David Rogier
MasterClass Founder & CEO asks: What is your “best failure” of the week?
Corporate Competitor Podcast Episode 170
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The online learning platform that David Rogier founded and now heads up as CEO features some of the world’s most talented people who share and preserve invaluable knowledge and stories so future generations can access and appreciate them.
You would think that working with all this world-class expertise would rub off on David’s leadership style. And guess what? You would be right. For example, in her entrepreneurism class on MasterClass, instructor Sara Blakely, the self-made billionaire founder of Spanx, tells the story of how her father tried to make it acceptable to try things and fail by asking family members at dinner every night, “What is something that you failed at today?”.
David loved this idea so much that every week he followed suit, sending out a company memo talking about MasterClass’ “best failure” of the week. Rather than dread their boss’s memo, David’s team came to look forward to hearing about the things each failure taught the team and why David was so proud and impressed by them.
“The only way that you are going to discover new things and do big, cool, new things is you are going to have to fail at them,” David explained in the podcast. “You get back up, learn from it and go and build the next thing.”
In the podcast, David demonstrates a particular penchant for showing how leaders can build not only high-performing but also courageous cultures based on shared values and expectations.
You will Learn:
- 5:00 The extraordinary lesson about education passed down to him by his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and inspirational figure behind MasterClass.
- 10:00 Behind-the-scenes stories of the first three signings: Serena Williams, James Patterson, and Dustin Hoffman.
- 15:00 How to practice and test before you go big.
- 20:00 Why Sara Blakely inspired David to send out a company memo talking about the “best failure” of the week
- 25:00 The difference between what people say they want and what people actually want based on their actions—and why you need to measure both.
- 28:00 How to find out what really matters to your customer so you can make their first experience as easy as possible.
Resources:
- Sign up for MasterClass.
- With MasterClass at Work, companies can develop durable skills that transform employees into future-ready leaders through cinematic lessons and life-changing stories taught by the world’s best.
- Connect with David on LinkedIn.
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