Ghumakkad Harsh: Learning from Failures

Thursday 25 October 2018

Learning from Failures

“I flunked in my first semester.”

“Me too!”

Sounds familiar? We are not talking about the other kind of #MeToo!

But what happened after the first semester? Did you bounce back? Most people did.

And that’s the point.

Did we learn from our failures in life? If we did, then we are on our way to success.

As Swami Vivekanand had said, “Take risks in your life. If you win, you can lead. If you lose, you can guide”. We can help others not to repeat the mistakes we did. This applies equally well to the Startups.

As part of the core course ‘Entrepreneurship and Startup Management’ in the PGDM program being taught by me, we included the topic ‘Learning from Failures’. The course participants had learnt all the foundation courses in Finance, Economics, Marketing, Statistics, IT, Operations, OB, HRM, Accounting, Business Laws, BRM etc in Semesters 1 and 2. Therefore, they were in a position to apply that knowledge to real life situations.

To make it more experiential, we assigned one startup each to a group of students. These startups had all been closed down or panic-sold in last twelve months. Each group had to study and analyse the failed startup and identify the reasons for failure. They were given 12 hours overnight to present their findings in the class. Although the mid-semester exams were on, the participants did a great job at researching and analysing. This post summarises the ‘Learning from Failures’ for few of the startups studied.

Note: Our analysis is based on information available in open domain. The purpose of the study is for education and learning. It is not to be viewed as being judgmental. Should any reader like to supplement it with more facts and figures, we would be happy to update our analysis.