Why do we celebrate failure?


QUITE why the demise of Rachel Elnaugh, chief executive of Red Letters Days and a panellist on the BBC TV show Dragons’ Den is such a cause for rejoicing is a mystery to me.

There seems to have been a great deal of crowing over the fate of her business, now snapped up by fellow Dragons panellist Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis, the former chairman of Millwall Football Club.

Much of this, of course, is to do with the fact that Dragons’ Den captured the imagination in a way that few business programmes, with the exception of Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice, have done so in recent years.

The programme, for anyone out there who doesn’t watch BBC 2, shows a bunch of aspiring entrepreneurs pitching their business ideas to a panel of the 'great and the good' who decide whether or not to invest in them.

Ms Elnaugh’s mistake, it seems, is to have put herself up as a member of this self-styled group of experts and then fallen short of its lofty ideals. But is that such a bad thing?

The problem with British business is that while it secretly admires risk-takers it likes to give them a jolly good kicking when their ideas fail. In the US there is a more realistic, and healthier, attitude to risk which says that failure is all part of the learning curve.

If Ms Elnaugh were based in America, her achievement in setting up what was, for a while at least, a successful business would be admired. And the company's lapse into administration would be seen for what it is – a short-term blip in what should prove a long and successful business career.

It's just a shame that Britons love to build their heroes and heroines up – and then pull them down just as soon as they get the chance. We'd all be a lot poorer if people weren’t prepared to take risks.

Why do we celebrate failure?

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