Failure Conference!! Sounds Interesting!! You Heard Right!! Read This!

Dear Friends,

Occasionally, we hear about Success Meets! Whether it’s an organization or an individual, success is generally celebrated. My son or daughter got a UPSC Civils Rank, scored 99 percentile in JEE, ranked in the top 100 in NEET, cleared CA in the first attempt, the startup received seed funding, the organization completed one year, received an award, our movie ran for 100 days, and so on!

Have you ever celebrated failure? Have you ever attended a party hosted by parents because their son/daughter tried UPSC but failed? Have you been to a party hosted by parents because their son/daughter couldn’t get a JEE rank despite training from an early age? Rare, right? I admit that even I have never celebrated or attended such a failure meet, though I have personally failed multiple times and experienced the pain.

However, one of my admirers, Harish Hande, is organizing one such mega event (6-7 Feb 2024, IIM Bangalore)! It is all about organizational failure, and the name of the conference is “Impact Failure 2025 Experiences (impactfailure.org).” They are not asking you to submit your pitch deck or success mantra. Instead, they are asking you to submit your failure story:

“Share your failure story with us and contribute to a culture that can admit and learn from what did not work, one where failing and learning are shared and celebrated.”

Harish has been doing this for the last three events! His goal is, “Let us humanize it...so many youngsters can take the right path going forward” (LinkedIn: harish-hande-67b226).

You all should know about Harish. I met him only once at IIT Madras, probably 15 years back. However, his story inspired me a lot. If you read his LinkedIn, it is an interesting read. He passed out of IIT KGP (1986–90) BTech. He writes, “This is what my certificate says,” “Grade: With great difficulty.” Then, like a typical confused person, I spent somewhere between 3 to 5 years getting a Master’s and PhD. I surely recommend it if you think you have some years to decide what not to do.”

This shows his humility. In fact, Harish did his master’s degree and later a PhD in energy engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2011 (Asia’s Nobel Prize) for "his pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor through his social enterprise SELCO India.” Hande co-founded SELCO India in 1995, a social enterprise, to eradicate poverty by promoting sustainable technologies in rural India.

Despite his tall success, he writes of himself as:

Employee, SELCO – Not sure about what I do. Worked with creative people worldwide (mostly those who creatively created a career out of 'solving' poverty).

At the age of 25, I was a little fearful of sharing my failures, fearing it would ruin my career and life. At the age of 50, with a short stint left, there is nothing to lose. Today, I am happy to celebrate mentally and internally to start with! Thanks to Harish, we can glorify them too!

Are you ready to celebrate your failure?

Ravi Saripalle