Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed
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Description
Winner of the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.
Thinkers50 Best Management Books for 2024.
We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we’re often told that failure is desirable – that we must ‘fail fast, fail often’. The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.
Here, Amy Edmondson – the world’s most influential organisational psychologist – reveals how we get failure wrong, and how to get it right. Drawing on four decades of research into the world’s most effective teams, she unveils the three archetypes of failure – basic, complex and intelligent – and explains how to harness the revolutionary potential of the good ones (and eliminate the bad). Along the way, she poses a simple, provocative question: What if it is only by learning to fail that we can hope to truly succeed?
Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her work explores teaming – the dynamic forms of collaboration needed in environments characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. She has also studied the role of psychological safety in teamwork and innovation. Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked with founder and CEO Larry Wilson to design change programs in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and innovation in the built environment remains an area of enduring interest and passion.