Watching events unfold at News International over the last few weeks, it’s clear that Rupert Murdoch has been humbled by the mistakes made within his organisation. I didn’t really reflect on this until later that week after a meeting with one of our largest customers. I met with the CFO who was preparing to leave the company and was in the process of handing over to his successor.

I was keen to meet with them both together and during our discussions I explained to the new CFO what Celaton and it’s technology had achieved for his organisation. Having the opportunity to review all the results in front of me I felt proud of our achievements.

However, as my pride was growing the outgoing CFO explained to his successor about the mistakes that had been made along the way “we’ve had issues, things have gone wrong, some of them ours, some of them Celaton’s…”. Where was this conversation going? I was becoming concerned that we were being portrayed as a company that doesn’t keep its promises.

I had no need to be concerned as I realised that this customer not only measured us by the promises we made in our contract but also by the way we had dealt with the unpredictable issues that challenged us, otherwise known as mistakes.

The fact is that we all make mistakes, as individuals and as organisations. We certainly didn’t set out to make any mistake deliberately but when mistakes were made we took responsibility for it (regardless of blame), resolved it and then reflected on how we dealt with it in the hope that we could learn something and avoid it happening again.

During my meeting I was initially surprised that our loyal customer was so eager to tell his colleagues about the mistakes, but very humbled by the fact that the way we dealt with them had left a such lasting impression.

I suspect that Mr Murdoch knows this and on reflection will be learning a valuable lesson too.