No self-respecting individual, whether a leader or a follower, wants to admit failure. Simply put, most are wired not to accept failure. This is largely because the fear of failure is drilled into us right from school days itself. Consequently, there is an innate tendency to shy away from talking or discussing failures. Sigmund Freud argued that there is a huge stigma around discussing any kind of failure in society. No wonder, politicians are the worst at admitting failures.

The classic works of corporate gurus like Peter Drucker emphasise optimising personal behaviour to achieve individual and organisational peak. They talk of success as the guiding mantra to surge ahead. Nobody wants to appear failed or defeated. Thanks to social media, the fear of failure has heightened, especially among the youth.

Different forms

Failure has many forms. There are intelligent failures, where one experiments deliberately to learn lessons from them. And then there are basic failures which include mistakes and slips, and complex failures where a mix of factors is at play over which one doesn’t have much immediate control. In Fail Smarter, business journalist Dougal Shaw draws on conversations with entrepreneurs and business leaders to look at failures in a more positive light. He lists seven lessons from the discussions, and these include: mental strategies to rebuild confidence; recalibrate thinking to address crises; leveraging negative customer reviews; tips to create breakthroughs in failures; and, finding new pathways to success as a team. The overarching message is that failure can be a signpost to success, only if one has grit, agility and ambition to seize the opportunities failure presents.

Fail Smarter is a valuable resource on lessons from failures that could eventually help entrepreneurs succeed in their ventures. It helps understand and appreciate failure better, and harness the creative opportunities that unfold. Despite the rise in number of failures among prospective entrepreneurs, the desire to create start-ups has only increased.

Shaw finds that many business leaders value failures for the lessons they teach, leading to personal growth and resilience. The observations of Josh Bayliss, CEO of Virgin Group, seems apt here: “I wish that I’d known earlier in my career just how important it is to be prepared to fail, because I think that’s when you learn the most.” Dealing with failure and learning from it make winning entrepreneurs.

Fail Smarter is a veritable meditation on failure, building a positive culture around failure and encouraging people to shift from blame and shame to acceptance and resilience. Shaw captures the personal experiences of a number of leading entrepreneurs in dealing with failure. The most successful leaders focus on what went wrong while building their businesses.

At the Global AI Summit in 2023, the key takeways that emerged from the fireside chat with delegates from Silicon Valley were: give up the security of the regular pay cheque; and be comfortable with failing. Adopting a more mature attitude to failure can help generate new ideas that make good business sense. Fail Smarter enlists many such ideas.

The successful leader must lead by example, both in terms of receiving and delivering feedback on failure.

The setbacks, failures and difficult moments are often the experiences that shape the biggest breakthroughs. So why is there a stigma around openly talking about them? That’s exactly what Shaw has explored in his book that combines personal accounts with practical insights on resilience, growth and learning. Failure can be a key character in the story, but it should not be the narrator.

The reviewer is an independent writer, researcher and academic

Title: Fail Smarter: Lessons from the Best on Turning Setbacks into Breakthroughs

Author: Dougal Shaw

Publisher: Profile/Hachette

Price: ₹499

Published on June 28, 2026