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We all make mistakes. We don’t all write them on a wall -- in permanent marker.
But at one local company, such public confessions are encouraged.
Jeff Stibel, chief executive of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., believes we learn much more from failures than we do from successes. So he created a Failure Wall in his Malibu headquarters to get workers to take ownership of -- and so grow from -- their slip-ups.
The wall is 15 feet long and 10 feet high. To help break the ice and convince people to write on it, Stibel stenciled on the wall a handful of quotations about the benefits of failure.
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He also wrote the first entry himself, using a Sharpie marker.
Now so many people write on the wall, it sometimes has to be repainted to make room for more public admissions.
Read the whole story of the Failure Wall in my latest City Beat.
Here’s the story -- in photos -- that I sent out on Twitter:
Former Los Angeles Times columnist Nita Lelyveld wrote City Beat stories about moments in the life of Los Angeles. She was born in New York and grew up around the world, but lived in L.A. longer than she lived anywhere else. Before joining The Times in 2001, she wrote for the Tuscaloosa News, the Associated Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer, which sent her to L.A. as a national writer in 1997.
