背景介绍：
我们每个人都会犯错。错误与发现、失败与成功之间究竟有着怎样微妙的关系？通过李锦裳发明蚝油、凯瑟琳·格雷厄姆掌管《华盛顿邮报》、亚马逊Fire智能手机失败等案例，本文揭示了错误往往孕育着新机遇。同时，文章也强调了正视失败、从中吸取教训的重要性，并引用艾米·埃德蒙森的观点，指出在复杂世界中追求卓越需承担风险，而关键在于如何改进以避免重蹈覆辙。
Why being
wrong is good for you
为什么犯错对你有益
Even the most
prolific blunderers can go on to do great things
即使是最容易犯错误的人也能取得伟大成就
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery,”
wrote James Joyce in “Ulysses”. In 1888 Lee Kum Sheung, a young cook in a
coastal province in southern China, forgot the oyster soup he was boiling on
the stove until it
simmered
down to a thick, sticky gravy.
詹姆斯·乔伊斯在《尤利西斯》中写道：“错误打开了发现之窗。”1888年，中国南方沿海省份的一位年轻厨师李锦裳在炉子上煮生蚝汤时，意外地忘了关火，直至汤液熬煮成了浓稠的肉汁。
Once he discovered how tasty it was, he decided to sell his “oyster sauce” in jars. That lucky mistake would make him and his heirs rich. According to Forbes, the Lee siblings—his great-grandchildren—are worth $17.7bn, making them the fourth-richest family in Hong Kong.
当他惊觉这一“失败品”竟拥有着难以言喻的美味后，毅然决定将其封装于罐中出售，并命名为“蚝油”。这一幸运的失误，不仅为他个人带来了无尽的财富，更让他的后代享受到了无比的荣华。据《福布斯》权威报道，他的曾孙辈——李氏家族，身价已高达惊人的177亿美元，稳坐香港第四大富豪家族的宝座。
Your guest Bartleby has not been so
fortunate in her mistakes. As with most people, hers have led not to riches
but, usually, to stomach-churning embarrassment and a good deal of
self-flagellation
. From fat-fingered spreadsheet errors and incoherent interventions
in meetings to failed mergers and
bungled
products, failure is a part of
corporate life. Yet even the most humiliating mistake can prove to be useful.
本栏作家巴托比则未能如此幸运。与芸芸众生一般，她的错误并未带来丝毫的财富，反而常常让她陷入尴尬与自责的境地。无论是因手滑造成的电子表格错误，还是在会议上发言时的语无伦次，亦或是并购项目的失败和产品处理的不当，失败在职场中已然成为了一种常态。然而，即便是那些最为丢脸的错误，也可能蕴含着无法估量的价值。
Some failures can be chalked up to a lack
of experience. Katharine Graham wrote in her autobiography of the many
ignominious
blunders she made after she became the publisher of the Washington Post overnight, following her husband’s suicide.
有些失败，无疑可以归因于经验的缺乏。凯瑟琳·格雷厄姆在她的自传中深情回顾，在丈夫不幸自杀后，她一夜之间被推上了《华盛顿邮报》出版老板的位置，所犯的尴尬错误更是数不胜数。
“I made endless unnecessary mistakes and died over them,” she wrote. She was determined to guard against them. Warren Buffett recalled walking into her office ten years after she had taken over to find a sheet of paper on her desk that read: “Assets on the left, liabilities on the right”.
她坦诚地写道：“我犯下了无数不必要的错误，并为此痛苦不已。”她下定决心，誓要防止这些错误再次重演。沃伦·巴菲特亦曾回忆，在凯瑟琳接管邮报的十年之后，他步入她的办公室，赫然发现办公桌上摆放着一张纸条，上面赫然写着：“左边记资产，右边记负债”。
Of course, even those with plenty of
experience are not
infallible
. In “Right Kind of Wrong”, Amy Edmondson, a
professor at Harvard Business School, explores how to build a healthy
relationship with failure. In a complex world, she argues, excellence requires
taking risks. The important thing is to establish what needs to be done
differently next time.
当然，即便是那些经验丰富的佼佼者，也并非能够确保万无一失。在《如何正确地失败》一书中，哈佛商学院教授艾米·埃德蒙森深入探讨了如何与失败建立一种健康的关系。她认为，在这个纷繁复杂的世界中，追求卓越往往需要承担巨大的风险。而关键在于，我们要明确下一次应该如何改进，以避免重蹈覆辙。
For companies the occasional failure may
be the price of innovation. Within months of the Amazon Fire smartphone being
introduced in 2014 it was clear to all that the device was a resounding flop,
with Amazon forced to write off $83m of unsold
inventory
. The device was late
to the market and had limited features, but was nonetheless priced in the same
range as the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy.
