My Favorite Mistake: Learning Without Blame in Business and Leadership
My Favorite Mistake is a podcast about learning without blame in business and leadership.
Despite the name, it’s not just my favorite mistake—it’s yours, it’s ours, and it’s what we can all learn from when things don’t go as planned.
Hosted by author and consultant Mark Graban, each episode features honest conversations with leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, and changemakers about a meaningful mistake they made—and what they learned after things went wrong. How they responded. How they improved. How they grew as leaders.
This isn’t a show about failure theater, gotcha moments, or simplistic “lessons learned.” It’s about how real people reflect, improve, and lead better in complex organizations—without scapegoating, shame, or hindsight bias.
What You’ll Hear
• Leadership and management mistakes that reshaped careers, teams, and organizations
• How teams and leaders learn without blaming individuals
• Insights about culture, systems, decision-making, and psychological safety
• Practical lessons drawn from real experience, not abstract theory
Guests come from business, healthcare, technology, sports, entertainment, government, and academia, sharing stories that reveal how learning actually happens.
The Perspective
Mark brings a systems-thinking lens grounded in Lean management, continuous improvement, and psychological safety. The focus is less on who messed up and more on what the system taught us.
Who This Podcast Is For
• Leaders and managers who want to learn from mistakes without blame
• Executives working to build healthier, more resilient cultures
• Professionals who believe improvement starts with reflection, not punishment
My Favorite Mistake: Learning Without Blame in Business and Leadership
Listen on:
Episodes
Monday Aug 10, 2020
Monday Aug 10, 2020
http://myfavoritemistakepodcast.com/
I hope you'll enjoy listening to My Favorite Mistake, published weekly. Please subscribe, rate, and review!
And please check out my new book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/favorite-mistake/support
About Mark Graban
Mark Graban is an author, speaker, and consultant, whose latest book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, is available now.
He is also the author of the award-winning book Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Engagement and others, including Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.
He serves as a consultant through his company, Constancy, Inc, and is also a Senior Advisor for the technology company KaiNexus.
Mark hosts podcasts, including “Lean Blog Interviews” and “My Favorite Mistake.”
Education: B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University; M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and M.B.A. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Leaders for Global Operations Program.