Advertise on podcast: My Favorite Mistake: Learning Without Blame in Business and Leadership

Eric Dingler and his wife met every week to review the numbers in their business. When they moved to Costa Rica, they paused that meeting for what was supposed to be six weeks. The pause lasted a year. Losing a client led to a short draw on a line of credit, then another, then one that never got repaid. Embarrassed, Eric kept it to himself until he could present a plan to fix it, and in a panic he launched a string of new offers. By the time he told his wife, he had run through the line of credit and two credit cards. Eric is a business coach, owner of the agency In Transit Studios, and author of Hire to Grow. He ran two businesses remotely for three years while his family traveled full time through 20 countries. We talk about why people hide bad news even from someone who has never given them a reason to fear the reaction, and Eric's explanation that the silence comes from a need for significance, acceptance, and security. Leaders who want their people to raise problems early will recognize the same pattern from the other side. We also cover the difference between training and developing a team, hiring before you feel ready, his commitment that no one on his team will lose their job to AI, and why an honest time audit is the first step for an owner who suspects they're the bottleneck. Full show notes and transcript: https://markgraban.com/mistake368 If the show is useful to you, please follow and leave a review.

Stephanie Mitchell came back from vacation and got called into the C-suite. They wanted her to run the hospital laboratory temporarily. She was an ICU nurse who had moved into administration, she knew nothing about lab work, and consultants were arriving to cut costs. She took the job and asked to be let out of it as soon as possible. Four months in, working night and day while lab staff wondered what a nurse was doing there, she thought she had made a mistake in saying yes. What changed was learning what the work actually was. She had assumed lab staff sat waiting for her phone calls as a nurse. They did not. By the end of the assignment she wanted to stay and fix the processes she finally understood, so she asked to interview for the permanent job she had been trying to escape. She retired from that lab 20 years later. Stephanie retired as Director of Lean Process Improvement and Laboratory Services at Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee, Illinois. In this conversation with host Mark Graban, who worked with her as a Johnson & Johnson consultant 20 years ago, she explains what separates real cost reduction from telling a department to cut 10 percent and figure it out, why a written no-layoff commitment made improvement possible, how faster test turnaround times helped the hospital avoid building an emergency department expansion, and the five separate checks the blood bank built so no single human error could give a patient the wrong unit of blood. If you lead people whose work you could not do yourself, this one is for you. Full episode page: https://markgraban.com/mistake367 Follow the show and leave a rating or review wherever you listen.

Dr. Jonathan Thorp spent a career building systems, methods, and models that made work more functional. His mistake was assuming that creating the value was where the work stopped. Promoting it struck him as vanity, the opposite of humility, so he avoided doing it. Then he watched good work land as a non-event, including an incentive plan he redesigned for a client services group after finding the levers were connected to the wrong things. Results improved. People credited a lucky run of customer calls until someone explained what had actually changed. His reframe now is that promotion is the servant of mission, and that translating value is part of the work rather than an afterthought. That matters for any leader whose improvements get made and then quietly ignored. If nobody knows what you changed, they will attribute the result to something else. Jonathan is CEO of Quantum Connections in Dallas, a Naval Academy graduate in ocean engineering who spent 24 years as a naval aviator, and a former VP of organizational development at JPMorgan Chase. He has taught leadership and decision making at the Naval War College since 2010. We also cover the Quantum Connections 2026 American Dialogue Report, which found that 85 percent of Americans avoided at least one difficult conversation in the past 30 days, what naval aviation debriefs teach about candor, and why declaring psychological safety without evidence backfires. Episode page, show notes, and full transcript: https://markgraban.com/mistake366 Follow the show and leave a rating if this one was useful.