对于公司而言，偶尔的失败或许正是创新所必须付出的代价。2014年，亚马逊 Fire 智能手机推出仅数月之后，所有人便清楚地意识到这款设备的惨败命运。亚马逊无奈接受了高达8300万美元的未售出库存损失。Fire 智能手机不仅上市时间滞后，功能也极为有限，但其价格却与 iPhone 和三星 Galaxy 不相上下。
Jeff Bezos, the tech giant’s chief executive at the time, would later argue that such misfires were the cost of an organisation
relentlessly
focused on continual innovation. “If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now,” he said two years after the fiasco.
杰夫·贝佐斯，这位科技巨头的时任首席执行官，后来认为这种失败是一个不懈追求持续创新的组织所必须承受的代价。他在惨败之后的两年内曾如此说道：“如果你认为这是一个巨大的失败，那么我们现在正在努力解决的将是更为严重的失败。”
Mistakes are unavoidable. But they are
rarely the end of the story. Graham went on to transform the Washington Post from a city newspaper into a respected
national institution; Amazon’s market value today is around 15 times what it
was when it made its disastrous foray into phones. So how can individuals and
companies successfully bounce back?
错误，无疑是不可避免的。但它们很少会成为故事的终结。凯瑟琳·格雷厄姆不仅将《华盛顿邮报》从一份地方报纸成功转型为一个备受尊重的全国性媒体机构；亚马逊今日的市值，更是几乎已经是它当初在手机市场栽跟头时的15倍。那么，个人和公司究竟如何才能成功东山再起呢？
In her book Ms Edmondson argues that
neither people nor organisations can learn if they deny that an error has
happened. Instead, failures need to be carefully and dispassionately examined.
That may mean having a process in place to signal when things have gone awry.
Workers on Toyota’s production lines, for instance, can pull a cord to raise
the alarm when problems arise at its car factories, allowing the team to work
out what has gone wrong and where.
埃德蒙森女士在她的书中明确指出，如果个人和组织否认错误的发生，他们将无法从中吸取任何教训。相反，我们需要仔细、冷静地审视失败。这可能需要我们建立一套流程，当事情出现问题时能够迅速发出警报。例如，当丰田汽车工厂出现问题时，生产线上的工人可以拉动警报绳，以便团队能够及时找出问题的所在和原因。
Drugmakers, too, have processes in place
to learn from failures. Ms Edmondson describes the example of Eli Lilly, today
the world’s most valuable drugmaker. After the firm discovered that a
chemotherapy drug called Alimta it had spent vast sums developing was
unsuccessful, the physician who conducted the trials pored over the results to
understand what had gone wrong.
制药商同样拥有从失败中吸取教训的程序。埃德蒙森女士以礼来公司为例，详细描述了这家当今世界上最有价值的制药商如何从失败中汲取经验。在该公司发现花费巨资开发的一种名为 Alimta 的化疗药物不成功后，负责试验的医生仔细研究了试验结果，试图找出其中的问题所在。
He spotted that although some patients had benefited from the drug, those with a folic-acid deficiency had not. Simply adding supplements to the drug in subsequent trials greatly reduced the treatment’s toxicity and improved the survival rate of patients. Alimta went on to be a blockbuster for the business.
他发现，尽管一些患者从该药物中受益，但那些缺乏叶酸的患者却并未受益。只需在后续试验中添加补充剂，便可大大降低治疗的毒性，提高患者的生存率。Alimta 后来成为了礼来公司的一款畅销药。
You cannot error-proof a career or a
company. But you can seek to improve. And if all else fails, a bit of
perspective might help. Although it may not feel like it at the time, your
error will probably not make the list of history’s most notorious howlers.
你无法确保个人职业生涯或公司的发展不犯错。但你可以寻求改进。如果其他方法都不奏效，那么换个角度看待问题或许能够为你带来意想不到的启示。虽然当时可能无法感受到，但你的错误很可能并不会被列入历史上最出名的失误名单。
In 1867 Russia sold Alaska to America for $7.2m, around $160m in today’s money, handing its future rival 1.5m square kilometres of oil-rich territory and access to the northern rim of the Pacific. Few blunders in business are quite as dunderheaded as that.
1867年，俄罗斯以720万美元（按今日币值计算约为1.6亿美元）的价格将阿拉斯加拱手让给了美国，也就是将150万平方公里富含石油的领土和通往太平洋北缘的通道让给了未来的竞争对手。在商业领域，这样愚蠢的错误并不多见。
simmer
[
ˈ
s
ɪ
m
ə
r] v. （食物）煨；炖；（情绪）激昂
self-flagellation
[
ˌ
self flæd
ʒəˈ
le
ɪʃ
n] n. 自我鞭挞；自责
