Military experts will tell you that failing to understand your enemy is a prescription for broader failure.
Helmus recommends expanding military training to include shaping and branding concepts such as cultural awareness, and the study underscores the perils of failing to understand your consumer.
Jason Hong, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of its Human-Computer Interaction Institute, says Microsoft Word's Clippy failed for two reasons: he was intrusive, interrupting you when you had already begun a task, and he simply wasn't very smart, often failing to understand your intentions, when you bothered to indulge him, that is.
So will failing to understand your customers.
You may feel that your opponent is totally failing to understand your position, but if you become too agitated, you opponent will take this as a sign of weakness and conclude that he has you on the ropes.
Understand that accepting your failings is a necessary part of seeing yourself as you really are.
For the last year the government has been applying a tried and trusted technique developed by retailers to try to understand the failings of its procurement systems.
Only then can we understand the failings of nurturing big government and its lifeline, a banking system that has enjoyed an unlimited license to print money through fractional reserve lending.
Our previous post When Failure is a Good Thing, looked at an initiative at Smith College called Failing Well, a set of programs that helps student understand that failing can lead to better learning.
Dr. Perkinson, who teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said that Mr. Colson's conservative faith may help inmates understand their own failings, but that it does little to help them understand society's.
"Often people like him end up the best coaches because they can understand people's failings.
