Vestas replaces ‘failure is not an option’ with ‘failure is always an option’
A corporate rebrand of accountability, with a side of AR glasses and AI.
The story
Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen discusses challenges from Chinese competition, rising costs, and energy security concerns, while highlighting the company's recent financial improvements and strategic shifts.
Source: fortune.com
Our reading
Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen says the company’s new motto—‘Failure is always an option’—is meant to encourage openness, but it’s also a way to avoid the pressure of the old slogan, which he claims made the company ‘stubborn and arrogant.’ The shift in tone feels less like a cultural revolution and more like a corporate rebrand of accountability, with the same people still in charge, just with a slightly less dramatic way to talk about their mistakes.
Andersen’s new approach includes using AI to predict turbine failures and augmented reality glasses for technicians, which sounds like a logical step forward—until you realize the real innovation is in the company’s ability to rephrase the same old problems with new jargon. The goal, he says, is to make a 40,000-person company move faster, which is a bit like telling a glacier to hurry up.
It’s a strange mix of pragmatism and theatrics: a mock funeral for a corporate slogan, a surprise party for a longtime employee, and a serious warning about the dangers of Chinese turbines. The message is clear: Vestas is still trying to build wind turbines, but now it’s also trying to build a better story about doing it.
