失敗為成功之母

這句話我們從小就知道。 

底下這篇文章有趣的地方在於其例子，例如愛因斯坦 (Albert Einstein) 是全班唯一沒有找到教職的，其中一位老師覺得他是最懶惰的狗 (laziest dog)；貝多芬（Ludwig van Beethoven) 的音樂老師告訴其父母，貝多芬因太笨將無法成為一位作曲家。

對於大四正在找工作的同學們，不知道是否有從這些故事得到啟示？

Famous Failures 
By Michael Michalko
May 11, 2012

Synopsis: You have to learn how to fail in order to succeed. Here are some famous failures from history.

When people speak of a “fear of failure,” they are really describing a hazy free-floating malaise and feeling of worry or discontent which induces lethargy and explains lack of effort. This malaise protects us from the anxiety that comes with freedom and taking risks. We tranquilize our lives by limiting the amount of anxiety that we experience by not trying anything new or different that might fail.

Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else or producing something else. You have not failed; you have produced some other result. The two most important questions to ask are: “What have I learned?” and “What have I done?”

Failure is only a word that human beings use to judge a given situation. Instead of fearing failure, we should learn that failures, mistakes and errors are the way we learn and the way we grow. Many of the world’s greatest successes have learned how to fail their way to success. Some of the more famous are:

• Albert Einstein: Most of us take Einstein's name as synonymous with genius, but he didn't always show such promise. Einstein did not speak until he was four and did not read until he was seven, causing his teachers and parents to think he was mentally handicapped, slow and anti-social. Eventually, he was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School. He attended a trade school for one year and was finally admitted to the University. He was the only one of his graduating class unable to get a teaching position because no professor would recommend him. One professor labeled him as the laziest dog they ever had in the university. The only job he was able to get was an entry-level position in a government patent office.

• Robert Goddard: Goddard today is hailed for his research and experimentation with liquid-fueled rockets, but during his lifetime his ideas were often rejected and mocked by his scientific peers who thought they were outrageous and impossible. The New York Times once reported that Goddard seemed to lack a high school student’s basic understanding of rocketry. Today rockets and space travel don't seem far-fetched at all, due largely in part to the work of this scientist who worked against the feelings of the time.

• Abraham Lincoln: While today he is remembered as one of the greatest leaders of our nation, Lincoln's life wasn't so easy. In his youth he went to war a captain and returned a private (if you're not familiar with military ranks, just know that private is as low as it goes.) Lincoln didn't stop failing there, however. He started numerous failed businesses, went bankrupt twice and was defeated in 26 campaigns he made for public office.

• J. K. Rowling: Rowling may be rolling in a lot of Harry Potter dough today, but before she published the series of novels, she was nearly penniless, severely depressed, divorced, trying to raise a child on her own while attending school and writing a novel. Rowling went from depending on welfare to survive to being one of the richest women in the world in a span of only five years through her hard work and determination.

• Walt Disney: Today Disney rakes in billions from merchandise, movies and theme parks around the world, but Walt Disney had many personal failures. He was fired by a newspaper editor because, "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas." After that, Disney started a number of businesses that didn't last too long and ended with bankruptcy and failure. He kept trying and learning, however, and eventually found a recipe for success that worked.

• Harland David Sanders: Perhaps better known as Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, Sanders had a hard time selling his chicken at first. In fact, his famous secret chicken recipe was rejected 1,009 times before a restaurant accepted it. He learned not to fear rejection and persevered.

• Thomas Edison: In his early years, teachers told Edison he was "too stupid to learn anything." Work was no better, as he was fired from his first two jobs for not being productive enough. Even as an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. One day, an assistant asked him why he didn’t give up. After all, he failed over a thousand times. Edison replied that he had not failed once. He had discovered over 1000 things that don’t work.

• Ludwig van Beethoven: In his formative years, young Beethoven was incredibly awkward on the violin and was often so busy working on his own compositions that he neglected to practice. Despite his love of composing, his teachers felt he was hopeless at it and would never succeed with the violin or in composing. In fact, his music teacher told his parents he was too stupid to be a music composer.

• Michael Jordan: Most people wouldn't believe that a man often lauded as the best basketball player of all time was actually cut from his high school basketball team. Luckily, Jordan didn't let this setback stop him from playing the game and he has stated, "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

• Stephen King: The first book by this author, the iconic thriller Carrie, received 30 rejections, finally causing King to give up and throw it in the trash. His wife fished it out and encouraged him to resubmit it, and the rest is history, with King now having hundreds of books published and the distinction of being one of the best-selling authors of all time.

• Bill Gates: Gates didn't seem destined for success after dropping out of Harvard. He started a business with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen called Traf-O-Data. While this early idea for a business failed miserably, Gates did not despair and give up. Instead he learned much from the failure and later created the global empire that is Microsoft.

• Henry Ford: While Ford is today known for his innovative assembly line and American-made cars, he wasn't an instant success. In fact, his early businesses failed and left him broke five times. He was advised by countless people not to get into the manufacturing of automobiles because he had neither the capital or know how.

