Mistake Bank Bookshelf: "Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins"

"Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation" by Ralph Farson and Ralph Keyes is our first entry in our "Mistake Bank Bookshelf" series. We'll write a short post on each book that falls into the category of must reads if you are interested in this topic. We'll post this every Friday. Most of the books have been covered in the past, but we will include them here in a simple summary post. You can find them all by clicking on the label "Mistake Bank Bookshelf."


"Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins" is not one we've written about before. It's a slim book, just over 100 pages, and the size made me think of the upcoming Mistake Bank book, which will be about the same size. It's a straightforward business book, focusing both on the psychology of success and failure and its impact on innovation. Women readers alert: there are LOTS of sports analogies, including shout-outs to Vince Lombardi, Bill Russell, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, etc., etc.

The book was released in 2002, and I wonder if it didn't do so well in its first release, because it's was rereleased a year later as "The Innovation Paradox: The Success of Failure, the Failure of Success." [Note to self: I hope it wasn't the word Mistake that hurt the book's sales prospects!]

Farson and Keyes do a good job of exploring how success and failure intertwine - how failures enable successes and successes set you up for future failure. I particularly love a brief autobiography they include for a "management consultant" who seems a lot like Farson himself:

Because I didn't receive a single "A" in college, I couldn't get into medical school. Instead, I worked as a lifeguard, but got fired at the end of the summer. My next job, selling advertising in the Yellow Pages, was interrupted by breaking my leg badly while skiing. This gave me three months to think about what to do with my life. Since I'd enjoyed my psychology courses in college, I thought I might try to become a school psychologist. So, I enrolled at UCLA to pick up psychology and education courses, but got kicked out of student teaching because I couldn't get along with my supervisor. Back to lifeguarding. Then I noticed that a prominent psychologist was giving a summer seminar at my alma mater, so I quit my job and enrolled. This experience was electrifying. The psychologist invited me to study with him at the University of Chicago. I was so intimidated by that most serious academic institution, however, that I put off going there for a year. Just before receiving my Ph.D. from Chicago, I was given a one-year fellowship on the Harvard Business School faculty. I left there at the end of the year with almost everyone mad at me.

My other favorite part of the book is the final chapter, entitled, "Samurai Success," in which the authors revisit a paradox of competition. In the greatest, most intense competition, winning and losing loses importance to the exhilaration of performing in the moment. And Japanese samurai, adopting Zen principles, "strived to achieve victory by becoming fully absorbed in a process that would lead them there, not by setting their sights on victory itself."

The lessons are that success has a significant component of subjectivity; that there are reversals along the way, and that the process and daily work is where satisfaction rests.