Lack of planning is the cause of most failures.
I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.
Some people are born and train their whole life to be an NBA player. But some people, if it doesn't work out, then they have no other option.
Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.
My view was that if you're going to make a mistake in your predictions, make sure you make them the right way. Don't put yourself into a situation where, in fact, you say you're going to do something, and then all of a sudden you can't.
Ensure that both plan and dispositions are flexible, adaptable to circumstances. Your plan should foresee and provide for a next step in case of success or failure.
Plan and execute your first failure so that you no longer have to fear it.
And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.
It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.
A lot of people plan for failure, but they don't plan for success, and that's a big problem, especially in the TV world 'cause you're trying to find out what your show is.
Formal declarations of mistrust, pre-nups are emotionally unfortunate. They overtly plan for failure, and thus involve a jarring cognitive dissonance.
Trying to design the perfect plan is the perfect recipe for disappointment.
As an entrepreneur and public company CEO, I've dealt with dozens of rollouts, and when unveiling a new product, the operating approach should be, 'Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.'
