Fail Better

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.

Argues that failure is the most direct way to becoming a more complete, loving, and fulfilled human being.

Pretentiousness is the engine oil of culture; the essential lubricant in the development of all arts, high, low, or middle.

A smart, accessible look into the philosophy of baseball, with a focus on its lessons for a life best lived.

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.

"Playfully exploring the intimate relationships between physical media and everyday life: Ford's investigations into, and reflections on, existential nature and the use of conventional materials and modes of presentation reveal ... nuanced contradictions as well as a fascination with process and the filling-in of time. While mostly a creator of laboured drawings, well-considered objects and videos, Ford also provides us with scenarios that have us pondering over the mundane and/or acting out the absurd as he invites us to look deeper into his works and what is taking place around us."--Back cover.

What impossibly big dream or impossibly big failure is God calling you to take a journey circling around the promise and to fail better? Sharing inspiring human experiences from her own journey to fail better in prison, Anmy Tran will help you uncover your heart’s deepest desires and God-given promises and unbridle them through the kind of audacious communication that God delights to give you the desire of your heart. Hidden in ancient biblical stories and scriptures from the Old and New Testaments, the mysteries of promises revealed in To Fail Better are as raw as a reality show because they are the omens of the present; the scriptures revealed the secret is here in the present. If attention is paid to the present, it can be improved upon. And if the present is improved, what comes later will also be better. The revelations are so specific that you can forget about the future and walk each day in the scriptures, confident that God’s love always prevails and his promises to his children are always fulfilled—it’s real. Written in an absorbing narrative style, To Fail Better opens with the appearance of a woman burdened with unexpected storm. Through it are a series of messages she has received in the form of travel photography through a pen. Each travel unveils a failure and a prophetic mystery concerning failing better that will change the way one sees living forever. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure” (Paulo Coelho).