Its never late when you realize your mistake and you feel sorry for the same. Every one of us does make mistakes but the most important thing is to accept and apologize for the same. There are very few people who have the guts to accept their mistake. I did come across people who never accept their mistakes.
I still remember an incident where in I saw a person accepting his mistake which could have jeopardize his career. It was a corporate meeting for discussing and planning about the future course of our business. The meeting was hosted at Panoramic groups Hotel United-21 in Thane. Our company has good tie up with Panoramic Universal Limited, division of Panoramic group that has hotels and resorts across India. Our conferences, meetings are organized at their hotels and resorts in India for the last five years. The motto of the conference was to decide on planning about the new business opportunities. During an important presentation an employee goofed with some data which made the whole trend of our business go wayward. We were amused to find such drastic change in our revenues and sales. Every one of us was surprised as we were really worried about our individual departments performance. The graph being displayed at the conference room of the hotel suggested that companys growth was stagnant.
It was a situation where everyone was panicking and was looking for some real reason for the downfall. None of us those present in the meeting did any analysis as we were sure that we did achieved a lot. But the graph was speaking a different story and it was then we decided to collect all data again to compare with the graphical data. For a moment, there was complete chaos at Hotel United-21. Since there were around 80 management people attending the conference, all were coordinating with their respective team members in the office.
All of a sudden there was an announcement from one of our directors. He was a person who was held in high regard by every employee of the company. He started with the note that the graphical representation shown on the projector was a wrong one. He even appreciated the person who made this mistake by mentioning that in spite of this chaos he had guts to accept his mistake. He said that none of the members presented here did pointed out a single mistake and even after one hours of coordinating with other employees they were not able to present the true picture. For him this mistake of the statistician bought the real picture of the management people. He was happy that the statistician accepted his mistake but was sad that none of the people present were prepared for the meeting.
He and other board of directors left the conference saying that conference would be again scheduled and he expected everyone to be prepared unlike this time. Even we realized our mistake, though we were sure about doing good we didnt had any statistics with us to prove the fact. When the wrong figures were displayed we all choked and it was only then we started demanding stats from our junior. I learned two lessons in a day at Hotel United 21. One is to be preparing every time and other is to accept your mistake before anyone else points it out.