Critics don't make good artists

MY WORST STRATEGIC MISTAKE... AND WHAT I LEARNT FROM IT

A G Krishnamurthy

Watch a baby learning to walk. It's life's best demo for everything you need to know about mistakes and how to learn from them. Babies have the healthiest attitude towards mistakes.

They are so focused on attaining their goal, that they make their falls seem so inconsequential. You very rarely see them contemplating or whining about their falls.

All they need is a minute or two to re-orient themselves and they are up again, bravely making another go of it. Of course, there are the occasional tantrum throwers who bring the house down, but they are the attention-seekers and not the norm.

Invariably, if you leave them alone they, too, get back on their feet soon enough. Nearly all babies seem to have a pre-programmed knowledge about the temporal nature of their mistakes. We have a lot to learn from our early days on this planet.

So, what is a mistake, really? The dictionary defines it as an error or fault resulting from defective judgement, deficient knowledge or carelessness.

My takeout is that mistakes are the flip side of learning. Not one of us, unless he or she is God, can ever claim fault-free judgement, complete knowledge and total attention at every stage of our lives.

Perhaps mistakes are the reason formal education plays such an important role in our lives. A good college education "" be it in management or medicine "" exposes you to the mistakes made by our predecessors and the lessons that can be learnt from them.

Thus, hopefully, prevent the new generation from making the same errors all over again. Little wonder the phrase "If only I had known..." is the most common reaction to mistakes. That said, it's time to talk about mine and what I've learned from them.

We are sure it's right, till it goes wrong

There are some mistakes you make that leave their lessons engraved in words of gold, so to speak, in your heart. One of mine is a division we at Mudra called "Passion". Let me give you a little backgrounder first.

Vimal, as you all probably know, began its product line with sarees and dress material. And integral to the product is textile design.

In a market such as sarees, constant variety and pattern innovation is critical in ensuring that your customer stays brand loyal rather than watching her be lured away by a fancier design in a competitor's shop.

It is one of the key factors that keep your brand ahead of the rest. Leading the pack has always been a Reliance trait, and textile design was one of the harbingers.

At its peak, the Reliance Design Studio at Naroda was the largest in Asia, with over 300 designers churning out 500 designs in 18 colourways (that works out to 2,200 designs) every month!

Now, marketing these designs is another feat altogether and that's where Mudra came in. To promote the latest designs we used to design posters that featured the saree design of the season.

Mudra's poster designs became so popular that the print featured on the poster would become the best seller of the batch.

Pretty soon we became the blue-eyed boys of both the client and the dealer network because of our ability to spot winning saree designs.

Our creative judgement was lauded by one and all! So we reasoned that if we were so good at spotting popular designs it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to actually design them ourselves! Sounded very logical to us at the time "" after all we were in the field of design.

So with great hope we opened "Passion" "" a textile design studio. We wanted to create exclusive designs that could be sold in boutiques and other exclusive outlets.

But we ran into problems pretty soon when we realised that textile design was fabric-specific. In other words, certain designs could only be reproduced on certain fabric.

That's when we realised that we were trying to put the cart before the horse, so to speak. Fabric construction itself is an exciting and creative world. That is the foundation.

Then design is add-on, literally, to enhance the inherent beauty of the fabric. Not the other way around, as we had assumed.

It was a disastrous attempt. We were trying to learn the business after getting into it! Needless to say, we had to shut shop pretty soon when we discovered that the act of "creation" was very different from the act of "creative judgement".

Falling, learning...

Our mistake clearly indicated we had defective judgement and deficient knowledge. Let's address the first ""defective judgement.

We erred in blurring the lines between two established roles "" the creator's and the critic's. The critic is seldom, if ever, a good creator. Take any example "" from the world of art, books, movies, the culinary world...anywhere "" and you'll see it happening every time a critic tries to become an artist, director, author or a chef. His work invariably doesn't quite make the grade.

I see a variation of this happening between clients and agencies, too. A discerning buyer is very different from a good producer. Experts tend to make a job look easy.

It doesn't mean it is. And it definitely doesn't mean that anyone can do it. Failure to recognise the merits and value of each other's disciplines are the first rumblings of a catastrophe waiting to happen.

The second failing was deficient knowledge. I cannot stress this more. Never, ever get into any discipline that does not belong to your skill set. Every organisation has it own core competencies and if a new discipline doesn't fall into this purview it will invariably end up as a costly mistake.

In the early 1990s "" the post-Liberalisation phase as it is now known "" many large corporations in India got into takeover mode with great gusto.

They began acquiring companies that had vastly divergent interests from their core businesses. Textile companies got into cement and so on.

They valiantly tried to run these businesses for a couple of years and then had to shut shop. Lack of in-depth knowledge and unfamiliarity with the terrain of the business that you run is akin to committing commercial suicide.

So, to reiterate a management truism coined more than 20 years ago by management guru Tom Peters in his classic corporate opus In Search of Excellence: stick to the knitting.

Life's way of getting us back on track

Here's the bottomline. You can make your mistakes work for you. If you view them positively they are marvellous eye-openers and the best part is they are lessons that are tailor-made for you.

It's a bit like being given "special tuition" to get you back on track. At the end of the session if you are smart enough, you will emerge stronger, faster and wiser than the rest.

You have my word for it. After all, I've had my share of both "" mistakes, and the rewards of learning from them!

A G Krishnamurthy is the chairman, AGK Brand Consulting, and founder, Mudra Communications and MICA