Nobody’s Perfect

CEOs aren't perfect, no one is perfect. I certainly am not perfect, and having the courage to show that to employees is really important. And what happens when the boss shows vulnerability is that people start relaxing, are willing to be vulnerable, and talk about their mistakes as well. And that's where a lot of good things are going to happen.

Is there an example of a mistake that you made that you can share with us? And how did you communicate that to the staff?

Oh, my goodness, a ton of mistakes. I mean, that's my daily life. I've launched products that have been failures, and often I talk about those when we have discussions about new product launches and research that we do prior to launching the products. And innovation is a funny animal where, you know, it's about data, but it's also about experience, and it's about intuition again, lots of things come into play. Learning from failures is really important, and I like to -- innovation is a topic that makes people uncomfortable because there's imperfect information and there's high risk. And the way to calm people down is always to talk about innovations that over the decades are brought to markets that were not successful, and there's many of them, trust me. Talking about that also, again, makes people relaxed and also shares in the learning and hopefully allows people to avoid the mistakes that I've made.