What do you think?
Rate this book
Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner Fail Better (Hardback) - Common
A usable method for learning from failureEveryone is talking about failure these days. It’s ok to fail—it’s how you learn. But how exactly do you take failure’s lessons and roll them into future success? Until now, there was no repeatable method for doing so.In this book, Anjali Sastry (MIT) and Kara Penn (Mission Spark) provide the missing a feedback loop that teaches us how to learn from our mistakes. The step-by-step process they suggest is easy, usable, and repeatable. The authors teach us how to adopt the process and guide us to putting it in place. The book is filled with stories of organizations and teams that have used the method, and includes a practically-oriented “how to” section to help teams move on from failure, as well as key findings drawn from relevant literature on learning, innovation, and psychology that underpin this approach.For anyone—innovators, engineers, managers, change-makers, and executives—who isn’t afraid to fail, this book will help you pick up the pieces and apply them to future successes.
Hardcover
First published October 14, 2014
12 people are currently reading
138 people want to read
About the author
Anjali Sastry
4 books5 followersAnjali Sastry is senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her PhD in management science and undergraduate physics and Russian degrees are all from MIT. She has been assistant professor at the University of Michigan and MIT, management consultant at Bain & Company, and research scholar at Rocky Mountain Institute.
SastryAnjali has two decades of experience teaching and researching organizational change, system dynamics, and action learning grounded in her professional experience and academic training in system dynamics, organizational theory, and sustainability. In 2007, she developed Global Health Lab, which has paired 70 faculty-mentored teams of MIT graduate students with organizations on the front lines of health care delivery in Africa and Asia to tackle pressing challenges and yield new insights about improving health care delivery in low-resource settings. Find more about this work and her study of innovative business models for frontier markets at groundwork.mit.edu.
Anjali’s research studies how design, business models, management, and systems thinking shape healthcare delivery amid constraints. She presents her work through executive education, academic conferences and publications, articles, and lectures in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere.
A former member of the Board of the Learning Project Elementary School in Boston, Anjali currently serves on the Board of Directors of the global nongovernmental organization Management Sciences for Health and the Medical Advisory Board of WonderWork, and collaborates closely with the Global Health Delivery Project, MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation at University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and the Global Business School Network. She frequently advises a variety of efforts, which recently have included technology start-ups across the globe, the Lemelson-MIT Program, the Ashoka Foundation, Merck for Mothers, the Center for Health Market Innovations, the United Network for Organ Sharing, the MIT Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, and the MIT Ideas Competition.
SastryAnjali has two decades of experience teaching and researching organizational change, system dynamics, and action learning grounded in her professional experience and academic training in system dynamics, organizational theory, and sustainability. In 2007, she developed Global Health Lab, which has paired 70 faculty-mentored teams of MIT graduate students with organizations on the front lines of health care delivery in Africa and Asia to tackle pressing challenges and yield new insights about improving health care delivery in low-resource settings. Find more about this work and her study of innovative business models for frontier markets at groundwork.mit.edu.
Anjali’s research studies how design, business models, management, and systems thinking shape healthcare delivery amid constraints. She presents her work through executive education, academic conferences and publications, articles, and lectures in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere.
A former member of the Board of the Learning Project Elementary School in Boston, Anjali currently serves on the Board of Directors of the global nongovernmental organization Management Sciences for Health and the Medical Advisory Board of WonderWork, and collaborates closely with the Global Health Delivery Project, MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation at University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and the Global Business School Network. She frequently advises a variety of efforts, which recently have included technology start-ups across the globe, the Lemelson-MIT Program, the Ashoka Foundation, Merck for Mothers, the Center for Health Market Innovations, the United Network for Organ Sharing, the MIT Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, and the MIT Ideas Competition.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 13, 2014
grabbed after seeing the reco on HBR
verdict: 4*
this book is unique and has very helpful relevant advises with contemporary examples for anyone who is interested in the concepts of "change management" and "lean management" principles
verdict: 4*
this book is unique and has very helpful relevant advises with contemporary examples for anyone who is interested in the concepts of "change management" and "lean management" principles
December 23, 2014
Failure can be good. We can learn by it. If we have to fail why don’t we fail in a good, positive way?
