Most of us can't help making mistakes. What we clearly need is a system to protect us from ourselves and make us more careful, writes Lucy Kellaway

LOOKING BACK over the past two months, everyone agrees on two things. Mistakes were made. And those mistakes were very bad.

This might seem too obvious to be worth pointing out. But simply stating these two facts undermines one of the most insidious, dangerous and downright moronic management ideas of all time. That idea says that mistakes are good and that there is no shame in making them.

Jack Welch put it like this: "I've learnt that mistakes can be as good a teacher as success" - and all self-respecting chief executives agree with him.

Enlightened managers encourage staff to screw up as they view it as a product of creativity. When employees fall on their faces, their bosses don't blame them; instead they throw a party in their honour.

Just a few weeks ago, Severin Schwan, chief executive of Roche, told the Financial Times: "It's extremely important to be willing to celebrate failure."

With pride, he told how, when Roche had lost an important lawsuit, he didn't give the lawyers a rocket but cracked open the champagne to prove that in his company risk is encouraged.

This mistakes-are-good fad started, as these things so often do, with the great Peter Drucker. "Nobody learns except by making mistakes," he wrote in The Practice of Management.

"The better a man is, the more mistakes he will make - for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top-level job who has not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise, he is sure to be mediocre. Worse still, not having made mistakes, he will not have learnt how to spot them early and how to correct them."

Drucker's prose is lucid and the argument sounds good. Only, if you think about it for a bit and compare it to real life, you will find he is quite wrong.

First, making lots of mistakes is not necessarily a sign that you have been experimenting creatively. It is perfectly possible - indeed commonplace - to screw up constantly and be a conservative stick-in-the-mud at the same time. If I think of the bosses I've known, the ones who have made the most mistakes have done so more out of stupidity, incompetence and vanity than out of adventurousness.

The second great fallacy is that we learn from our mistakes.

In a Financial Times column this year, David Storey of Warwick Business School said there was no evidence that entrepreneurs who had failed first time were any more likely to succeed second or third time than those just starting out.

As for me, I almost never learn from my mistakes. But that is what makes me human. Whatever it was that inclined me to make that mistake the first time round, makes me inclined to go on making it again and again. In fact, I can think of only one occasion when I learnt from a mistake. I once warmly congratulated a colleague - who I knew wanted a baby - on her pregnancy. Only it turned out that she had just put on weight. I was so mortified that I learnt never to comment on a pregnancy ever again.

However, learning from mistakes, on the rare occasions when this happens, is not always good. Now I am so frightened of confusing a fat woman with a pregnant one that I seem cold and oblivious when faced by someone who is eight months pregnant with twins.

When we do learn in this way, our learning is almost certainly an overreaction and not to be recommended. Mortgage lenders made the mistake of repeatedly lending to people who couldn't afford to pay the money back. And then, when the whole thing came crashing down, what they learnt from their mistake was not to lend to anyone at all.

This is possibly an even worse mistake - so much so that governments are having to step in to make them forget it.

But, even if Drucker was wrong, he is less wrong than the idiots who followed him. The writer Paul Arden wrote a particularly silly book a couple of years ago called Whatever You Think Think the Opposite. One of his maxims was: "Start taking bad decisions and it will take you to a place where others only dream of being" - a view too stupid to be worth the trouble of refuting.

Most of us cannot help making mistakes. We do it all the time. What we clearly need is a system to protect us from ourselves and make us more careful. A telling-off can work quite nicely, as can a libel suit. I am prone to inaccuracies as a journalist but I know that a mistake means an embarrassing correction in the paper, so I try to be careful. This doesn't mean that I will never be creative or that I will never take a risk. Carefulness and creativity are not either/or. We can all try for both.

You would have thought that all of this celebrating of mistakes would have had at least one good side-effect. If mistakes are good, surely people will be queuing up to boast about how many they have made. Alas, it does not appear to have worked like this: there have been no bankers rushing forward to own up to any errors in the past few weeks.

If you ask business leaders what their biggest mistake was, they will almost always admit to something piffling. I remember a chief executive telling me that his biggest mistake was getting someone to do a job they did not love. That is the soppiest mistake I have ever heard. As with Drucker, I wouldn't give this person a big job. But that isn't because he hasn't notched up enough mistakes on the bedpost. It is because, if he says this is his biggest mistake, he is a shocking liar. - (Financial Times service)