I get a bit nervous when I listen to the terms unacceptable or intolerable especially in email where it’s easier to pretend to be rude not having to look someone in the eyes.

They are quite always associated to errors or wrong behaviors, often used when it is someone else fault, rarely when is the fault of the one who uses the term, and I don’t think they focus to find solutions: they just rise barriers.

That’s why I was a bit skeptical when I got in touch with an article of the Harvard Business Review called: when failure is intolerable. What lead me to read it was the term failure: I often joke (or not!?!?) with the fact that ‘here failure is not an option’

In the article Scott Anthony writes that in reality, there are three types of failures that bother me:

  1. When someone knowingly does the wrong thing
  2. When someone could have easily discovered that they were doing the wrong thing
  3. When someone spent a lot of time and money researching something that could only be learned experientially

To me, it makes sense … and it doesn’t get me nervous (no spider sense tingling 🙂 ). What about you?

PierG