Anjali Sastry

Kara Penn

If you’re aiming to innovate, failure along the way is a given. But can you fail better? Whether you’re rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better, faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works, in three steps: 1. Launch every innovation project with the right groundwork 2. Build and refine ideas and products through iterative action 3. Identify and embed the learning Fail Better teaches you how to design your efforts to test the boundaries of your thinking, explore crucial interdependencies, and find the factors that can shift results from just acceptable to groundbreaking—or even world-changing. Practical instructions intertwined with compelling real-world examples show you how to: • Make predictions and map system relationships ahead of time so you can better assess results • Establish how much failure you can afford • Prioritize project activities for disconfirmation and iteration • Learn from every action step by collecting and examining the right data • Support efficient, productive habits to link action and reflection • Distill, share, and embed the lessons from every success and failure You may be a Fortune 500 manager, scrappy start-up innovator, social impact visionary, or simply leading your own small project. If you aim to break through without breaking the bank—or ruining your reputation—this book is for you.

Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner

Fail Better

Anthony K. Tjan

Jeff Weiss

Joe Knight

Raymond Sheen

Learn what it takes to build a great business with this digital collection curated by Harvard Business Review; it contains everything you need to know about entrepreneurship, from leadership traits and a willingness to fail to financial intelligence and tips for building a business case. Includes Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs; Fail Better; Heart, Smarts Guts, and Luck; Entrepreneur’s Toolkit; HBR on Entrepreneurship; HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case; HBR Guide to Negotiating; How I Did It; and the Harvard Business Review articles “Five Stages of Small Business Growth,” and “Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Scale.”

Anjali Sastry

Books

Your next favorite book is out there