The continuing growth in sales and profits for the Alessi company testifies to the power of this vision and of the methods that underpin it. Marie Thorne, of the University of the West of England in Bristol, would argue that it is. Through the analysis of a case study involving a large company's attempts to transform itself to meet changing environmental pressures, she demonstrates that ignoring failure can limit the ability of an organization and its management to change effectively. In Alpha Construction, fear of failure and the associated blame culture paralysed management and prevented them from achieving the transformation necessary for survival. Even when senior managers became aware of the issues and of their own responsibility for sustaining and repeating patterns of negative behaviour, the macho organizational culture and rigid hierarchical structure of the firm kept them from developing appropriate solutions.
Failure is part of success.
The skill in working positively with this is to remain open to learning from every stage of the cycle and flexible enough to adapt to whichever aspect of the duality is dominant at the time. Whilst the notion of studying failure to learn about success may seem contradictory, there are areas of management where this is already routine practice. Alberto Alessi may value his failures as proof that his business is on the edge creatively but engineers across mass market industries know that they will learn more from their mistakes than their triumphs. Wherever they seek to improve manufacturing processes, the focus falls upon the rejects rather than the perfect specimens because these are generally far more revealing about defects in the process. Defects are susceptible to improvement, perfection is not.