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Can anyone upstage Tom Peters' kaizen Is…Very Dangerous Stuff? How about David Drickhamer? David has a different view on kaizen, Continuous Improvement — Crash, But Don't Burn, appearing in Industry Week.

People often cringe when I say, "Fail early and often." We work so hard to avoid failure, to encourage it seems counter to accepted wisdom. When I worked at The Neenan Company we called attention to our errors by banging on a Chinese gong in the main lobby of the building. Visitors thought we were crazy. Our subcontractors knew it to be true!

The road to process excellence and market success — and wisdom — is paved with failure.

So along comes David Drickhamer telling us to talk about our company and project failures. This is a guy who says if we don't speak about the failures we can't become great.

"What doesn't work — the major and minor failures — becomes the tacit knowledge and experience that builds up within individuals and organizations as they keep trying new things. Learning from past missteps, the next time they face a similar bottleneck, or a customer makes a similar request, these people and organizations are able to skip some of the trial and error to arrive at a solution faster."

I've learned that only the mature and wisest of managers and companies take advantage of failure. Politics, petty ambitions, and the fear of not looking good are the main enemies of an organization intent on learning, innovating, and staying competitive. David describes the usual situation:

"(W)hen the death knell begins to toll for really big projects, everybody who possibly can flees, separating themselves mentally and physically from the doomed venture."

Hey, Tom Peters. kaizen is not dangerous. Danger is an organization that doesn't systematically and continuously learn from its mistakes.