Think of the savviest companies and executives you know. They spin off a wealth of ideas and are willing to take risks to turn those ideas into business strategies. Most of them are no strangers to mistakes.
Failure comes with the territory.
What's far more critical than a perfect record is the ability to learn from missteps to make smarter business decisions. Victoria's Secret is such a company. The retailer endured one of the Internet's most visible black eyes in February 1999 when its Web site locked up after the company's Super Bowl ad sent more than a million viewers to the site in the span of an hour. Rather than attacking the site problems as a pure capacity issue, Victoria's Secret management put together a multipronged strategy. It changed everything from the way streaming video is distributed to how the company handles requests.