Mistakes
By Bob Plankers on Jul 1, 2009 in Featured, Quotes
“No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.” – Henry Petroski, “To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design”
My friend Jon has a script to randomize quotes in his email signature, and this came through yesterday. I’ve always enjoyed Henry Petroski’s books, and though he’s a civil engineer most of the lessons are ones IT professionals can learn from, too.
Luckily, most of our mistakes don’t involve buildings collapsing, though.[0]
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[0] Which reminds me of another thing a former boss of mine used to say during crisis situations: “Calm down, nobody is dying here.”
