Read endorsement blurbs

2025 Shingo Publication Award Recipient

What if your team’s biggest competitive advantage is the one you’ve been taught to avoid—mistakes?

In The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, bestselling author and consultant Mark Graban shows leaders how to replace fear, blame, and silence with a culture where people learn faster, innovate more often, and continuously improve the systems around them.

Drawing from powerful stories on the My Favorite Mistake podcast (more than 200 interviews with CEOs, entrepreneurs, clinicians, creators, and change-makers), Graban reveals a consistent truth: success isn’t about avoiding mistakes—it’s about learning from them.

This practical, engaging, and deeply human book helps leaders build organizations where people speak up, take smart risks, and solve problems together. The lessons align with the principles Graban has taught for years in Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, and Measures of Success—all grounded in respect for people, systems thinking, and psychological safety.

If you want to stop firefighting, reduce recurring problems, and spark real innovation, this book will show you how to:

• Overcome fear-based cultures that suppress ideas, hide problems, and slow improvement
• Build psychological safety so people feel safe admitting mistakes, raising concerns, and trying new approaches
• Create systems that prevent errors, improve processes, and reduce blame
• Develop a growth mindset that sees setbacks as opportunities rather than personal failures
• Turn vulnerability into a leadership strength, not a liability
• Accelerate learning and continuous improvement across teams and departments

You’ll learn how individuals—from startup founders to Fortune 500 executives to frontline healthcare professionals—turned their biggest missteps into turning points. And you’ll see how any team can do the same with the right leadership behaviors, habits, and systems.

Who This Book Is For

• Leaders who want to build a culture of continuous improvement
• Executives looking to strengthen innovation, agility, and trust
• Managers who want teams to feel safe speaking up about problems
• Lean practitioners and coaches seeking to reinforce respect for people
• Anyone ready to rethink their relationship with mistakes

A Fresh, Actionable Approach to Learning from Mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable—but the quality of your response isn’t. Graban provides questions, tools, and frameworks you can use immediately to shift conversations, redesign processes, and lead in a way that improves performance and engagement.

Whether you're driving transformation, leading a team, or simply striving to grow, The Mistakes That Make Us will help you unlock the hidden value in every misstep.

Buy The Mistakes That Make Us today and start transforming mistakes into your greatest source of learning, innovation, and success.

Learn more at the official website for the book. A paperback version is now available through Amazon.com and other retailers. It's also available in a hardcover edition.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR HOW TO MANAGE YOUR METRICS

Organizations depend on metrics for their business. Question is, are they helping people do the right things? Or, encouraging them to overreact to every uptick, downturn, and change?

In other words, reacting to noise.

Noise is present in every metric. But, it’s our reaction to noise that causes waste and stress. Too often, people don’t recognize this. 

Like feeling stuck on a rollercoaster you no longer enjoy.

We do and explain things that don’t help us improve. At the cost of doing things that do. No need to be jittery about every change in a metric. Not by a long shot.

Measures of Success shows a better way to chart and manage your metrics, in any organization or setting. For your business processes and activities, you need to know what’s working, what’s not, and what to change. And why. Then, you can determine what to stop doing, what to start doing, what to keep doing. 

So you can…

Jump off the metrics rollercoaster, by responding to signals.

Systematically. Sustainably. 

Learn how to identify statistically meaningful signals in a metric. To respond just right. 

Or perhaps, not at all. 

You’ll learn how with methods easy to understand, making it obvious what activities to do next. Loads of vivid stories and clear examples from healthcare, software companies, and more. With compelling case studies from the news and personal lives, too. 

“What gets measured gets managed.“

We’ve all heard that. But did you ever learn how to manage a metric? This ain’t about gaming the system or fudging the numbers. This is about delivering real value, understood by everyone, and proven with data.

Learn a better way to manage your measures.

BEST-SELLING AUTHOR DAN PINK SAYS

"MEASURES OF SUCCESS will help you tame the firehose of data flooding your organization, turning it into an orderly stream of information you can use to improve your business. With clarity and precision, Mark Graban steps through the process of collecting and analyzing the kind of data you focus on — activities that add value for your customers rather than activities that are just wasted motion. If you’re navigating a tough business environment, you need this book."

-- Daniel H. Pink, Author of WHEN and DRIVE

WHO IS MEASURES OF SUCCESS FOR?

EXECUTIVES AND LEADERS

…in healthcare, manufacturing, and services. Who know what to measure, and are now ready to learn how to manage those measurements. And…

WILLING TO…

• Challenge and change the way things are done today
• Motivate workers to think and do them differently tomorrow
• Coach people, versus telling them what to do
• Be responsible for results, not hold others accountable
• Encourage people to collaborate, not compete
• Help people sleep better at night because they’re improving their work during the day

TO BE CLEAR

Measures of Success is not for leaders who’d rather give orders. Then, blame others when things go south. That whole hit the target or else thing… won’t create real change, nor real value. But that ain’t you, right?

BEST-SELLING AUTHOR ERIC RIES SAYS

"By combining a range of case studies and stories across industries, including many from his own personal experience, with detailed, clear explanations of what Process Behavior Charts are and why they're so effective for managing data, Mark Graban has written a readable, informative book to guide any leader who wants to help an organization achieve true and lasting success. Improvement has been made easier thanks to his work"

-- Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way

AFTER READING MEASURES OF SUCCESS

…you’ll be able to answer three critical questions for your business.

1) Are we achieving our target?

And, how often? Occasionally? Consistently?

2) Are we improving?

And, can we predict our future performance?

3) How do we improve?

And, when do we react? When do we ignore? When do we improve? 

…AND HOW CAN WE PROVE WE’RE IMPROVING?

How would you feel if you could answer these questions for your business?

Measures of Success shows you how.

A DIFFERENT BOOK THAN THE OTHERS

Measures of Success is a book for business leaders. Though it’s based on statistical methods, anyone will understand how to use these. 

No reason to feel intimidated - this ain’t calculus, nor rocket science, either. 

Learn to respond versus react to changes in metrics. Have better conversations, creating better outcomes. Backed by numbers over opinions. And…

Prove it all. Visually. In seconds.

With charts and other visuals to show, rather than tell.

REACT LESS. LEAD BETTER. IMPROVE MORE.

Key takeaways for Measures of Success.

• Don’t manage the metric. Do manage the work. Metrics are the result of your work. Improving work improves results.
• Two data points are not a trend. Three? Four? Not usually. A dozen or more? You betcha.
• Data only has meaning when compared over time. Context tells the story.
• A chart tells a better story than a list of numbers. Every. Time.
• More than what happened, be able to predict what’s likely to happen.
• Fluctuations occur for every metric. Process behavior charts show what to respond to, what to ignore.
• Save your breath and time explaining the noise of a metric, since there’s no ‘root cause’.
• Measure often. Weekly over monthly. Daily, even better. Respond thoughtfully, versus react mindlessly.

Want to react less, lead better, and improve more with a better story for your organization? Who wouldn’t, right?

SEE THE PATTERN

...around this whole signals from noise thing? 

Listen and watch how this affects your organization.

Listen to a podcast with Mark discussing the book and his use of Leanpub.

DIGITAL EXTRAS

Order here through LeanPub and you'll receive a ZIP file with a number of digital extras:

• Excel template for Process Behavior Charts
• Summary of Key Points (PDF)
• Quick Reference Guide - Rules for Finding Signals (PDF)
• Audio File - Audiobook-Style Content of Early Book Material
• 30 Minutes of Free Virtual Coaching (if you pay the suggested price of $19.99 or higher)