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

19Escape the Gravity of Failure: Leading the Fallible Organization

We named this book The Other “F” Word for a very simple reason: We want our readers to move the topic of failure from taboo to a regular focus of their leadership agenda. Our suggestions can help you turn your failures from unfortunate regrets into valuable resources.

The good news is, there are five additional powerful capabilities inside your organization—just on the other side of the other-F-word taboo—waiting to be liberated. As you become more failure-savvy, these five—honesty, curiosity, pride, humility, and engagement—can themselves become force multipliers for your leadership:

1. Honesty: Think how much wiser your decisions would be if you had the benefit of real candor from your colleagues. Rather than presiding over meetings in which people are afraid to share their ideas, much less talk about the proverbial elephant in the room, develop a culture where productive conversations take place about projects and initiatives that failed. The meetings we profiled at Google, ONTRAPORT, and Twitter serve as helpful examples.
2. Curiosity: Imagine how invigorating it would be to hear new product, strategy, or business model ideas and questions bubbling up from your organization, rather than awaiting signals from on high. Face it, no single person in your organization —including you—is as smart or brings as much perspective ...