Posted by Lisa Hochgraf
Two nights ago, my Mac laptop apparently didn't shut down properly. I should have made sure it was down. But because I didn't, my battery was totally dead when I went to log in to CUES yesterday morning. So I waited for it to charge, until I got a phone call from my esteemed colleague Mary Wood, CUES' information systems manager, with this sage advice: "Take the battery out and force it to run on A/C power." Yet another set of tricks to add to my telecommuting bag. Generally I'm pleased with how well telecommuting works for me, but learning from this kind of mistake just makes it go better and better.
Another mistake from the past that made me better, especially because of the way my boss handled it was this one: I had the job in the early '90s of getting the CUES logo printed on some cardboard photo frames. When the frames came back from the printer, the logo made the frame clearly "vertical," while our group photos of CEO Institute grads were most definitely horizontal. Feeling bad that what I remember as hundreds of frames were wrong (surely it wasn't as many as I remember), I created a mock-up for the printer showing where the logo was supposed to be, and offered to pay for the second go. My then-and-now boss, CUES VP/Publications Mary Arnold of CUES Skybox fame, said I didn't have to pay--it was a small price for so much learning. It's pretty easy to admit this morning's mistake to Mary, based on our history of treating one-time mistakes as times of learning.
So this reflection on mistakes and how they make you better makes me ask you: What mistakes have you (or your organization) made that have made you better? And, how have those around you helped or hindered your ability to learn from your mistakes?
