Dover, N.H. — Written high on the wall at Brückner Group USA's new headquarters is a reimagination of New Hampshire's famous state motto in huge letters that are really hard to miss.
CEO Matt Sieverding took inspiration from Revolutionary War Gen. John Stark's comment, "Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils," and put his own twist on the famous line to help inspire employees at the equipment maker.
"Think free and try, Failure is not the worst of evils," Sieverding said, gives employees the opportunity to take chances, not be afraid to fail and learn from their mistakes.
In the end, the CEO said, that will make Brückner a better company.
"It's very important for us and our engineers, our R&D guys, and we have a lot of interns and co-ops coming through, are not afraid of failure. You can only innovate if you have a high failure tolerance and you are willing to fail. We wanted to encourage them for that, make sure that for our R&D part for our customer innovation center is that you can really think out of the box, and you should try," Sieverding said.
"It's not bad if there is a failure. You learn more from your failures than you learn from your successes. That's why we took the New Hampshire state motto and remodeled it to fit our needs," he said.
"I have a long term in the industry, ran multiple different tech centers. For me, it was always important as a process engineer to really think freely and try stuff," Sieverding said. "I always tell my guys I would rather fail in my lab than fail with my customers. I wanted to make sure that if something goes wrong because they tried something, that is not a problem from the company side."
