My Favorite Mistake is a podcast and learning platform built on a simple idea: mistakes are inevitable, but learning from them is a leadership choice. These posts explore conversations with executives, healthcare leaders, entrepreneurs, engineers, and educators who reflect candidly on mistakes that shaped their thinking, leadership, and approach to improvement.
Rather than blaming individuals, this archive focuses on system design, psychological safety, and the conditions that make it possible—and worthwhile—for people to speak up, experiment, and learn. The goal isn’t failure for its own sake, but better decisions, better leadership, and better outcomes through honest reflection.
I don’t always share new episodes of the “My Favorite Mistake” podcast with you here, but when I do… it’s a Lean practitioner. Today, that guest is Bob Rush, who has roughly 30 years of Lean experience with different companies,…
My latest episode of “My Favorite Mistake” is one with a heavy Lean focus, so I’m sharing it here with you today. My guest is Lee Houghton, a consultant based in the UK who has done a lot of Lean…
You might remember this Lean Blog Interviews podcast episode that I did last year with Keith Ingels from The Raymond Corporation, a Toyota Industries company: The theme of learning from mistakes came up, not surprisingly, so I also had Keith…
I don’t share every episode of “My Favorite Mistake” here (but I do hope you’ll subscribe and listen). As a reader of this blog, you might know that John Shook was the first American manager to be hired by Toyota…
This is some bonus audio related to an episode of the “My Favorite Mistake” podcast that Professor Jonathan Byrnes and I recorded last week. He is a Senior Lecturer at MIT. I’m going to release his full episode in mid-May…
I make a lot of mistakes. Maybe that’s one reason why I started a podcast called “My Favorite Mistake.” I do my best to learn from my mistakes. I’d like to avoid repeating mistakes, but I do find ways to…
Of the 32 episodes of the “My Favorite Mistake” podcast that I’ve released so far, the episode with Billy Taylor has been the most listened to by far — by a factor of five. Readers of this blog most likely…
I’ve stopped sharing every single episode of the “My Favorite Mistake” podcast here on the blog, but I will share episodes that feature folks from the Lean community. Today’s “My Favorite Mistake” is one such episode, featuring my friend (and…
Note: After doing so for the first 25 episodes, I’m going to stop cross-posting all of the episodes here to LeanBlog.org. I’ll post about the podcast if there is a guest from the Lean community. To make sure you learn…
My Favorite Mistake is a learning from mistakes podcast created for leaders who want to grow without blame. Each episode features honest conversations with business leaders reflecting on a professional mistake–and what they learned from it. The goal isn’t confession…
My guest for Episode #266 of the podcast is Karyn Ross (@KRCLean4Service on Twitter), co-author of the new book (with Jeff Liker): The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: Lean Transformation in Service Organizations.
