Ikea global CEO wants his employees to make mistakes

Yes, you read right. Jesper Brodin, the global CEO of Ikea, encourages his employees to make mistakes. And so, Brodin has invented a “Go Bananas Card" which is like a license to make mistakes but with a co-signed apology for it.

“It symbolises to say, it's not only allowed, I expect you to make mistakes. And when you do, we can apologise or laugh about it and move on,” the global CEO of Ikea told CNBC-TV18 in an exclusive chat while cautioning they can’t make mistakes that would be harmful to the business or people.

One would wonder if such a culture would be of any help but Brodin has proved that it does. The licenses which have been given out to almost a couple of thousand employees of the Swedish multinational conglomerate, he said, have translated many ideas into business decisions.

“We see country managers in our big countries, to store managers, to people working in digital exploration refer to that. And some of them are being very tactical to use it afterwards to apologise for something that went wrong. I'm happy to hand out a bananas card to anyone happy to take a risk. And we do follow-ups as well on these mistakes.”

The global CEO feels any company with years of good legacy should avoid complacency, be afraid of its success, make sure that it invests in the fragility of ideas, and allow itself to make mistakes, test, close and move on.

But he has a word of caution. He feels in leaning towards creating the future only, one “might lose themselves”. “You might copy others and lose the strengths you've built over the years. The beauty is not to put the past and the future against each other. I think, as a leader, you have to do a much better job in anticipating and being open to the future.”

In his quest to stimulate a culture of encouraging people to make mistakes, learn, and incubate new ideas, Brodin says Ikea, which has 80 years of experience in the business, will test and try many more things in India, a market it entered a little over five years ago with a store in Hyderabad.

This means, as per Brodin, “sometimes we will have to give up and say that didn't work.”