Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation
by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes
Copyright 2002 by The Free Press, a Division of Simon and Schuster
Price: $22 • Kindle Edition: $14.99

Get going now! This one will change the way you look at life and business. This book gets it right from the very beginning. The premise is that relying on conventional, outmoded ideas about success and failure stands in the way of your ability to innovate, compete and stay ahead of the curve in a changing economy.

I confess that I just finished reading this book for the second time. The first time was in 2002 when it first came out. The most impressive thing I found when re-reading it was that the ideas presented here are actually more relevant today, almost 10 years later, than they were at the time of publication. How often can you say that about a business book?

Authors Farson and Keyes have it dead right when they say that we have new problems that require new solutions and that we have to face the future with an open mind, unbiased by the way we've done things in the past.

Here are several gems from this short volume (just 129 pages).

"Nothing succeeds like failure ... If you're not failing you're not trying ... Nothing fails like success ..." and then the title, of course, which states that "whoever makes the most mistakes wins."

I really support the statement that nothing fails like success and find it applicable to so many situations that all of us are facing today, not only in our own businesses but in all business. This axiom is universal, but here are several real life examples from our own industry.

Many companies I work with have completely screwed up their pricing structure by winning an order they shouldn't have won and at a price they shouldn't have gotten. Once in a blue moon, a customer is desperate enough to buy boards at a price that is much too high, for whatever reason. Most of the time, the customer is aware of the inflated cost, but because he is in a bind he feels that he has to make the purchase. Now this is a good thing for the vendor, right? No! It's terrible, because now that vendor, on the basis of that one time when he got away with an inflated price, will try to do it again and again and again, getting to the point where his win/loss percentage will now be at least 10 points lower than it should be. Think about how much business he will be losing based on this false precedent.

Here's another example. A new salesperson comes on board like a house on fire. She wants to try all kinds of sales and marketing tactics that she used successfully at her previous company. But instead of encouraging her to go for it, her manager squelches her creativity and ambition because of a bad experience he had 10 years ago, when he tried a similar tactic and one of his customers complained! Think about that for a minute. Because one customer complained about a promotional deal the company ran 10 years ago, nothing like that has been tried since ... or will be if he has anything to say about it.

So if you're ready to stop the insanity ... if you're ready to open up your mind ... if you're ready to start trying hard enough to fail once in a while ... then take a small risk first by picking up this book. Read it and get motivated to head in the right direction. Do it now! Right now!