About The Authors
Anjali and Kara’s shared drive to understand how to create success when confronting the risk of failure has nurtured a decade-long professional partnership originating at MIT Sloan School of Management. Together, we’ve designed dozens of iterations of courses, projects, trainings, and workshops that combine the classroom and the real world.
We’ve used these innovative platforms to test ideas, gather data, and build our own evidence base. Fail Better practices underpin our work as leaders and managers within organizations, and as consultants in partnership with corporations, government agencies, communities, and social enterprises.
Anjali Sastry
As senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Anjali Sastry’s teaching includes organizational behavior, system dynamics, and global health delivery.
She mined her experience with innovation and improvement projects on the front lines of healthcare delivery in Africa and Asia to develop Fail Better. She is a Member of the Board of Management Sciences for Health, advises surgical charity WonderWork, and works with both the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation at the University of Cape Town and MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design.
Connect with Anjali
Kara Penn
Kara Penn is owner and principal consultant at Mission Spark, a bespoke management consulting firm. She works on the front lines of practical management to implement innovative strategy solutions in complex, often resource-constrained settings.
She has led award-winning community collaboratives; designed, managed and evaluated multi-year social change initiatives; and guided --as a trusted, results-driven partner-- more than 75 government, corporate, nonprofit, philanthropic and community-based organizations on mission-critical work. Several prestigious fellowship programs, including Coro, Watson and Forte, have recognized her leadership and community contributions. Kara earned her MPP from University of Chicago and her MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.
Connect with Kara
Upcoming Events
Learn more about the Fail Better method directly from the authors at these events.
Applied Leadership Series hosted by Vail Leadership Institute
Kara Penn Presents "Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner"
Event InformationAvailable Now
Fail Better
Failure will happen. It’s what you do with it that counts. Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner with Fail Better.
If you aim to innovate, failure is a given. Fail Better shows you how to design mistakes at a scale, scope, and visibility that drives better outcomes and deliverables, improves individual and team capacity, and builds organization-wide learning.
Get The BookA Fail Better Declaration
The right kind of failure instructs, refines, and improves ideas, work products, skills, capacities, and teamwork.
We support your efforts to generate small, smart mistakes that enable your team to meet its work requirements while building capacity, practices, and insight.
Create the conditions, culture and habits to go from status quo to ground-breaking using your day-to-day work as your sandbox.