• F. W. Woolworth: Some may not know this name today, but Woolworth was once one of the biggest names in department stores in the U.S. Before starting his own business, young Woolworth worked at a dry goods store and was not allowed to wait on customers because his boss said he lacked the sense needed to do so. Woolworth also had many ideas of how to market dry goods - all of which were rejected by his boss. His marketing ideas became the foundation of his phenomenal retail success with his own stores.

• Akio Morita: You may not have heard of Morita but you've undoubtedly heard of his company, Sony. Sony's first product was a rice cooker that unfortunately didn't cook rice so much as burn it, selling less than 100 units. The rice cooker was the object of scorn and laughter by the business community. This did not discourage Morita and his partners as they pushed forward to create a multi-billion dollar company.

• Orville and Wilbur Wright: These brothers battled depression and family illness before starting the bicycle shop that would lead them to experimenting with flight. They were competing against the best engineering and scientific minds in America at the time, who were all well financed and supported by the government and capital investors to make the first airplane. After numerous attempts at creating flying machines, several years of hard work, and tons of failed prototypes, the brothers finally created a plane that could get airborne and stay there.

• Vincent Van Gogh: During his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only one painting, and this was to a friend and only for a very small amount of money. While Van Gogh was never a success during his life, he plugged on with painting, sometimes starving to complete his over 800 known works. Today, they bring in hundreds of millions of dollars each.

• Fred Astaire: In his first screen test, the testing director of MGM noted that Astaire "Can't act. Can't sing. Slightly bald. Not handsome. Can dance a little." Astaire went on to become an incredibly successful actor, singer and dancer and kept that note in his Beverly Hills home to remind him of where he came from.

• Steven Spielberg: While today Spielberg's name is synonymous with big budget, he was rejected from the University of Southern California School of Theater, Film and Television three times. He eventually attended school at another location, only to drop out to become a director before finishing. Thirty-five years after starting his degree, Spielberg returned to school in 2002 to finally complete his work and earn his BA.

• Charles Darwin was chastised by his father for being lazy and too dreamy. Darwin himself once wrote that his father and teachers considered him rather below the common standard of intellect. When Charles Darwin first presented his research on evolution, it was met with little enthusiasm. He continued to work on his theory of evolution when all of his colleagues called him a fool and what he was doing “a fool’s experiment.”

The artist genius of the ages is Michelangelo. His competitor’s once tried to set him up for failure or force him to forgo a commission because of the possibility of failure. Michelangelo's competitors persuaded Junius II to assign to him a relatively obscure and difficult project. It was to fresco the ceiling of a private chapel. The chapel had already been copiously decorated with frescoes by many talented artists. Michelangelo would be commissioned to decorate the tunnel-vaulted ceiling. In this way, his rivals thought they would divert his energies from sculpture, in which they realized he was supreme. This, they argued, would make things hopeless for him, since he had no experience in fresco, he would certainly, they believed, do amateurish work as a painter. Without doubt, they thought, he would be compared unfavorably with Raphael, and even if the work were a success, being forced to do it would make him angry with the Pope, and thus one way or another they would succeed in their purpose of getting rid of him.

Michelangelo, protesting that painting was not his art, still took on the project. In every way it was a challenging task. He had never used color, nor had he painted in fresco. He executed the frescos in great discomfort, having to work with his face looking upwards, which impaired his sight so badly that he could not read or look at drawings save with his head turned backwards, and this lasted for several months. In that awkward curved space, Michelangelo managed to depict the history of the Earth from the Creation to Noah, surrounded by ancestors and prophets of Jesus and finally revealing the liberation of the soul. His enemies had stage managed the masterpiece that quickly established him as the artist genius of the age.

漢威聯合 (Honeywell) 如何逆轉？

圖片來源 Economist, Honeywell International: From bitter to sweet, Apr 14th 2012. 

成功的祕訣？豐田式生產系統 (Toyota Production System, TPS)！

2002 年，David M. Cote 被任命為 Honeywell 的執行長，提出專注在五項關鍵動力 (1)，其中的 Honeywell 維運系統和機能革新 (Honeywell Operating System (HOS) and Functional Transformation) 就是根據 TPS。

在對人的尊重 (Respect for people) 方面 (2)，要求基層員工每個月提出兩個改善工作的點子 (3)。當然，心態與行為的調整是需要長時間的努力。

在消除浪費 (Elimination of waste) 方面，使用顏色管理，例如開會於 15 分開始，一到 30 分時，壁鐘的底色由綠轉紅，提醒大家 15 分鐘已經到了；在地上噴上職務頭銜的漆，以瞭解誰忘了參加會議 (3)。

Cote 相信做對的事比快速重要，所以初期的實驗必須不斷地修正與調整，確定此方法的效用後，再廣泛地推廣到所有的工廠。HOS 大大地提升了員工的生產力，以在 Lincolnshire 的工廠為例，生產毒氣偵測器的時間從 42 天變成 10 天。到了 2011 年，公司在 8 年之間增加了 72% 的銷售，利潤成長雙倍而變成 40 億美元 (3)(4)。

(1) 五項關鍵動力採用了平衡計分卡的策略架構

(2) 根源於日本的文化和二戰戰敗的背景，TPS 的兩大基石是對人的尊重和消除浪費，參見 J. Magretta 著、李田樹譯，管理是什麼，天下出版，第 194 −197 頁中有趣的描述。有別於傳統的觀念，對人的尊重相信第一線員工的智慧，授予 (持續) 改善 (continuous improvement) 生產線運作的權利與責任。

(3) Economist, Honeywell International: From bitter to sweet, Apr 14th 2012. 

