My Favorite Mistake: Learning Without Blame in Business and Leadership
Mark Graban
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
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
Episodes
Mentioned books
Mar 23, 2026 • 47min
Why "Have a Sense of Humor" Was the Wrong Company Value -- with Mike Chaput
Mike Chaput bought his first company at 24, went bankrupt at 28, and started over. When he co-founded Endsight, he and his partners worked hard to establish company values -- and landed on one that sounded great: "Have a sense of humor and take enjoyment from the day." The problem? Elevating humor to the top of the values hierarchy gave permission for blame-based behaviors, including a rubber chicken shaming ritual where the chicken got hung on the cubicle of anyone who made a mistake.
Episode page with video, transcript, links and more
The turning point came when Mike encountered W. Edwards Deming's work at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a sales leader told him bluntly that the organization felt like it was always looking for someone to blame. Deming's Point 8 -- drive fear out of the workplace -- made it clear: humor without respect underneath it creates the conditions for people to hide problems from leadership.
Mike shares the framework he now uses to test whether values are actually working, how Endsight replaced blame with problem registers, value stream managers, and A3 thinking, and why command-and-control leadership turns teams into panicked prey animals instead of coordinated predators. Drawing on Primed to Perform by Doshi and McGregor, he explains the motive spectrum from play to inertia -- and why fear-based management guarantees low performance.
Mar 16, 2026 • 46min
Why Being Great at Your Job Isn't Enough to Get Promoted with Kendall Berg
Kendall Berg was the most productive person on every team she joined. She was so technically good at her job that she thought she didn't have to be nice. Then a VP she respected -- someone outside her chain of command -- pulled her aside and delivered six words that changed her career: "Nobody likes working with you."
Episode page with links, video, and more
That blunt feedback could have been a setback. Instead, it became the catalyst for a complete transformation. Kendall spent a year building structured templates for the soft skills nobody had ever taught her -- how to make small talk, how to disagree without being dismissive, how to advocate for her own work -- and went from stuck at the manager level to earning five promotions in six years.
In this episode, Kendall shares her favorite mistake and what she learned about the real reasons people get promoted (and don't). We talk about why "playing politics" deserves a reframe, why nobody actually wants to work in a true meritocracy, and the "acknowledge and respond" technique that changes how people receive your ideas. She also shares how she turned a team of 17 underperformers into high performers by giving them something most managers never provide: structure for soft skills.
Kendall Berg is an internationally published author, TEDx speaker, and career coach. Her book is Secrets of the Career Game: 36 Strategies to Get Ahead In Your Career. Her TEDx talk is The Clash of the Generations. Find her at ThatCareerCoach.net.
Mar 9, 2026 • 43min
The Mistake of Going It Alone -- with Patrick Engasser
Patrick Engasser spent two years ranked near the bottom of a 615-person sales organization -- broke, in debt, and grinding through trial and error -- before one decision changed everything. He hired a coach. The problem wasn't effort or talent. It was not knowing that was even an option.
Episode page with links and more
In this episode, Patrick shares the mindset shift that had to happen before any strategy could work, how he turned blindness from a perceived liability into a genuine competitive advantage, and what actually separates leaders people want to follow from managers who just have a title.
What you'll learn:
Why trial and error is the most expensive way to learn -- and what to do instead
How mindset has to come before strategy in any coaching relationship
What real leaders do differently when things go wrong
How to coach people through excuses without damaging the relationship
What procrastination is really telling you -- and how to interrupt it
What to do (and not do) when you encounter a guide dog in public
Patrick Engasser is the bestselling author of "If I Can Do It, You Can Do It" and a business coach and motivational speaker who built a seven-figure sales team after starting from zero.
Mar 2, 2026 • 42min
Why Conflict Avoidance Costs More Than Conflict -- with Dr. Jen Fry
Dr. Jen Fry's favorite mistake is a disagreement with her best friend of over ten years -- a small miscommunication that led to eight months of silence. Neither of them knew how to reconcile it. Then Jen's mother passed away, and her friend sent a card. That single act of reaching out changed how Jen thinks about conflict, reconciliation, and the kind of people worth keeping in her life.
Episode page with transcript, links, and more
Jen is a sports geographer, tech founder, TEDx speaker, and author of I Said No: A No-Nonsense Guide to Setting Boundaries, Speaking Up, and Having a Backbone Without Being a Jerk. In this conversation, she draws on her background as a college volleyball coach, tech founder, and conflict expert to break down what leaders and teams get wrong about conflict, feedback, and boundaries.
We dig into why niceness gets weaponized to keep people quiet, why kindness requires accountability, and why people pleasing quietly ruins reputations and results. Jen explains why conflict-avoidant bosses create conflict-avoidant cultures, why anonymous feedback does more harm than good, and the critical difference between being defensive and defending yourself. She also shares what she saw on a high school volleyball video that she wishes she could burn -- and what it taught her about being a better teammate and leader.
Feb 26, 2026 • 6min
Robot Umpires Are Here: ABS and the Mistakes It May Create | Mistake of the Week
Baseball has always made room for human error. Umpires miss calls. Fans complain. Life goes on.