Maybe it is a cultural difference as in many countries failure is seen as a very bad thing, something to be ashamed of. Naturally you don’t want to fail and you don’t set out to sabotage your own project, yet sometimes it is inevitable and there is a lot to possibly learn along the way. This book seeks to show you that you can plan for failure and should it happen you can salvage something of value: knowledge. You will learn how to create the conditions, culture and habits to quickly figure out what works in just three steps. Along the way you will challenge your thinking, stress test and validate interdependencies and keep an eye to the future. The authors say that they have refined their way of thinking as consultants with over a hundred different companies and provide a road map for others to implement this into their own organisation, irrespective of size and location.
Overall this is a fairly accessible, clearly written book that manages to push forward an interesting methodology to help drive your business. Many of the messages could also be taken out and implemented in one’s private life. A lot of the points seem and feel like common-sense but it is often these simple things that are overlooked in favour of something more complicated and less-effective. Despite being open-minded one wasn’t fully and totally sold with this book. It might be a slight culture clash or just a style approach. It isn’t the Holy Grail, the one and only book you might need, yet it is capable of giving a lot in the right hands. It is pleasing to note that there is a large bibliography for further reading and research at the end. It underlines the authors have not just pulled out some ideas from the air and hoped for the best. The book did feel a bit elongated, padded and slow to burn. Punches were slightly dulled or pulled rather than being a vice-like grip on the subject. Different strokes for different folks, perhaps?
However the core is interesting and actionable. To be forewarned is to be forearmed as they say. Get your defences in place just in case. This book might help you do that whilst looking forward with the hope that you will never need its guidance in practice.
Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner, written by Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn and published by Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN 9781422193440, 256 pages. YYYY
Maybe it is a cultural difference as in many countries failure is seen as a very bad thing, something to be ashamed of. Naturally you don’t want to fail and you don’t set out to sabotage your own project, yet sometimes it is inevitable and there is a lot to possibly learn along the way. This book seeks to show you that you can plan for failure and should it happen you can salvage something of value: knowledge. You will learn how to create the conditions, culture and habits to quickly figure out what works in just three steps. Along the way you will challenge your thinking, stress test and validate interdependencies and keep an eye to the future. The authors say that they have refined their way of thinking as consultants with over a hundred different companies and provide a road map for others to implement this into their own organisation, irrespective of size and location.
Overall this is a fairly accessible, clearly written book that manages to push forward an interesting methodology to help drive your business. Many of the messages could also be taken out and implemented in one’s private life. A lot of the points seem and feel like common-sense but it is often these simple things that are overlooked in favour of something more complicated and less-effective. Despite being open-minded one wasn’t fully and totally sold with this book. It might be a slight culture clash or just a style approach. It isn’t the Holy Grail, the one and only book you might need, yet it is capable of giving a lot in the right hands. It is pleasing to note that there is a large bibliography for further reading and research at the end. It underlines the authors have not just pulled out some ideas from the air and hoped for the best. The book did feel a bit elongated, padded and slow to burn. Punches were slightly dulled or pulled rather than being a vice-like grip on the subject. Different strokes for different folks, perhaps?
However the core is interesting and actionable. To be forewarned is to be forearmed as they say. Get your defences in place just in case. This book might help you do that whilst looking forward with the hope that you will never need its guidance in practice.
Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner, written by Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn and published by Harvard Business Review Press. ISBN 9781422193440, 256 pages. YYYY
December 9, 2018
I found this book to be more of a practical guide than a compelling read, and I had to put it down halfway through. I feel it is a book best used as a reference tool, and I will likely return to it next time I'm working on a complex project. However it's not a book that I would pick up and read just to absorb its theories.
