I received my latest issue of Harvard Business Review to find an article titled Finding Entrepreneurial Opportunity in Adversity. There was a comment in the article about something apparently Machiavelli had said. “Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis”. The article went on to pull a quote from Michael E. Porter’s book entitled The Competitive Advantage of Nations “Competitive advantage emerges from pressure, challenge, and adversity, rarely from an easy life.”
I have participated in The Strategic Coach Program for over ten years and they also focused on what they called The Greatest Teacher I Ever Had which discussed the fact that “We rarely learn when things go well. Only when we fail at something do we open our minds and make the decision to change.”
I look for these types of lessons as I write discussion points for The Advisory Board Program®, our own proprietary business coaching program I created eight years ago. We adhere to the concept that we must all learn to embrace the failures in our life. There is a very short period of time, after something doesn’t turn out as planned, when our mind is open to change. We need to embrace those times. We need to learn as much as we can from those experiences, for it is only then that we get better. Be careful not to always point the finger at everyone else. Accept responsibility for your role in whatever has occurred, learn from the experience and let the wisdom accumulate.
