Fail Fast, Learn Faster

PREFACE

“Perfect is the enemy of good.”

—Voltaire

I wrote this book during the second winter of COVID-19, 2020–2021. Travel was not an option. I had the time.

I had been writing articles and columns for many years, published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review. People asked if I was ever going to write a book. I told them only if it was the next Moby-Dick, or a social comedy or observation of life in the seaside village that I moved to part-time a dozen years ago. Perhaps an updated Peyton Place. My neighbors can breathe a sigh of relief. No kiss and tell this time around.

They say write about what you know. I had never been a Pacific whaler, so I could not rewrite Moby-Dick. However, I had lived and worked for four decades during one of the periods of greatest technological transformation in modern times – the Information Age.

I began my career working in a big bank in Boston (an old bank, too – the motto was “Founded in 1784”). I had no technical skills or business background but was trained by the bank at their expense to be a computer programmer (in Cobol). To my surprise, and maybe the bank's as well, they thought I was good at it and so asked me to keep it up. I grew restless though and moved to the business side of the bank (strategic planning). I was curious about how businesses operate and how decisions were made. Working as a computer programmer, I wrote computer programs that moved data around. I asked what ...