August 1, 2019
way too much filler, not enough detail or substance
July 12, 2017
It's a generally good book offering helpful strategies for businesses, not very exciting to read tho.
September 15, 2019
Not bad.
December 16, 2014
This book is about recognizing the different types of mistakes we can have during a process and these are:
1.- Mistakes from which we can learn more so they will give us new insights and improve the process.
2.- Mistakes that are out of our control and that we need to be able to manage and tolerate.
3.- Mistakes that we must avoid because they are just plain dumb.
Number three should be avoided at all costs because those are the mistakes that don't give any insight and do nothing to improve the process, indeed they just make things worse. The book give us a guideline to identify and squeeze the best of Number one and number two, and even teach us how to encourage or give some slack to those mistakes that will make us learn more, learn better and explore some new ideas previously unknown.
The thing is to learn how to Fail in a better and more productive way. Fail or Succeed shouldn't be black and white propositions. There's more to learn if we explore their nuances.
I think this book is more a field guide, a step-by- step do it yourself, than a book. Every chapter has a summary at the beginning listing the appropriate steps of that part of the process. And at the end of each chapter there is a checklist so you don't forget anything. As I told you this is like a workbook.
At the end of the book the authors show two real practical cases step-by-step which are very useful to see how we may apply all the learned principles in different scenarios.
The only quibble I have is that they could have shortened the book if they had used more bullet points and less prose. Nonetheless this is a good book not only for managers and entrepreneurs, but also for CEOs and people involved in the design, creation and evaluation of almmost any kind of projects.
1.- Mistakes from which we can learn more so they will give us new insights and improve the process.
2.- Mistakes that are out of our control and that we need to be able to manage and tolerate.
3.- Mistakes that we must avoid because they are just plain dumb.
Number three should be avoided at all costs because those are the mistakes that don't give any insight and do nothing to improve the process, indeed they just make things worse. The book give us a guideline to identify and squeeze the best of Number one and number two, and even teach us how to encourage or give some slack to those mistakes that will make us learn more, learn better and explore some new ideas previously unknown.
The thing is to learn how to Fail in a better and more productive way. Fail or Succeed shouldn't be black and white propositions. There's more to learn if we explore their nuances.
I think this book is more a field guide, a step-by- step do it yourself, than a book. Every chapter has a summary at the beginning listing the appropriate steps of that part of the process. And at the end of each chapter there is a checklist so you don't forget anything. As I told you this is like a workbook.
At the end of the book the authors show two real practical cases step-by-step which are very useful to see how we may apply all the learned principles in different scenarios.
The only quibble I have is that they could have shortened the book if they had used more bullet points and less prose. Nonetheless this is a good book not only for managers and entrepreneurs, but also for CEOs and people involved in the design, creation and evaluation of almmost any kind of projects.
October 4, 2021
This book is primarily intended for project managers. If you aren't involved with a project, be it in a business or a non-profit, I recommend you avoid buying or reading this book.
I also noticed several grammatical mistakes along the way, and wonder who did the editing.
The use of examples is slim, and the amount of detail in those examples is skimpy.
This book is full of generalities and not much specific knowledge for use in the real world. And finally, the language tends to be academic and consultant-speak.
The fail better method may have some merit, but this book doesn't have too much.
I also noticed several grammatical mistakes along the way, and wonder who did the editing.
The use of examples is slim, and the amount of detail in those examples is skimpy.
This book is full of generalities and not much specific knowledge for use in the real world. And finally, the language tends to be academic and consultant-speak.
The fail better method may have some merit, but this book doesn't have too much.
January 15, 2017
Enjoying it. Not done but nearly so. Got my rethinking and remembering my MA in Ed. Tech. Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate. And a good bit of Lean Startup and Agile thinking thrown in. I would recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews