[MUSIC] In this next section, we're going to shift gears a little bit and we're still going to focus on what helps drive innovation. What drives effective entrepreneurship and we're going to look at it through from a different angle. We're going to take a look and say, what other resources might we be able to incorporate to help drive that next innovation, that new venture that we're thinking about. And one resource that typically has been overlooked is this resource of failure. Now, as I shared with you earlier, I wrote a book about this which was published recently. It's called The Other "F" Word. How smart leaders, teams and entrepreneurs put failure to work. And our impetus for writing this book, why did we write the book, is, we noticed, as I've shared with you during this particular lesson, that the way that we think about and teach entrepreneurship and innovation has changed. It's become far faster, it's become far more iterative. The approaches that we take incorporate a broad variety of inputs in real time to be able to help understand what works and what doesn't work. And when something doesn't work, smart entrepreneurs, smart innovators, take insights from that particular failure or mistake, or bad outcome, negative outcome, assess it and roll it into more successful opportunities in the future. Now, what we noticed here in the San Francisco Bay Area, is as this practice around entrepreneurship and innovation was shifting, people were starting to pay much more attention to those outcomes from failure, as many people observe Silicon Valley is one of those few places where it's okay to fail. And it's okay to fail not just once or twice, but multiple times, as long as you're able to take learnings from that failure and put it to work. In fact, when entrepreneurs recruit other entrepreneurs or team members, they often ask, what if you fail that? And what did you learn from that failure? So, I've observed this up close and personal for many years. But the other thing that I've observed, is once I get outside of this region and I start talking about how we can better leverage failure to business executives in large global enterprises. Or internationally, to executives in organizations around the world, this willingness to leverage failure, to embrace failure as a strategic resource is very different and that's why John and I wrote this book. We wanted to be able to share our experiences and insights, to share the experiences and outcomes of hundreds of companies and entrepreneurs, which were evolved in the research that we did for this book, to others around the world to say, here is another resource that you need to leverage and that resource is failure. Now let's start this discussion with a recognition that failure happens a lot. Failure happens far more often than success, including in many areas where you would expect success rates to be much higher. Quickly walk down this list, Micheal Jordan, arguably one of the best basketball players or the greatest basketball players of all time, although I'll say our Golden State Warriors with Steph Currie is doing pretty darn well these days, missed more field goals than he made throughout his career. VC funded startups, if you move up to the green line. 75% of start ups that attract venture capital, which means that they are the most vetted of these start ups, fail to return even the amount of money that's invested in them to their investors, three out of four fail that fundamental. Do you do New Year's resolutions? Do you make those New Year's resolutions, well 88% of New Year's resolutions fail. It's one of the reasons we get to make New Year's resolutions every year. How about patents? Here in the United States, 99 out of 100 patents fail to create value, fail to generate revenues or income for their patent owners. So failure is much more prevalent than success across so many of these different arenas. In fact, during the second world war the U.S. army came up with their own term for this. And you may know this word, it's called SNAFU, which means something is just not going right. But it's actually an acronym. And it's an acronym for the other F word. It's Situation Normal All Fucked Up.
