Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner

By Anjali Sastry, Kara Penn | Harvard Business Press Books

A usable method for learning from failure. Everyone is talking about failure these days. It’s ok to fail–its how you learn. But how exactly do you take failure’s lessons and roll them into future success? Until now, there was no repeatable method for doing so. In this book, Anjali Sastry (MIT) and Kara Penn (“Mission Spark”) provide the missing link: a feedback loop that teaches us how to learn from our mistakes. The step-by-step process they suggest is easy, usable, and repeatable. The authors teach us how to adopt the process and guide us to putting it in place. The book is filled with stories of organizations and teams that have used the method, and includes a practicallyoriented “how to” section to help teams move on from failure, as well as key findings drawn from relevant literature on learning, innovation, and psychology that underpin this approach. For anyone– innovators, engineers, managers, change-makers, and executives–who isn’t afraid to fail, this book will help you pick up the pieces and apply them to future successes.