Fail fast - so true!

Yesterday, one of my developers end up messing up the firewall setting of my test environment. He was so worry, but I think it was the best thing that ever happened to us. We are in a start-up shop. Which means, that capital funds are scarce and that we need to do more with less. I told him that it was OK. We don't know much Unix, but that we could get it working. In the book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis says,

Corrections enhance credibility... Being willing to be wrong is a key to innovation.

He is right! My team got together from different parts of the world using nothing but our laptops, skype, Unix screen (awesome), and gray matter. You can learn so much more from mistakes. The only thing is that you need to fail fast or make mistakes well.