Re:Root cause of failure, root cause of success
by kqr on Sunday August 15, 2021 @09:34AM
(#28188658)
There's a similar Toyota story, where the blueprints for a model of their automatic loom was stolen.
Toyoda was not shaken in the least by that, because in his view, the important information were all the failed attempts that lead to the design, and those weren't in the blueprints. "By the time they've taken their copy of that model to the market, we'll have innovated past that, and they won't be able to keep up because they haven't learned from our mistakes."
Thomas Edison is supposed to have made hundreds of failed attempts to get the filament of his light bulb working reliably before his first success.
A smart aleck reporter asks him; "Mr. Edison, don't you think you are more of a failure than a success given the ratio of your failed attempts to successful outcomes?.
Edison replied; "No, because i am the only person in the world who knows hundreds of ways of how NOT to make a light bulb filament"!.