City Beat: Errors encouraged on one company's Failure Wall
January 28, 2013 | 5:48pm
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.
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:
Photo: Natalia Williams, a marketing coordinator with Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. in Malibu, writes on the failure wall. Credit: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times
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