Ep. 142: Sylvana Caloni - Failure has a Purpose

About Sylvana Caloni:
https://sylvanacaloni.com/about-me/


Humble Crumbles: Savouring the crumbs of wisdom from the
rise and fall of Humble Pie:


https://sylvanacaloni.com/humble-crumbles/


https://www.amazon.com/HUMBLE-CRUMBLES-Savouring-crumbs-wisdom/dp/1916328571/

https://sylvanacaloni.com/book-reviews/

https://sylvanacaloni.com/testimonials-2/



FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMitch:
(00:05)
Welcome back to count me in, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch
Roshong and today you will hear from Sylvana Caloni, as she joins
us for episode 142 of our series. Sylvana is a former equities
fund manager, a professional certified coach and author of the
book, Humble Crumbles. She was an executive vice president when
she was privileged to partner with an executive coach. She is now
a leadership consultant committed to paying it forward by
enabling clients to make an impact at their companies and in
their communities. In this conversation, you will hear Sylvana
discuss the value of failure, the benefits of clear communication
and ways to propel business. Let's head over and listen to her
now. 
 
Adam: (00:57)
Sylvana, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the count
me in podcast today. 
 
Sylvana: (01:01)
Thank you, Adam. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak
with you and to explore failure and entrepreneurship and all
sorts of different ideas coming from our book, Humble
Crumbles.
 
Adam: (01:13)
So speaking of your book, Humble Crumbles, you say in that book,
failure has a purpose and failure's a part of the process. So can
you just start by giving us some more insight into that
statement? 
 
Sylvana: (01:25)
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess we see across different cultures and
across different types of businesses, if you like and academia,
that there is a fear of failure. And we, as individuals often are
constrained in what we do because of that fear of failure. It may
be so great that we prevent ourselves from jumping in taking the
leap and starting up a business, or perhaps we have started the
business, but because of that fear of failure and because of a
fear of not meeting the commitments we've made to our
stakeholders, et cetera, again, it constrains what we can do. So
if you look at tech companies, for instance, you'll often hear
the phrase fail fast, fail often, or if you look at scientific
revolutions and innovations and how things have pivoted during
this pandemic, actually, if there had not been failures, there
wouldn't have been learning. There wouldn't have been multiple
iterations. There wouldn't have been new responses to the
challenges that are out there. So for Paul O'Donnell my co-author
and I, the idea that failure is part of the process is that we do
need to sort of remove ourselves from that view that it's first
time only time, and we're going to be successful from the get go,
because in fact, most successful businesses have started out in
some other form in their initial iterations. And it's the ability
of the business owners and entrepreneurs to be flexible and to
pivot and, you know, take on constructive criticism or take on
impartial advice to modify their product or service, which means
that ultimately it is successful. 
 
Adam: (03:15)
So when you look at these leaders who are having to transition
and fail and become more successful, how do you, you know, how do
you understand what makes them tick? What do you, what, what can
we do to, to look at these people and see what can, what can
cause you to fail and keep coming back and keep coming
back? 
 
Sylvana: (03:34)
It's a great point that I think one of the key points we're
trying to make in Humble Crumbles it's that the failure of the
business is often attributed to external factors. So someone will
say, well, you know, the economic environment deteriorated or
technology changed or legislation was too prohibitive. And that's
true. I mean, absolutely there can be external factors that
impact the success or failure of a business. But what I found
when I was an equity analyst and funds manager, was that more
often than not the failure of a business was to do with the
owners or the leaders, the management of the companies and the
problems I often saw were whether they were not self-aware. So
they didn't have a sense of, okay, well what makes me tick? What,
what are my drivers? What are my motivations? How do I make sense
of my world? And in having that lack of self-awareness, they're
not then able to engage successfully with others because they
take the view that well, it's my way or the highway, or this is
the way the world works. So they don't have an appreciation that
their own norms, standards, practices, ways of behaving are not
universal. They could differ with other people because other
people have different cultural backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds,
gender backgrounds, it could be a different set of, drivers
within an organization. And if at what we show in the book,
Humble Crumbles, and it's full title is Humble Crumbles: Savoring
the Crumbs of Wisdom From The Rise and Fall of Humble Pie. We
share Paul O'Donnell's story. So Paul is my co-author and Paul
like me had come from the financial services world. We had both
worked at Bankers Trust. So BT co. Us company. In fact, even
though we were both Australians and you can hear that in my
accent. So we were working in Bankers Trust in Sydney, Australia,
and Paul eventually left BT and started up a couple of his own
businesses. So he's a serial entrepreneur and his first couple of
businesses were in what you might call financial adjacent. So
they were similar types of businesses, you know, financial
advisory or publishing a financial material, fundraising, that
type of thing. And then he wanted to go into a business that was
more real in the sense of making something so humble pie was a
business that manufactured pies for the retail sector. And then
ultimately also he got into wholesale. So it was, it was pies
that we eat sweet and savory pies that we eat. And he came from
that financial services background with the number of ways of
seeing the world behaving and business traditions, if you like,
or business practices that certainly worked for him, but there
were others that were more relevant to financial services, but
not so much to a factory where he had people in the factory
kitchen making the pies or sweeping the floors or delivering the
pies to the shops, et cetera. So what we found Paul was
blindsided in that he just assumed for instance, that the factory
workers would, like him, have a view around equity as a way of
incentivizing behavior or around bonuses as a way of, you know,
promoting work, et cetera. Whereas these people had different
concerns, different cares, you know, for them the weekly pay
pack. It was what was really important, not some notion of equity
or a bonus at the end of the year. So the blind sidedness or the
lack of Paul's self-awareness, which he courageously, I have to
say. I mean, he fesses up basically in the book and looks at some
of the errors he made with. I think, I think he's very generous
and very courageous in doing that because what he's doing is he's
demonstrating how sometimes the very things that we think are our
strengths, if taken to an extreme can actually turn into a
weakness or can turn into a vulnerability in a negative
sense. 
 
Adam: (08:00)
That almost mak...