an almost Pavlovian fear of pain, retribution or often refuse to take risks.
Have you ever wondered how far each one of us would fly, if we could just get over the fear of falling? See how an infant, when she sees a new object, immediately reach out for it, her natural curiosity and lack of fear evident in the instinctive response of reaching out. While we adults, conditioned by an almost Pavlovian fear of pain, retribution or just failure quite often refuse to take risks in the quest of greatness and settle for the safe cloak of mediocrity.
The fear of failure is a worry, sometimes visible and often dormant that guides all too many actions in life and work. It starts at home in early childhood with a list of dos and don’ts prescribed by well-meaning parents and grandparents and gets reinforced by school teachers, college professors and finally obsessive bosses in organisations who throw the “Key Result Areas” list at us with alarming frequency, ostensibly to keep us on our toes but more often than not to keep us fearful about the consequences of failure.
At the school and college level, most Western educators have realised the value of learning rather than teaching and encourage students to experiment, ask questions and make mistakes on the voyage of discovery. In the corporate sector too, early experiments have begun in encouraging entrepreneurial risk taking and encouraging big dreams that go beyond traditional KRAs and Balanced Business Scorecards. As we enter into increasingly complex business and political environments, both in India and abroad, every company will have to see the value of encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit and building true leaders. Indeed one of my favourite definitions of a leader is one who does not believe in creating dozens of worshipping followers but creates an environment of empowerment where every individual is encouraged to embark on their own personal voyage of leadership
An environment that truly demonstrates “no fear of failure” will have to be built and maintained assiduously by the leadership of every institutions in the country
While the organisations I lead, Zensar Technologies and Zensar Foundation are far from perfect when it comes to this capability, there are a few early signs that demonstrate that we are on the right track. At Zensar, our innovation journey, has been well chronicled by Prof.Michael Tushman a global Guru on ambidextrous innovation in the case study on our company which was developed and taught at the Harvard Business School. In the early days around 2002, when we were just a small firm with employee count of less than a thousand, we realised that to make our mark we needed a fresh point of view and the only way to do it was to assemble a truly entrepreneurial team and give them the freedom to build and practice innovation. The creation of the “Solution Blueprinting” approach which obviated the need for programming in the process of building computer applications for business and the creation of an independent profit centre called Innovative Technology Solutions, which later empowered the entire applications management group was one of the key reasons for our success through the next ten years of growth. Similarly in NASSCOM Foundation, our ability in the last year to double our revenues and triple the amount of funds companies entrust to us to deploy “technology for good” has been an outcome of our initiative to give young people a free hand to design programs that meet the needs of our companies and the end beneficiaries in the country.
There is a joy in unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit that can only be experienced when you make it happen. Here is encouraging all you readers to give it a try!
by Ganesh Natarajan
