The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

Ford wanted his customers to wait obediently at the end of his production line to hop in and drive off in whatever he chose to make. He famously remarked “You can have any color—as long as it’s black.” His company produced one car, the Model T, from 1908 to 1927, and then, when sales finally started to flag, it rolled out another car, the Model A,

Europe, in short, treats entrepreneurial risk-taking like farming: success is a result of hard work and good planning, so if you fail, it’s because you did something wrong.

Our best guess is that nosocomial infections (sickness contracted as a result of medical treatment) kill about 100,000 people every year—about three times as many as are killed in car accidents.12

America, by contrast, treats it like foraging: results are highly uncertain and always driven by luck, so if you fail, it’s a healthy sign that you were trying hard.

“The reason we struggle with insecurity,” says Pastor Steven Furtick, “is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”

By contrast, GM pioneered annual model changes and attractive styling, was an early leader in auto financing, and developed multiple brands to suit different demographics and personalities—“a car for every purse and purpose,” as the longtime GM executive Alfred P. Sloan put it.

If I’d been sitting alone in my apartment, it would have been hard to convince myself that I was on the right track. But as long as I had someone else there who was willing to say that we might get married someday, I had just enough reason for optimism to keep on doing what I was doing.

The L.A. Unified School District and the Coca-Cola company were afflicted with what I call the Curse of the Successful Pilot Project. It’s what happens to organizations that forget the cardinal rule of experimentation: many results are spurious, and most pilot projects don’t scale. Most things that work great in the lab, or the taste test, or the f

Somehow, taking risks in groups makes us more, not less, likely to make dumb gambles that give us some remote hope of maintaining the status quo. We look around at all the other people strapped into their seats and say, “Never mind the smell of smoke.” While you’d hope that adding more people would make it more likely that someone would state the o