Try, try and try again is the mantra when solving business and political dilemmas
In 2003, start-up fever on the West Coast of the US was like a new Gold Rush. Investors chasing ideas were throwing money in the hope of magical returns. Part of this rush was based on faith and some of the investors believed tall tales when they should have dug harder to find gold.
That year Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos. She claimed that her technology could detect diseases with a single drop of blood. She was lying. The technology was a fraud and those who invested in her found they were investing in nothing.
John Carreyrou’s brilliant book about the company’s demise, Bad Blood, reads like a thriller. Blood samples were swapped, investors misled, tests voided. It’s a tale of dishonesty and greed that has few parallels for the mountain of cash it created. Holmes was—briefly—the first woman to become a self-made billionaire.
For some this is a lesson of capitalism’s failure—how greed trumps truth when dollars are at play. In truth, it is about more than that. It speaks about integrity and the importance of shared risk.
In science, we have seen the death of people who have rejected vaccines because of online rumours. We’ve seen criminal damage and threats to medical teams who have tried to help. Diseases we thought long gone are coming back following dishonest campaigns to spread doubt.
In politics too integrity shapes lives, and promises unfulfilled lead to popular anger. Lies can even threaten democracies. Seeing US soldiers camped in the Capitol in Washington DC last year reminded me of those I saw sleeping in the palace at Baghdad around the same time Holmes started her career of deception.
Holmes’ conviction on four counts of fraud brings an end to that scam, and it reminds us why the truth matters and we need a culture that promotes it. To get there, we need to accept failure and move on.
Today that’s harder than ever. Every keystroke is recorded, and every statement filed so that memories live in the present and restarts are tough. That’s why we all need to think hard about what we want out of our society.
We shouldn’t expect every idea to deliver. Start-ups are difficult and founders learn every time they try. Many learn more when they fail. Their creations can change lives and employ thousands, and their failures can be steps on that road. In politics too ideas are difficult and solutions bring compromise and sometimes fail. If either were easy they would already be fixed.
That’s why culture is about all of us, and matters in all areas. Capitalism isn’t a creed, it’s a description of the way free people trade effort and exchange goods. Democracy isn’t a theology, or a voting system, but how we talk to each other and try to find common solutions that work for us all.
That’s where integrity matters because when failure comes, we need to know that we have tried to do what’s best.
A strong economy is about giving people the power to start again. Every successful entrepreneur today has a story about a venture which failed and most UK businesses don’t survive the first five years. If we want more success, we need to punish dishonesty, but accept failure.