(4) Economist 屬於報章雜誌，報導的內容較為一般性。如果想深入瞭解某議題，需要看專業的期刊，例如 Interfaces。

快速時尚 Zara 的降價策略

驚人的成效 (圖片來源, Zara 的發音)

在一季中，Zara 的主要競爭者提供約 2000 到 4000 件商品，但是 Zara 卻提供平均約 11,000 件的商品。原先 Zara 使用人工決定換季大拍賣的折價價格，作者使用數學模型來處理此問題 (註 1)。

美國中西部 13 州電廠的最佳化運作

因應電力的自由化，美國中西部 13 州的電廠聯合成立了 MISO (Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator) 以提昇營運效率。 

MISO 使用整數規劃 (integer programming) 以決定會員的某電廠是否要開或關，以最小化成本；限制有傳輸線的流量、預備電力的下限、運作成本、開關電廠時限等等。

在 2007 到 2010 間，節省 21 到 30 億美元；預估未來的 10 年將節省額外的 61 到 81 億美元。本論文因此得到年度的最佳論文獎　(Franz Edelman Award)。

Brian Carlson, et al., MISO Unlocks Billions in Savings Through the Application of Operations Research for Energy and Ancillary Services Markets, Interfaces, January/February 2012, 42:58-73.　

零售業的火箭科學 (Rocket science retailing)

錯的產品訂太多？對的產品訂太少？報章雜誌幾乎天天報導這些情形。訂太多，賣不出去，只好降價賣出。訂太少，賣不夠，潛在的收入機會不見了 (1)。 

如何解決？因為資訊技術和定量方法的進步，零售業所提供的機會就像是 70 年代的金融業一樣，這本書便是作者和學生的研究成果 (2)。除了一般供應鏈的問題外，例如良好的預測、彈性的供應鏈、協調，作者提供了許多可行且頗具成效的方法 (3)。但是，因為這是一本商業的書，所以免去了複雜的數學 (4)，只使用四則運算和離散機率來描述一些重要的概念。

討論的公司來自於 (第二章) 餅乾、輪胎、(第三章) 女人衣服、鞋子、玩具、(第四章) 腳踏車、(快速時尚) 衣物、(第五章) 錄影帶出租、家俱、消費性電子產品、醫療用品、滑雪衣物、汽車零件、(第六章) 書店、大賣場、辦公室用品、小家電。

當然，任何方法的實現脫離不了人的問題，舉兩例說明之：

消費性電子產品商 Bryn Mawr Stereo 以銷售額的 0.2% 到 5% 做為店經理　(store manager) 獎金，短少的部份 (例如偷竊) 全部由店經理賠償，於是，店經理把許多的精神和人力用來防弊。經營權改變後，改成至多 20% 做為獎金，短少的部份則賠償至多 20%，店經理改用較多的精力來銷售，結果增加了　9.94% 的銷售額和　$8,834 美元的短少，總共增加 2.5% 的利潤。由此可見獎勵 (incentive) 措施強烈影響一個人的行為。

作者的研究顯示，增加第一線服務員工 1 美元的薪資可以提高平均 3.81 美元的毛利，報告給廠商聽時，其中一位執行長 (CEO) 的反應是 "I spend my days saying no to a long line of people suggesting ways to spend money, including adding store staff. I don't need a couple of Ivy League professors with their fancy statistical analysis giving them more ammunition." (5) 

(1) M.L. Fisher, A. Raman, and A.S. McClelland, Rocket science retailing is almost here, Are you ready?, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2000.

(2) Marshall Fisher and Ananth Raman, The New Science of Retailing: How Analytics Are Transforming the Supply Chain and Improving Performance, Harvard Business Press, 2010.

(3) M. Fisher, Rocket science retailing: The 2006 Philip McCord Morse Lecture, Operations Research, Vol. 57, No. 3, May-June 2009, pp. 527-540. (圖 4、8、15) 全文  

(4) 例如 
(第二章) 取代率、maximum likelihood estimation 
(第三章) 報童問題 (newsvendor problem) 
(第六章) 使用　statistical process control 找出缺貨機率
(第七章) 使用 (財管)　call options　來評估　RFID　(而不是 ROI)
書末有相關論文的資料 

(5) 作者分別任教於哈佛大學和賓州大學商學院