The Other "F" Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work

17The Failure Value Report CardA Practical Tool to Help You Put Failure to Work

“Failure is today's lesson for tomorrow.”

—John Danner

We wouldn't be true to our academic roles if we didn't offer you a way to assess your own failure leadership and grade yourself on your progress in making your organization more failure savvy. After all, we don't want you to flunk failure. So we've developed a Failure Value Report Card that covers the three different time zones of the Failure Value Cycle: before failure occurs, during a failure event, and afterwards. This tool can help you honestly evaluate how well prepared your organization is to anticipate, deal with, and leverage failure.

Organizations tend to act on what gets measured, so you need a way to keep track of your progress in becoming more failure savvy. Take care that your failure management process doesn't gratuitously celebrate or merely tolerate failure, but elevates and liberates it as an ongoing resource to strengthen performance overall. Keep that goal in mind as you determine what to measure.

Based on the seven stages of the Failure Value Cycle—and the role leaders have at every stage—we have designed this prototype to help you identify where you are strong and where you need to focus your attention. It's a tool that will be most helpful if it reflects the candid assessments of a representative cross-section of your entire ...