Eddie Andrew is one of Sheffield’s ‘Remarkable’ businessmen! As well as providing some of the loveliest ice cream you will ever have (The Our Cow Molly lemon and ginger ice cream is absolutely amazing!), he has built a fantastic reputation for his innovative approach in a very ‘traditional’ industry.

This ‘innovative thinking’ extends to the most traditional side to the family business - the milk round! His family have delivered milk to folks’ door steps directly from their farm for over 60 years and it is currently run by Eddie’s brother Dan!

Although things don’t always run smoothly in those early mornings. As Eddie explains “The way it works is we load the truck up with what we think the customers want / usually have, you walk up their drive and you find there’s a note saying they want an extra pint or no milk at all!”

He also knows that customers sometimes go on holiday and forget to let him know!

This got Eddie thinking… the customer has had to find a pen and paper to leave him a note out and he thought ‘How old fashioned is that?’ So they introduced a texting service that meant that customers could simply let Dan know what they wanted via their mobile phones!

So now their customers text for extra milk! They don’t have to put in their whole address and personal details as Dan has their address stored in his phone. They simply text the amount!

“We only load the truck up with the right amount of milk and we don’t have to walk up a drive to find a note saying no milk !!! Win Win!” explains Eddie.

It’s a great 3D example (one of our 100!) of being easy to buy from and deal with! What could you do to make yourself easier to deal with and help your customers?

Why not get some Our Cow Molly ice cream, chill out, and get thinking (in 3D)!

A top girls’ school is planning a “failure week” to teach pupils to embrace risk, build resilience and learn from their mistakes! The idea of the failure festival at Wimbledon High School, which is ranked 34th in The Sunday Times’s independent schools league table, is to help girls - and their parents - cope with pressure to succeed all the time, both  academically and socially.

Apparently the emphasis will be on the value of ‘having a go’, rather than playing it safe and perhaps achieving less. The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show “it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life.”

I think lots of us in business can learn from that! I see in far too many businesses a culture that promotes an unwillingness to admit ‘failure’ and crucially, as a result, not learn from it. In fact a manager in one business I once worked with told me that they didn’t have ‘brainstorming’ meetings, they had ‘blamestorming’ meetings where everyone just sat around and  discussed why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible!

Some of the best leaders and innovators see ‘failure’ as a natural consequence of innovation. Take the innovative entrepreneur Sir James Dyson. Here’s a quote from him…  “I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126  failures. But I learnt from each one. So I don’t mind failure.”

So, why not take a bit of time out and highlight a ‘failure’ that you’ve had, and importantly, identify…

• What have you learnt?
• What would you / are you doing differently as a result?

If you are really brave, why not ‘lead by example’ and let you team know all about it? What have you got to lose?

And if you don’t believe me, how about these ‘wise words’ from Sir Winston Churchill…

“Success consists in going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”