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

Part IIIHowUsing the Failure Value Cycle to Advance Your Organization

You have several choices about how you handle the other F word. You can ignore it, rationalize it, excuse and forgive it, or even hide it. You can treat failures as isolated events or regrettable episodes.

But if you're serious about leveraging failure as a strategically significant resource to help you better innovate, engage your colleagues, and grow your organization, you need a serious, practical framework to do that.

In this section, we introduce the Failure Value Cycle, based on our research and the hard-earned insights from the prominent leaders we interviewed. It contains seven discrete but integrated stages in which, starting tomorrow, you can extract significant value from the failures you and your organization face—before, during, and after they occur.

Like any proper teachers, we'll offer you a practical report card you can use to grade yourself and your organization across the entire Failure Value Cycle. After all, we don't want you to flunk failure itself.