 | Good Morning edwardlorilla1986.paxforex@blogger.com, I entered business journalism quite by accident in 2008. One of the first (and brutal) lessons I learned was to not drink the Kool-Aid of my own writing, when my very first draft was slashed down nearly 80% in length. I’m only mildly paraphrasing what one of my editors told me after cutting out the bulk of a story I’d spent months working on: “Nobody wants to read your tome of a research report!” The second thing I learned is that developing trusting relationships with industry leaders and sources takes a lot of time. Since then, things have only gotten worse on that count. For reasons too many and too complex for this edition, it’s become harder for business journalists to develop trusted relationships with powerful and influential leaders, including founders. Most are guarded, scripted, and filtered through layers of officialspeak. Not Vineeta Singh, the spirited and driven co-founder and CEO of Sugar Cosmetics. I met her at a recording studio in Mumbai last October for the first time and came away thinking she was an exception to the rule. Vineeta was candid, unfiltered, cheerful, and trusting through the nearly two hours that we spoke for First Principles. I spoke to Vineeta earlier this week, with a view to seeking out her favourite First Principles. We spent the first 10 minutes on the call talking shop, cracking jokes, and just letting off steam. It was fun! We then moved on to discussing the First Principle that Vineeta relied on most frequently as Sugar’s CEO. It would have to be the concept of “fail forward”, she said. “Failing forward” is the counterintuitive (or perhaps common-sensical) principle that holds failure not as an obstacle to our success, but a prerequisite. Most failures represent the collision of our ambition, tenacity, and effort against reality. If we aren’t failing every now and then, perhaps we aren’t doing things that are ambitious? Remember that adage, “we miss 100% of the shots that we don’t take”? It’s easier to visualise if you think of Michael Jordan as the one missing the shots. |  | | I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six 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. | At Sugar, Vineeta and her co-founder (and husband) Kaushik Mukherjee, have made failing forward a key part of their corporate strategy. Most companies stigmatise failure. But many, including us at The Ken, openly talk about accepting failure. A handful go about celebrating it. Sugar goes even beyond and publishes it! These are the covers of the two books published by them cataloguing various failed efforts by people and teams within the company. |  | Vineeta told me that Sugar tries to encourage more of its employees to see failure as a prerequisite for success. “Every year we collate over 150 failure stories, and then publish 25-30 into a book,” she says. Why? “Because organisations and Indian culture make it harder for people to accept failure. And they try to avoid failing.” Is it working, I ask Vineeta? “Yes!” She tells me about a colleague who tried, unsuccessfully of course, to create an NFT line for Sugar. Another wanted to experiment with “home sampling” (sending product samples to customer homes). “As a founder you know that (home sampling) is done to death, but if people want to still experiment around it, we let them do it while keeping budgets under Rs 1 lakh (US$1,200). We want to let people try,” says Vineeta. She also tells me about how “contouring palettes” became Sugar’s leading product due to such an experiment that was run during the Covid years. “Instead of saying yes or no to an idea, we try to reduce our risk by limiting exposure to less than Rs 1 lakh and then take a call.” In the process, she says, she looks for the people who are demonstrating ownership, taking risks and innovating. Failures are also discussed and celebrated during Sugar’s annual events, says Vineeta. “And not just at a surface level, but we go through the decisions, the steps, the problems, etc., in depth. If you don’t remind people often, it dies out. And then, you have people thinking LinkedIn viral posts are what failure is for.” Kaushik, the person whose idea it was to celebrate failures by publishing them, says that the books alway get a lot of questions from his colleagues—"why are we investing time in this?". But he says he'd like to believe that walking the talk on failures will help Sugar take more risks and create opportunities for more moonshots. What Sugar is doing is best understood through a 2016 Harvard Business Review article called “Increasing your Return on Failure”. | But there’s a way to resolve this conundrum: Rigorously extract value from failure, so you can measure—and improve—your return on it, boosting benefits while controlling costs.
In a return on failure ratio, the denominator is the resources you’ve invested in the activity. One way to raise your return is by reducing this number—by keeping your investments low. Or you can deliberately sequence them, starting with small amounts, until major uncertainties have been resolved.
The numerator is the “assets” you gain from the experience, including information you gather about customers and markets, yourself and your team, and your operations. Increasing these is the other way to boost your return. | | | We all know the theory. Where it fails inside most organisations is in execution. Because our actions speak louder than our words. If leaders talk about accepting (or celebrating) failure, without demonstrating it through their day-to-day actions, employees are right to not take risks. If those who take risks and fail find their careers plateauing, while those who pick “safe” projects are rewarded, failing is a risky career choice. Vineeta Singh of SUGAR Cosmetics talks about building products, educating consumers, and focusing on the long term | 3 November, 2022 | And in case you still haven’t heard it, here’s the latest episode of the First Principles podcast, with Varun Dua, the founder of digital insurer Acko. Varun Dua of Acko on learning to let go in order to grow | 20 July, 2023 |  | If leadership is a ladder, we often make the mistake of thinking that the CEO title sits at the apex. Instead, leadership is a journey. And the best founders know that to create organisations that outlast them, the CEO title is but one milestone in their journey. The road doesn’t end there. Varun Dua co-founded Acko—a digital-first insurer most recently valued at over $1.4 billion. He was also Acko’s CEO before hiring a seasoned insurance industry leader to take over that role. That’s not the only thing different about Varun. He freely admits that as a graduate, he was super lazy and had neither a plan for his life nor any interest in being an entrepreneur. His dream at one point was to get hired by eBay or Cleartrip. Thankfully for him, neither of the companies hired him. So, he ended up starting one company, which morphed into another firm, which morphed into Acko. Along the way, he went from super lazy to super driven. | | | I began this newsletter edition with two of the learnings that have stuck with me over my career as a journalist. I’ll end with a third, which is one of my all-time favourites because it relates both to writing and organisational strategy. “Show, don’t tell.” Don’t tell your readers or your employees what is important. Show them. Thanks for reading. Regards, Rohin Dharmakumar fp@the-ken.com | | | | |
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