But this season, MLB is rolling out the Automated Ball-Strike challenge system -- ABS -- giving teams two challenges per game to contest ball-and-strike calls.
The idea is to reduce bad calls. The likely side effect is a whole new category of mistakes.
In this "Mistake of the Week," Mark Graban looks at what happens when correcting human error depends on another human decision -- and what one anonymous coach predicted, vividly, about how this will play out.
Feb 23, 2026 • 56min
Public Health Shouldn’t Be Political — A Career “Mistake” That Changed Everything | Dr. Tyler Evans
In this episode of My Favorite Mistake, Mark Graban talks with Dr. Tyler B. Evans, infectious diseases and addiction medicine physician, public health leader, and author of Pandemics, Poverty, and Politics.
Episode page with links, video, and more
Dr. Evans shares a deeply personal “mistake” — giving up his dream of working in global health abroad to take what he thought was a conventional job in the United States. That decision led him to work with Native American communities in Wyoming, build refugee health programs in New York, and serve in leadership roles during the COVID-19 pandemic. What initially felt like a detour ultimately shaped his career and mission.
The conversation explores the politicization of public health, the erosion of trust in expertise, and why solidarity among healthcare professionals may be essential to restoring confidence. Dr. Evans reflects on lessons from seatbelt laws, smoking reduction, and pandemic response — and why public health measures are fundamentally about protecting communities, not restricting individuals.
They also discuss how scientific understanding evolves, how leaders can communicate uncertainty responsibly, and why learning — not blame — must guide how we respond to mistakes.
Feb 19, 2026 • 4min
When a Water Leak Turns a Street Into Ice: Mistake of the Week
A forgotten water heater tap led to an overnight leak, an unexpected ice rink, and a reminder that the real lesson isn’t about blame — it’s about designing systems that catch small mistakes before they spread.
A small, human slip led to a big, icy problem in a neighborhood in northwest China. After a woman forgot to turn off the tap on her solar water heater, water flowed unnoticed for nine hours — and overnight temperatures turned the street outside into an accidental skating rink.
In this episode of Mistake of the Week, we look past blame and shame to ask a better question: why did the system require perfect memory, instead of detecting the problem or shutting itself off?
It’s a story about water leaks, design flaws, and how small mistakes can spread when systems aren’t built to catch them early — along with practical lessons for our own homes about alarms, automatic shutoffs, and mistake-proofing everyday risks.
Source news story
Feb 16, 2026 • 40min
Confusing Performance with Alignment — A Leadership Mistake That Causes Burnout, with Genevieve Skory
In Episode 339 of My Favorite Mistake, Mark Graban talks with Genevieve Skory, executive coach and former Chief Field Development Officer, about a leadership mistake that many high performers make: confusing performance with alignment.
Episode page with links, video, and more
For years, Genevieve defined winning by revenue and results. Pressure was normal. Constant pivoting felt strategic. Intensity was rewarded. The numbers came in — but so did exhaustion, turnover, and a culture operating in fight-or-flight mode.
In this conversation, we explore the hidden cost of performance-at-all-costs leadership, the neuroscience behind fear-driven decision-making, and why teams don’t always tell leaders the truth when the environment feels unsafe. Genevieve shares what changed for her and how she now helps ambitious leaders build sustainable success without burnout.
If you’ve ever sensed that strong results were masking deeper misalignment, this episode will resonate.
Feb 11, 2026 • 4min
Olympic Medals That Couldn’t Handle the Celebration | Mistake of the Week
After winning gold at the Winter Olympics, skier Breezy Johnson did what champions do — she jumped for joy.
And her medal fell off.
She later joked, “Don’t jump in them… I was jumping in excitement and it broke,” adding that it was “not, like, crazy broken. But, a little broken.” Other athletes experienced similar ribbon failures during their celebrations.
In this episode of Mistake of the Week, Mark Graban looks at what happens when a system fails during the very moment it’s designed to support — and why it’s encouraging that Olympic officials acknowledged the problem instead of blaming the athletes.
Because if your medal can’t survive celebration… what exactly was it tested for?
This episode explores:
Designing for real human behavior (including joy)
The importance of testing under realistic conditions
Why admitting a flaw beats assigning blame
What organizations can learn from a broken ribbon
Feb 9, 2026 • 43min
I Made a Marine Cry: Leadership, Authority, and Learning from Mistakes | Olaolu Ogunyemi
What happens when a leader realizes their approach caused real harm?
In this episode of My Favorite Mistake, U.S. Marine Corps officer and leadership mentor Olaolu Ogunyemi shares a defining moment early in his career—recognizing that his leadership style, while well-intended, crossed a line and made a Marine cry.
Episode page with links, video, and more
Rather than defending his authority, Olaolu reflects on the gap between intent and impact, and how that moment forced him to rethink what effective leadership really looks like. We talk about learning from mistakes, the difference between fear-based compliance and true accountability, and why psychological safety is essential—even (and especially) in high-pressure environments like the military.
This conversation explores how leaders grow when they confront mistakes honestly, respond with humility, and commit to changing their behavior—not just their words.
