“Hit it again!” said Wynton Marsalis.
Last Friday I heard a jazz concert by Stefon Harris, the incomparable vibraphone player. Harris is a brilliant up-and-comer, part of the rising generation to fill the shoes of those who built the house of jazz. A charismatic entertainer, his joy in making music is infectious and fills a place as large as Chicago’s Symphony Hall. Between numbers he told this story: “I was doing a performance with Wynton Marsalis and a collection of jazz greats. The part of the show came where I was supposed to do my riff and the other performers fell silent. I got going and at the very peak of the run I hit the wrong note! It was so obviously wrong that I froze. Then Wynton said, ‘Hit it again!’ That broke the ice. I did hit the wrong note again. The audience laughed and I completed the run. But I never made that mistake again.”
The story of Stefon Harris and Wynton Marsalis is about owning one’s mistakes. Doing so helps you to learn from the mistake and to regain momentum. Wynton seemed to be telling Stefon to acknowledge it and move on. This is good advice for students.
As a teacher, I’ve encountered some students each year who deny a mistake they’ve made, or their role in making it. “Your question wasn’t clear.” “The case is confusing and contains unnecessary data.” “This business problem is flaky/phony/incredible.” “My learning team got bogged down.” “The Internet went down.” “The spreadsheet locked up.” “It’s not my fault.” Each of these claims may be true; but it is also true that each day hundreds of other students manage to avoid the same mistake—there is something in individual behavior that gets things right. Much of graduate education is to discover what that “something” is. The biggest barrier to that discovery is denial—the reluctance to admit mistakes.
What is true at the level of the individual is also true at the level of the corporation or institution. In the past few days, leaders have owned mistakes primarily to get their organizations moving ahead. Stanley O’Neal, CEO of Merrill Lynch, announced a $5.5 billion charge and acknowledged mistakes in risk management related to sub-prime loans. Richard Brodhead, President of Duke University, apologized for the lack of full support for students charged with an alleged crime. Organizations can make mistakes; when they do, it is necessary to own up and move on.
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric said, “In everything that I have ever attempted, I have met with failure after failure after failure. I have learned that setbacks, disappointments and temporary failure are as normal and as natural as breathing in and breathing out. I failed in school. I failed in my first, second and third attempts to cross the Sahara Desert. I failed at different jobs, at least initially. When I began selling full time, I failed to make a sale hundreds of times. When I moved into management, I made an endless number of mistakes. At every part of my life and my career, I have had failures over and over again before I experienced success. What I have learned from failure is the necessity for persistence. Every single person who has ever achieved greatly has also failed greatly many times.”
The secret to persistence is the capacity to own one’s mistakes. It is exam time at Darden. Mistakes will be made. Students can freeze at this thought. But the advice of Wynton Marsalis is apt: “Hit it again”—accept the possibility of mistakes and the opportunity to learn from them. Then move on and grow in wisdom.
Posted by Robert Bruner at 10/09/2007 10:07:31 PM