There is a question I keep asking people in boardrooms, living rooms, and occasionally over bad conference coffee. The answers are many, but none are satisfactory enough to close the discussion.

Is it better to have tried something bold and failed or to have played safe and slept peacefully? Because everything is calm until hindsight wakes you up, screaming about how wrong you were.

It is an old philosophical hand-me-down question, of course. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. A line that has survived centuries, several poets. But replace “loved” with “approved that risky idea” and “lost” with “ended up in a marketing blunders list”, and suddenly the romance disappears. The courage sits whining on the edge till the time to decide arrives.

Every year, we read post-mortems of marketing disasters with forensic delight. Campaigns that were experimental. Brands that were adventurous. Leaders who said yes when others said, “Let’s sleep on it.” And now, safely seated on the sofa of hindsight, we tut-tut. What were they thinking? Who approved this? Didn’t they test it?

What we forget is that at the moment of decision these were not “blunders”; they were bets. Thought through, debated, and often passionately defended. And Time, the........

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