About this item
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 groundwork2. Build and refine ideas and products through iterative action3. Identify and embed the learningFail 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.
About the Author
Anjali 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.
