Doug Gillon on Wednesday: Sir Bill Gammell confessed to several recollections of personal failure yesterday, yet when the markets closed last night, his Cairn Energy empire was worth £2.7bn. So failure clearly is relative, and not necessarily calamitous.

Sir Bill Gammell confessed to several recollections of personal failure yesterday, yet when the markets closed last night, his Cairn Energy empire was worth £2.7bn. So failure clearly is relative, and not necessarily calamitous.

However Gammell, a former Scotland rugby internationalist, believes failure is: "a key factor in the learning process. You can't learn unless you test yourself. Failure is something to be embraced as something that you are going to learn from, and not as a negative experience. Otherwise you won't dare risk anything."

Cairn's chief executive recalls playing at Murrayfield for Scotland against England, and a missed opportunity. "We were coached not to kick away possession, because it was then 50-50 who got the ball. I was just outside the England 22, and saw the cover coming over but knew I could kick over their heads and get there first, yet I hesitated, and the chance was gone."

Prevailing coaching philosophy had made him risk-averse to kicking. In today's professional sporting era, risk aversion is in danger of destroying flair and originality. The culture is more to do with not losing rather than winning.

As entrepreneur at the head of one of Scotland's most successful companies, Gammell has clearly overcome this trait, but still unashamedly confessed to commercial failures in his past. He adds that as an oil exploration firm, "a lot of what our company does involves failure. Drilling has about a one in 10 success rate.

"It's about supporting and directing people, and encouraging them to understand failure is part of the learning experience. You learn to take calculated risks based on appropriate risk assessment."

However, Gammell believes that mindset is disappearing from the Scottish culture. More pertinently, he believes the win-at-all costs attitude is a barrier to progress, and is doing something about it.

Gammell also chairs the Winning Scotland Foundation (until recently the Scottish Institute of Sport Foundation) who were out in force yesterday for the launch of Positive Coaching Scotland in Stirling.

There to launch a pilot of PCS, described as a coaching programme with a more positive ethos, was Californian Jim Thomson.

As a parent, he was appalled at the win-at-all-costs mentality handed down from professional sport, and mimicked by school, club, and community sport coaches.

Director of Stanford Business School's public management programme, he stood down after 11 years and founded the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA), a movement of parents, coaches and youth sports organizations dedicated to "transforming youth sports so sports can transform youth."

This centred on the concept of double goal coaching: the first being winning, but through concerted effort, and not at all costs, and the second being to teach character-building life skills through sport.

Thomson's public management programme at Stanford was the top non-profit business management programme in the US, and he was also director of a course to prepare MBA students for a global economy, placing them in China. In the 10 years since he founded PCA it has developed a network of more than 130 coaches who have delivered 5000 workshops for youth sports leaders, coaches, parents and athletes. The programme has reached some 3m children.

"We currently have PCA working in the Bay Area in northern California, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Chicago, New York, and Washington DC," he said yesterday. Houston and Dallas are in the immediate pipeline. "The aim is to open in one or two cities a year for five years. It takes about $1m to sustain the programme for five years. The aim is to be self-supporting after that."

The PCS programme is also being piloted in four other local authorities: Clackmannanshire, East Renfrewshire, Fife, and in Drumchapel. The project is being managed by Tommy Boyle, former coach of Scotland's last world ranked male and female athletes, Tom McKean and Yvonne Murray. As he points out, the skills being encouraged are leadership, coping with adversity, teamwork, persistence and compassion. These are planks of Scottish education's curriculum for excellence.

"In my first six years as a coach, I had the win-at-all costs mentality," said Boyle yesterday. "I'd a procession of champions at Lanarkshire, West District and Scottish level. Then I realised it was a flawed logic, and that I needed to spend a lot more time teaching athletes, things like good technique, and working hard, the work ethic I had been taught."

Many young athletes succeed because of freakish development, but disappear as adults. Yet some coaches build reputations by seeking out such prodigies.

"More importantly," says Boyle, "other kids are not focused on, to the detriment of their development."

The aim of PCS is to focus on all of that, prevent kids from abandoning sport, and impact on health statistics. PCS will teach that success through hard work is what really matters, in sport and in life.

The foundation's executive director, Graeme Watson says, "Sport is the best training ground to give young people skills which are applicable across their whole lives. What is important is not how good they are now, but how good they want to become."

Football will have a key part to play in establishing the credibility of PCS and its role in the new programme will be unveiled today.