Thank You!!!

The "big players" may not give me the time of day...There is a local incubator in Orange County< CA that I may target to see what happens. :-)

That's so exciting, @mpourayan. I know you can't go into much detail, but without giving away too much, where are you looking to submit your ideas--for funding, prospective partners, your company...? Best of success to you!

couldn't agree w/you more :-)  I am working on two potential ideas right now and I am trying to muster the courage to get it submitted..:-)

Oh no, @mpourayan, far from it. I don't think, though, an entrepreneur should simply view each failure as an expected part of eventual success (and I'm not saying any do). You'd have to really scrutinize why a particular project failed and, if you keep failing, try to figure out why you're having so much lack of success and whether there are any commonalities -- perhaps in organization, funding, management style, or whether it's something totally unrelated.

What I am hearing, then, is that we have to discourage innovation and out of the box thinking for the fear of failure?   It seems to me that we have to constantly encourage it....

Great point, Kim: Enthusiasm will only carry you so far! Especially in today's economy, employees may be willing to gamble somewhat on the success of an idea or company, but a string of failures isn't necessarily conducive to attracting the best and brightest -- in employees, investors, board members, or customers. 

Failing faster makes sense only if there's some kind of safety net for the company.  Maybe fail faster with specific initiatives, but if you keep driving enterprises into the ground, you're going to struggle for funding and good staff.

If you're talking about entrepreneurs, then absolutely! Thanks for clarifying, George. I've found the most active entrepreneurs are those who do that; they're usually driven by their idea not money, so because of their enthusiasm for the concept of whatever it is they're creating -- software, hardware, a retail store, restaurant... anything -- they throw 110% behind it, no matter how "good" or "bad" the idea is. 

If I take your point Alison, but I think Stanek was thinking of the entrepreneurs and the need to be clinically honest with yourself about what you're doing and how much time you have to make it successful.

Looking at Paul's comments about the technology and usability and the need to recruit, if you look at what these companies are doing you will see that they are for the most part selling Platform as a Service, relying on some pretty stable technologies to do the storage and the numbercrunching, and fronting it with their own software to put the query tools/dashboards on the marketer's/sales executive's screen.

In this context the IT department's role will be to ensure that the company captures all the relevant, accurate and timely data it needs, and to ensure that it is clean and secure.

I get the point Stanek makes about encouraging people to "fail faster," but in the reality of the business world I don't know how many employees would actually feel comfortable or empowered to do that. As an entrepreneur who believes in his/her ideas, that is something you have the freedom and flexibility to do. As an employee, you don't always have that liberation. Hopefully we've all had a boss like that, someone who supports your initiatives when you have some numbers or common sense to backup your ideas. But that's not guaranteed in business, unfortunately!