Martha Pledger's farewell "My Biggest Mistake..." column published on Aug. 4, 2013, but the column has staying power. Readers remember it well. You'll find an online link to the column below.

Longtime readers of our platforms will remember Marcia Pledger, a former business writer for The Plain Dealer who might be best known for column called “My Biggest Mistake… and How I Fixed it.”

It was an “as told to” column, written in the first person perspective of someone who had made a mistake in their business and corrected it. Marcia did the writing. She wrote it for 10 years and estimated when she penned her farewell in 2013 that she had spoken with 450 entrepreneurs and business people about their lessons.

I’m wondering whether we should bring it back, in another form. Having people share their stories with us helps build community. I also wonder whether we could do something similar with people’s healthcare experiences, based on your overwhelming response to my column two weeks ago about my health scare. So many people told me similar stories. 

“My Biggest Mistake” was popular. Marcia put a collection of them into a book in 2008. Readers – particularly people in business – enjoyed reading about how others had erred as cautionary tales. I wonder how many people took lessons from the columns and avoided similar mistakes.

I heard from Marcia recently. She lives in Florida, but she was heading to Northeast Ohio to moderate a discussion about “My Biggest Mistake.” A non-profit agency  invited her. That’s remarkable staying power for a column that had not appeared in more than 10 years.

I loved Marcia’s philosophy for the column, which she laid out in her first piece: “You can learn from your own mistakes, but wouldn’t it be less painful to learn from someone else’s?” 

You can read Marcia’s farewell column here, and her summing up of the top 10 mistakes she wrote about is here.

We do have challenges in bringing it back. One is that no one can replicate Marcia. She made the column her own, and any attempt to repeat it would feel hollow. The other is resources. The column was a heavy lift, and we don’t have a reporter with that kind of time.

What if we turned it into an advice column? And what if we put together a form with a handful of questions on it that business people might fill out, to help us gather the information we need. Changing the format might be enough to differentiate it from the excellent work Marcia did. We’d still have to reach out to business leaders to ask for their help, but Marcia persuaded hundreds to discuss how they managed their challenges. 

The business world has changed dramatically since Marcia stopped writing the column, partly because of the pandemic. Plenty of new issues have emerged. We’re still noodling.

We could create a similar column on healthcare. After I wrote about my five-day hospitalization and how grateful I was for the care I received at University Hospitals, dozens of people wrote to share their healthcare stories, many more harrowing than mine. What shone through was their gratitude to the doctors, nurses and others who got them well.

We could create a column, based on reader submissions, where they could publicly thank healthcare providers for getting them well? Again, we’d probably put together a form to fill out, to make this efficient. And we’d probably need some sort of release so we could verify the accounts with their providers, to make sure we are not getting duped. 

This would not be about healthcare complaints. Malpractice is for the courts to resolve, and complaints about medical providers gets into defamation. We don’t have the resources to sort out the details of the criticisms people might have of the hospitals.

No, this is about something positive, where readers are grateful for the care provided by our well-known medical institutions.

I know from the response to my column that people want to tell their stories. What we don’t know is whether you want to read them?

We’re in early days of thinking about these features.  I’m laying them out here to get your feedback.

Would a column about overcoming business mistakes appeal to you? How about expressions of thanks from people who had debilitating illnesses but came out OK because of the treatment they received?

Please let me know if you like these ideas or have suggestions for improving them.

I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com

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