We are both right because we are free to chose our perspectives.

Wow, pulling a Nazi analogy out. Haven’t seen that since John Stewart last lampooned Fox News.

Success for some is almost always bad for someone else. If you launch a new product and it triples your revenue, it is successful. For your competitors, it is a bad thing. For you, it is good. Are you going to measure your success on their opinion? No. When one measures Success, or Failure, as either good or bad, you have to measure it from the perspective of the person executing the plan, which is hopefully you.

When talking about Failure and Success, we should always be talking about the perspective of those creating and executing. That is the data that matters.

Success is not good by default. Hitler was successfully killing millions of people. Was that good? The problem is one of perspectives. The surgery might be successful and the patient still die. The surgery might fail and therefore the patient had surprisingly a few more years to live anyway. The banks make huge profits (success!), the politicians get elected by running over budget (success!) and the EU might fail because of it.

A failed suicide will be seen positive by most people. And so on and so on …

That is a mistake that will be corrected thank you for pointing it out.

Looking at Track 3 Captiva Dispatcher – Seems that this is the advanced course. http://mylearn.emc.com/portals/ext/ml.cfm?actionID=65&subjectID=21420 and that “Dispatcher Fundamentals and Development” is a pre-requisite. If they want to foster education of Captiva, starting at the top, might be the wrong approach.

Also on the Developer Conference and TechSet 2012 homepage, it only has 1 person attending. (hopefully this is wrong – but it would help justify networking if we had an idea how many are registered)

With the most advanced courses being offered and only one person attending (as it says), I wonder if using my limited training budget for this event is worthwhile and how much marketing attention this is getting at EMC.

Failure is bad, but not necessarily catastrophic. It is a sliding scale and at some point something can be classified as a failure.

I would say that Failure is not the absence of Good and Success is not the absence of Bad.

I think I agree with much of what you said in these recent posts. I don’t have enough time to go into depth on the subject but what I would say is that it’s a good idea to try and turn activities, initiatives or whatever into things that might turn out to be mistakes rather than failures. I’m passing I would say that this is one of the key insights of agile approaches to projects- a fail fast setup. This maybe where the confusion over failure comes in as it involves the word fail rather than mistake.