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

18Creating the Failure-Savvy Organization

Our Journey So Far

Everybody wants to talk about success, but we began this book by discussing and defining failure. We suggested that failure's like gravity: It's a pervasive fact and force of life. We investigated the insidious power of the fear and memory of failure to paralyze teams, limit experimentation and risk-taking, and reduce innovation. We explored how the other F word manifests itself across different organizational phases—from nascent Start-Ups to small and medium-sized Keep-Ups to global Grown-Ups. We also introduced our seven-stage Failure Value Cycle to help you avoid failure in the first place, better prepare for it and, in particular, leverage it more effectively when it happens.

Throughout this journey we have provided exercises, to-do's, and takeaways, along with our Failure Value Report Card to help you assess the failure-savvy of your organization. We also provided examples and illustrations of how once-proud organizations such as Kodak stumbled and never recovered, while others such as Netflix were sufficiently failure savvy to respond effectively to failure, recover, innovate, and thrive.

Now, we turn to you. Think back on the various exercises we've suggested and the results you've seen from yourself and your colleagues. As a refresher, here are the key exercises we introduced:

• Assess Your Failure Leadership ...