15 Lessons from the Greatest Business Failures of All Time

Max Nisen writes about the fifteen lessons one can learn from the greatest business failures of all time on the Business Insider war room.

James Dyson on leveraging failure to reach success

James Dyson talks to Entrepreneur about leveraging failure for success - click here

Tom Peters thought for the day

"At every Exec Group meeting, set aside a 15-minute block to discuss a "dumbest thing we've done lately" item—insist that members bring a case along for discussion." See the original post here.

Putting Failure in its Place - HBR Post

Whitney Johnson has published a short and engaging piece on managing failure on the HBR blog. Put Failure in its Place - by Whitney Johnson

Shades of Failure

"And what color is the sky?" I ask my three-year old* in that cutesy voice parents reserve for their children. "BLUE!!" comes the unequivocal reply.

We've all been conditioned to see the world in unequivocal terms. The sky is blue, trees are green, roses are red… I was not surprised to find that a majority of people associate failure with the color - think about it for a moment - yes, black. Success is most often associated with the color white. We wear black to attend funerals. Brides wear white dresses to their wedding. But are things really that simple? No. Consider that in many cultures the dead are dressed in white. And grooms often wear a black tuxedo to their wedding. Bridal gowns are not always white. And not everyone dons a black suit to a funeral.

Black and white are extremes. Just like the sky isn't blue, there is an infinite spectrum of shades and colors between black and white.

So what color do you most associate with failure now? Is there really such a thing as complete and utter failure, a failure so grave that we could only color it in solid black?

Tell me, I'd love to hear from you.

*My daughter is now 16...this was written back in 1999 while I was still at Stanford.

More on VC Failure - The Kauffman Foundation Report

A reader recently shared the Kauffman Foundation report, and it's quite an incredible piece of testimony against the VC industry...

The Kauffman Foundation is a $2 billion foundation and one of the 30 largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. Kauffman focuses on two goals: advancing entrepreneurship and improving the education of children and youth.

Over the past 20 years the foundation had invested in approximately 100 different VC funds, and therefore has a unique set of statistics on the performance of the VC industry. The results of Kauffman's analysis are staggering in their implications:

Since 1997, investors poured more cash into VCs than VCs had distributed to investors (!)

Only 20% of venture funds managed to beat the market by more than 3% annually

62% of funds failed to exceed average market returns (!!)

The average VC fund FAILS to return investor capital (!!!)

There is a lot more of interest in this report to anyone that has anything at all to do with start-ups, entrepreneurship, innovation and investment.

To access the full report, click here.

To view a video explaining the foundation's findings, click here and then click on the video link.

As could be expected this report received widespread coverage, here are some of the more prominent analyses and discussions:

Geekwire

cnet

CNN

Can Apple keep churning without Jobs? Will Apple fail?

From the Guardian:

The post-Jobs Apple has a different flavour under Tim Cook
A year after Steve Jobs's death, the replacement for the seemingly irreplaceable co-founder has made the company more ethical – and yet more profitable