30 March 2002
MISTAKES AND FAILURES
I like sharing my views with others. One time when I chatted with my supervisor, I said, "One night, I saw one English program called 'CEO Exchange' and in that program, the CEO of HP when asked about how she faced the mistakes made by her employees, she responded, 'We need to differentiate mistakes from failures, one makes mistakes every day but one doesn't make failure every day. When there is a failure, one should see whether it is an execution failure or it is a policy failure. You may have a right policy but the execution is not in the right form, or you may have a wrong policy.'" I said I found her analysis very meaningful.
Afterwards, my supervisor received a phone call from her secretary, "Mr. X of ABC Co. called me? Why he called me? ¡K He found a problem in the letter we sent him? The figure we are going to charge him was not correct? We charge him $500,000 but we wrote on the letter $5,000,000?¡K How come you made such mistake (sighing)¡K What? Nora wrote this figure? ¡K" When my supervisor has finished her call, I immediately smiled and told her, "This is a mistake, not a failure."
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