Failure Analysis

Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, gives us this:

Failure analysis is the process of collecting and analyzing data to determine the cause of a failure and how to prevent it from recurring. It is an important discipline in many branches of manufacturing industry, such as the electronics industry, where it is a vital tool used in the development of new products and for the improvement of existing products

Dictionary.com, the free, on-line dictionary, defines failure, among 7 meanings, as:

An act or instance of proving unsuccessful; The lack of success as in 'His effort ended in failure. The campaign was a failure.'; Nonperformance of something due, required, or expected, as in a failure to do what one has promised or a failure to appear; A subnormal quantity or quality as in an insufficiency or the failure of crops; Deterioration or decay, esp. of vigor, strength, etc., as in 'The failure of her health made retirement necessary.'

Keep in mind that failure can be defined many different ways. The word tends to be too emotionally loaded, so I define "failure" as underperformance on key objectives. Success would be meeting or overperforming on key objectives. For example, if the purpose of the Iraq war was to find and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, not finding any, the war underperformed and analysis would look into the causes for its underperformance.

The entrepreneur should always have a clear set of objectives for all his or her major thrusts, measurement systems to measure success or underperformance. Then after the measurement period has concluded, determine whether to drop the effort, or retool it to make it successful.

If you're interested in either of these two concepts read the entire articles. And what do you think? Please post a comment.

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