Study business failures than business successes

I've often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. I my business, we try to study where people go astray, and why things don't work. We try to avoid mistakes. If my job was to pick a group of ten stock in the Dow Jones average that would outperform the average itself, I would probably not start by picking the ten best. Instead, I would try to pick the ten or fifteen worst performers and take them out of the sample, and work with the residual. It's a inversion process. Albert Einstein said, "Invert, always invert, in mathematics and physics," and it's a very good idea in business too. Start out with the failure, and then engineer its removal.

- Warren Buffett