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What's in It for Me?
Your Personal Guided Book Tour
This book will make you a better leader by helping you tap into a phenomenal resource all around you. You may not always be aware of it, and chances are you're not utilizing it very well right now. But the good news is you've already paid for it, and you and your organization continue to add to it every day in many ways. It's failure, the other F word. Although no one likes to fail, truly successful leaders know how to turn a bad experience from a regret into a resource. They put failure to work, driving innovation, strengthening genuine collaboration, and accelerating growth in their organizations.
We teach about innovation, leadership, strategy, and entrepreneurship. Our executive, graduate, and undergraduate students at University of California Berkeley and Princeton come from backgrounds ranging from business to engineering and healthcare to energy. In all our classes, we stress that entrepreneurs, innovators, product designers, and leaders of change initiatives need to answer the one key question on the minds of their potential customers, users, and colleagues: WIIFM? That's short for: What's In It For Me? Translate what you are trying to do into terms your audience can understand and benefits they can appreciate.
We're holding ourselves to that same standard. So to begin, we've created a personal crib sheet for you on the key points we'd like you to think about…
- Failure matters. Why? Because we spend much, if not most, of our lives creating it, dealing with it, and trying to learn from it.
- Failure's like gravity. It's everywhere—a fact of life for every organization at every organizational phase, from startup to growing business and established enterprise.
- Failure is too often a taboo topic. That's why we call it the other F word. If you can't talk about it, you can't manage it, or learn from it. Take it out of the shadows.
- You've already paid for it, so use it. As a leader or team member, you can convert failure from a repeated regret to a strategic resource that can help you drive innovation, better engage your colleagues' real capabilities, and accelerate growth.
- Fear of failure is failure's force multiplier. It distorts the likelihood of failure and exaggerates its consequences. It is one of your most important challenges in getting your organization to go where you want it to go.
- While we suggest a more open and practical direct relationship with failure, that doesn't mean tolerating it as an excuse for incompetence, negligence, or indifference.
- How you deal with failures of your team members is the acid test of whether you trust them, and vice versa. And trust is essential to address the biggest failure in most organizations: Employees are not meaningfully engaged in their work or mission.
- If you're serious about innovation or entrepreneurship, be prepared for the failure that often comes with the experiments and risks associated with those objectives. Use it to understand what you don't know or haven't yet delivered.
- Our seven-stage Failure Value Cycle framework can help your organization to better understand and harness failure as a value-add resource:
- Respect the power and likelihood of failure
- Rehearse for your most significant failure scenarios to develop better, faster reflexes
- Recognize its signs sooner
- React to failure situations more appropriately in the moment
- Reflect deeply and honestly on their underlying causes so you can craft better strategies going forward
- Rebound confidently, based on the lessons learned
- Remember the insights you gained, to strengthen your culture's ability to leverage future failures
- Failure is today's lesson for tomorrow. Put it to work to help you accelerate innovation, intensify employee engagement, and drive growth. You and your organization are fallible. Admitting that reality and leveraging the failures you create builds the trust you need to create those results.
Now that you know where we're headed, let's tell you four places we won't take you. First, we won't waste your time exploring the usual clichés about the other F word, like to err is human and learn from your mistakes. While we know how difficult it can be to put that understanding into action, ours is not a personal psychology book or self-help manual.
Second, we're not going to take out our pom-poms to join the fail fast, fail often cheerleading chorus from Silicon Valley. We think you've already heard that enough, too.
Third, this is not another one of those “I struggled, I persevered, I succeeded” heroic personal memoirs. Great, inspiring stuff, but we'll leave that genre to others.
Fourth, although we are teachers, this is not an academic book per se. We hope it will be used in classrooms worldwide, but it is not written as a textbook. Our tone is informal and straightforward. We want to engage in a conversation, not a lecture. We invite you to share your experience and perspectives with us on our book website: www.theotherfwordbook.com.
Find Yourself Here
We've written this book with a practical agenda in mind: to challenge you to think about failure differently, manage it more effectively, and leverage it more creatively in your organization. We'll offer you specific, straightforward suggestions for how to do that, with examples drawn from our own extensive research and experience as well as insights from effective leaders we've interviewed across different organizational settings and professions, both domestically and internationally.
You'll learn how to deal more effectively with the reality and inevitability of failure. We'll offer you a practical, seven-stage framework, the Failure Value Cycle, which you can use to apply these lessons in your organization, starting tomorrow. Along the way, we provide practical exercises for you and your team to better understand key issues and put these insights to work.
There are more specific ways you can benefit from our book, depending on your particular responsibilities and interests. We trust you can find them yourself after scanning the following dozen profiles, whether you run a large established organization or a small to medium-sized business, are starting a new venture, or are simply curious about our topic:
- If you're in charge of your organization, you'll benefit from insights of successful peers who are leading or have led global Fortune 100 enterprises, high-potential startups, thriving mid-size businesses, important government organizations, and highly respected nonprofits, to name a few. They'll share lessons learned and suggestions for how you can more effectively address the fear of failure as well as leverage the power of the other F word to drive innovation and growth.
In our Failure Value Cycle, you'll learn specific steps you can take to bring out the best in the people you are leading. You should see the payoff in greater candor among your colleagues as you consider the choices ahead of you and their risks. You should witness increased evidence of creativity across your organization as your workers get more comfortable with a less-punitive culture that embraces excellence while accommodating good-faith experimentation.
- If you're in marketing or sales, you deal with the other F word every day, unless you are converting and closing 100 percent of your target prospects (in which case, you should be writing a book). A marketing campaign or sales call that doesn't yield what you'd hoped for, while unfortunate, also indicates what you don't know, or haven't yet shown, to convince your potential customers you're the answer to their needs.
Our book can help you be more effective on your next foray into the marketplace. Since you deal most directly with your competition and see firsthand new trends in the market, your insights are essential to the success of your firm. Imagine how much more your cash register would ring if you could improve your yield by just a few percentage points.
- If you manage the technology/IT side of your organization, you understand the accelerating and disruptive pace of change. Offensively, these changes can unleash opportunities for new, creative products and services, redefine how you leverage ideas and resources, and even redesign core business processes. Defensively, they pose brand-tarnishing risks like network security breaches, getting outflanked by more nimble competitors and startups, and being hampered by legacy systems and outdated technology.
Stay tuned. Our Failure Value Cycle can help you align your agenda with the most important priorities of your clients, even if they don't know the difference between the Zachman Stack and a short stack of pancakes. Applied rigorously to your own domain, it can complement your existing tools to anticipate, identify, and preempt potential failures-in-waiting, whether occasioned by malevolent hackers from the outside or inadequately examined failure scenarios inside.
- If you work in finance, you're concerned with how your organization manages its resources to get the best results from its investments and spending. You're also keenly aware of the disparity between the strategic objectives and commitments your CEO has established and the limited resources you have to allocate. We can't promise you a silver bullet, but we can offer you silver buckshot to help hit your targets.
We'll show you how to extract unexpected value from your organization's “garden mulch pile,” the accumulated residue from past product, technology, or market failures. We'll provide examples of how others have increased their ROSI (return on sunk investments), whether in the form of reconfiguring product offerings or repositioning solutions for entirely new markets. We can help you get more mileage out of your investments in innovation and operational improvement by facilitating an environment in which potential failures get flagged more rapidly, and better ideas for future actions get discussed and critiqued more openly. You know better than most how relatively small improvements in your working capital or net portfolio returns can cascade into dramatic positive results for your organization.
- If you're involved with strategic planning, you're in the business of recommending and making bets about the future. While leadership is fundamentally assertion in the face of uncertainty, your role is to advise the head...
