The Innovative Organization's Path to Embracing Adversity – Speak's 'Try and Grow'

In the Korean startup ecosystem, 'failure' has long been a taboo word. Amidst investors demanding only perfect success and founders striving to conceal their mistakes, Silicon Valley's 'Fail Fast, Learn Fast' culture seemed like a distant dream. However, SpeakEasy Labs Korea (CEO Connor Nicolai Zwick) challenged this stereotype by publishing "Make Mistakes, It Will Open Up." Speak is an AI-powered English learning platform that encourages users to focus on the 'quantity of speaking' rather than perfection. Breaking free from the obsession with accuracy in traditional education, its counter-intuitive idea that 'it's okay to make mistakes, in fact, you should make mistakes' garnered market attention, achieving a corporate value of 1.4 trillion KRW in just five years. Behind their success lies a unique organizational culture called 'Low-ego professionalism'. This is not mere humility, but an attitude of acknowledging one's limitations based on high self-esteem and embracing mistakes as a driving force for growth. Through this culture, Speak has flexibly adapted to the rapidly changing market and achieved innovation. Speak prioritizes rapid execution and learning over perfect planning, breaking down all projects into small units for experimentation and verification. Mistakes that occur during this process are unavoidable, but they serve as a foundation for creating better products. Particularly noteworthy is their 'failure documentation' system. Beyond simply recording failure cases, they meticulously document and share why the failure occurred, what hypotheses were incorrect, and how to approach it next time, utilizing this as a valuable database for the future. They also provide a 'safe failure' environment for new employees, allowing them to gradually expand their scope of challenges. As the book's title suggests, "Make Mistakes, It Will Open Up" is Speak's campaign slogan and core value. The book details how this philosophy was implemented in real business scenarios, such as celebrity campaigns and the production of subway commercial songs, including specific trials and errors and the process of overcoming them. It also provides readers with practical application guidance through specific failure management methodologies, templates, and case studies, covering topics like failure retrospective meeting methods, report writing techniques, and insight extraction. CEO Connor Nicolai Zwick emphasizes that this book is not merely a management guide, but "our thoughts on a culture that fears failure." Speak's story of acknowledging imperfection and finding realistic, practical solutions within it offers a new perspective to the Korean startup ecosystem, treating failure as a tool for learning and innovation.