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

by John Danner, Mark Coopersmith

Leverage the power of failure in your organization.

Nobody wants to fail, but failure is a fact of life. Most of us treat it as a regrettable, even shameful, event best overlooked. In truth, failure can be a game-changing strategic resource that can help you and your organization achieve the greater success you crave.

"The Other "F" Word" shows how successful leaders and teams are putting failure to work every day - to re-engage employees, spark innovation and accelerate growth. Authors Danner and Coopersmith - with their rare blend of senior-level executive experience, global advising, teaching acumen and cross-discipline perspective - share these valuable new practices, and show how they can improve results across your organization. Based on exclusive interviews with prominent leaders and insightful examples from their own in-depth work, the book features a practical seven-stage framework to liberate failure as a force to advance your leadership agenda. After all, everyone creates and confronts failure on a daily basis. Why not use it to your advantage? "The Other "F" Word "shows you how to: Start an open, productive conversation about failure across your organization. Reduce the fear of failure that stifles initiative, creativity and engagement. Anticipate, prepare for and respond to failure, so you can leverage it when it happens. Harness failure as a catalyst to drive innovation, improve performance and strengthen culture

Failure's like gravity - pervasive and powerful. Whether you're a leader or team member of a startup, a growing business, or an established enterprise, failure is today's lesson for tomorrow. Let "The Other "F" Word" show you how to apply this lesson and take your company where it needs to go.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Self Help

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 16, 2015

About the author

John Danner--trusted advisor, teacher, author, and speaker--has spent decades helping leaders and their organizations navigate rapidly changing environments to their advantage.

John brings a rare blend of senior-level experience plus broad industry perspective to every engagement. He advises Fortune 500 companies as well as startups in fields as diverse as healthcare, energy, finance, enterprise services, technology and consumer products. John anchors executive education programs and delivers keynote addresses on five continents. And he teaches tomorrow's leaders at UC Berkeley and Princeton.

Connect with John--and learn more about how he helps create value for companies, customers and society--at www.johndanner.com .

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

The authors spent the first third of the book selling the book to me. Then they spent the second third showing me they had nothing to sell. Didn't read the final third.

[Affad Shaikh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Danner and Coopersmith state that their purpose is to have a conversation, engaging and honest, about "Failure." And that is precisely what it was, and a wonderful one at that. Failure can be intellectualized, even made into something quantifiable through behavioral psychology. And there is value to that, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow by Kahnehman. As there is value to reading about how to frame failure, or mistakes; and how develop it into a process with Harford did a wonderful job in Adapt. Also there are peripheral issues involved with the concept of failure, which you can read about in Duhigg's Habit, Duckworth's Grit, and Mischels Marshmallow Test. A host of other books out there also cover failure, including another worth mentioning, Sarah Lewis's very lyrical and poetic reflection in The Rise. But where they leave gaps, 'F' Word, provides a filling with a processing framework that the reader can derive immediate applicable value from called the Seven Stages of the Failure Value Cycle.

One of the anecdotes provided for Stage Four, React, helped ingrain the value cycle as an effective tool for me. Here, Danner and Coopersmith share the story of the late Rick Rescorla who was a Vietnam Vet in charge of security for the 22 floors of Morgan Stanley offices in the World Trade Center's Tower 2. He assessed the risk of a plane hitting the tower and took measures to implement procedures and practices that fine-tuned operations in the event of his predicted incident. Failing to get Morgan Stanley to shift buildings entirely, he worked with his team to develop institutional muscle memory within the 22 floors of offices to evacuate the floors orderly and with rigorous efficiency. He died that day, but the people who he served, the ones that made fun of the failure assessment reaction and gripped about the wasted time, well over 2,600 employees of Morgan Stanley survived thanks to his Eight P's philosophy.

And from Danner and Coopersmith sharing of this anecdote within their framework I draw the most value from their ideas. Failure is bound to happen, especially if you are in a position to innovate and develop. The only way to take opportunity to failure is to create a systematic way to capture all the various learning propositions that can be gained. That allows a failure to be converted into a potential asset. The Seven Stages of the Failure Cycle are therefore points of failure where specific types of information can be captured and utilized for better learning from failure.

Another book I would recommend to read with other listed books on the topic of Failure is Weinzimmer and McConoughy's Wisdom of Failure, as it provides a host of scenarios where failure comes up regularly based on some ridiculous number of author interviews with CEO's and teams and their suggested responses to those scenarios. This fits perfectly in Danner and Coopersmith's Failure Cycle stages two, three and four.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A valuable book with some great insights on developing a culture of innovation within the workplace. Many of the truth bombs in the book should be readily apparent to anyone running a business, but often we neglect the obvious truths in leu of pithy catch phrases bandied about (such as "failure is not an option"). The simple fact is that failure is the inevitable consequence of innovation-if there is no room for failure, there is no room for trying new things. A culture that learns from it's own failure is one that must be fostered from the CEO all the way down to the line workers, as the author aptly points out.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some ideas from the book:
* Failure is not the opposite of success; it's a part of it.
* Experimentation, by its very nature, will produce failures. The goal is to make those failures small, fast, and informative.
* By embracing failure as a learning opportunity, we unlock our potential for growth and innovation.

[Nikko · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you seek honest advice for managing your business better, you need The Other “F” Word in your library.

I first read this book when it came out in 2015, the same year I started working as a freelancer. It contains tons of examples from businesses of all sizes, so the book actually grows in relevance as your business advances. And, if like me, you offer business consulting as part of your services, the case studies themselves may prove priceless for helping you help your clients.

Reading The Other “F” Word taught me that no matter how secure a business seemed, disaster preparedness—as well as preparedness for success from an unexpected direction—could ultimately determine the longevity of the business.

This book claims to teach strategies for failure, but really it teaches you ways to pivot, to seize new opportunities, and to shed what no longer serves you.

Highly recommended! I continue to reference this book whenever I need a dose of hope (and reality) about my business.