Last year when I interviewed Sir Terry Leahy, then Tesco's chief executive, he described his approach to innovation as taking little bets. "If you don't constantly take survivable risks there comes a time when you have to bet the company," he said. That is the key message of this book, whose subtitle could be "how to fail successfully".
One advantage of making small bets is that you learn to cope with failures and to take lessons from them. Continual failure is essential for success, but only in the right environment. Factors that contribute include honest assessment of results, fearless and open experimentation, and a playful attitude to ideas.
Sims explains concepts with diverse examples including US comedian Chris Rock testing new material, the huge success of a firm owned by Steve Jobs (Pixar, not Apple) and architect Frank Gehry. This is the story of innovators unafraid to try new things. By working on a small, affordable scale, good ideas can flourish, while failures don't cause too much damage. The book includes plenty of failures turned into vital lessons or runaway successes.
