Mark Coopersmith

We all know we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, and we’ve heard the mantra of “fail often, fail fast” and “embrace failure” from Silicon Valley.

It sounds so simple. But this is harder to pull off than it sounds. For one thing, it’s no fun to admit our mistakes. But it’s also tough to accept the likelihood of failure in a culture (and market) that expects ever-higher levels of performance. And we don’t want failure to excuse incompetence or halfhearted effort.

In other… Show more

We all know we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, and we’ve heard the mantra of “fail often, fail fast” and “embrace failure” from Silicon Valley.

It sounds so simple. But this is harder to pull off than it sounds. For one thing, it’s no fun to admit our mistakes. But it’s also tough to accept the likelihood of failure in a culture (and market) that expects ever-higher levels of performance. And we don’t want failure to excuse incompetence or halfhearted effort.

In other words, it’s easy to flunk failure itself, and miss the valuable insights it holds as a strategic resource to accelerate innovation, drive growth and strengthen employee engagement.

So how can executives put failure to work? How can they turn it from a regret to a resource that advances their agenda? The article outlines four practical steps... Show less

Disarming the toxicity of failure, and making it work for you and your organization.

Organizations want faster growth, more innovation and deeper employee engagement. Executives, entrepreneurs and teams know how hard that is to do. The good news? There’s a largely untapped resource immediately available that can help you advance this agenda. But most people have trouble even talking about it. It’s failure—the “Other F Word”—and it’s the one asset you and your colleagues create and pay for every day. You might as well put it to work.

In this provocative and practical… Show more

Organizations want faster growth, more innovation and deeper employee engagement. Executives, entrepreneurs and teams know how hard that is to do. The good news? There’s a largely untapped resource immediately available that can help you advance this agenda. But most people have trouble even talking about it. It’s failure—the “Other F Word”—and it’s the one asset you and your colleagues create and pay for every day. You might as well put it to work.

In this provocative and practical book, the authors share failure-savvy insights from exclusive interviews with leaders from multinationals to startups. Danner and Coopersmith add their interdisciplinary background as executives, entrepreneurs, board members and advisors. As professors at the UC Berkeley and Princeton, they also contribute their research and classroom experience with students and executives from around the world.

So tap into the power of The Other “F” Word , and put failure to work today! Show less