Susan von Seggern handed the finances to her business partner and stopped looking at them. Then she decided their Los Angeles PR agency should open a New York office -- a lease, three hires, salaries, insurance, payroll taxes -- without opening the books first. Her partner pushed back. Susan says she didn't listen. Then the dot-com crash hit, then the 9/11 recession, and PR budgets disappeared. A forensic accountant looked at the books and told them what they had to bring in each month to keep going. They weren't close. Susan took a home equity loan against the condo she had bought in her twenties to cover final paychecks, handed off the New York lease, and closed the office. People lost jobs in both cities. The leadership question here isn't about accounting. It's about what happens when you delegate a function and quietly delegate your attention along with it, and what it takes to hear a partner who is telling you something you don't want to hear. Susan is a Los Angeles PR consultant with more than two decades in the field, starting as a major label publicist working with artists including Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Elton John, and Ice Cube. She and her former business partner are still close friends, which she credits to how deliberately they both tried to do right by people on the way down. We also get into earned media, why lead time is the thing clients underestimate most, and her three years doing PR for one of the world's largest online gambling companies. Full episode page: https://markgraban.com/mistake365 If you find the show useful, follow it in your app and leave a review.

Steve Montague had been flying for the airline about two years when he decided to let his captain be wrong. He was paired with a captain who shut him down every time he offered anything. Asked about routing around a thunderstorm 80 miles out, the captain told him he would say when he had made a decision. Told that maintenance had been called for a burned-out light, which federal regulation required, the captain told him to ask permission next time. On their third trip together that month, descending into Albuquerque, Montague watched the airspeed sit at 300 knots below 10,000 feet, where the limit is 250. He saw it. He said nothing. The captain caught it himself. Nothing bad happened. But Montague calls it the least proud professional moment of his career, and it still bothers him decades later. What bothered him was not the chewing out. It was that he had let his pettiness exceed his professionalism. Montague is a retired American Airlines 787 captain and check airman, a former Navy F-14 pilot, and has spent years bringing crew resource management into patient safety work at more than 100 hospitals. In this episode he explains what he told every crew before every flight, why fear and futility are an incomplete list of reasons people stay quiet, and why the response to the first person who speaks up sets the price for everyone after them. Full episode page, video, and transcript: https://markgraban.com/mistake364

Michael Chaleff took a year between the Navy and law school and spent it working as a restaurant magician -- walking up to strangers who had been drinking, interrupting conversations they were happy to be having, and trying to earn a tip before the food arrived. He knew going in that things would go wrong in that environment almost every night. What he didn't do was make a plan for what to do when they did. In his first week, at a brunch in San Diego, he opened his best card routine with "imagine you have a deck of cards in your hands." The woman at the head of the table looked at him and said, "I don't have hands." He locked up -- the first time in his adult life, he says, that he lost the ability to speak. More than 30 years later, he still remembers the shame, and has no memory at all of what happened next. Michael is a former Naval officer who served during the Gulf War, a former DOJ trial attorney, and a professional magician and mentalist of more than three decades. He now coaches lawyers and executives on storytelling and influence. In this conversation he explains why the recovery matters more than the error, what cross-examination teaches about controlling information, and the four-act structure he uses to build a story that lands in under 90 seconds. Full show notes and transcript: https://markgraban.com/mistake363

Carl Pradelli was 18 months into building a co-branded skincare line with the Home Shopping Network when the first production run came back wrong. Ingredients specified at five percent had gone in at one. Ingredients specified at one had gone in at five. The same women who had praised the samples now reported the product was making things worse. Learn more at https://www.markgraban.com/mistake362 The contract manufacturer had come recommended by an acquaintance of one of Carl's partners. He had visited the facility and found real credentials -- FDA certifications, inspections, everything he expected. What he had not done was his own due diligence on a decision capable of making or breaking the business. When he brought the batch records back, the manufacturer did not offer to remake the product. They argued it was not as bad as he thought. Then their accounting department called about payment. Carl is co-founder and CEO of Nature City, the direct-to-consumer supplements company he and his wife Beth started in 2002. He spent 12 years in investment banking and private equity before that. In this episode he explains why he has used the same manufacturer for more than 20 years instead of quoting every job to three vendors, why the dime you save per bottle evaporates the moment something goes wrong, and where quality failures enter a supply chain at the supplier, manufacturer, and brand owner levels. He also shares how he handles it when someone on his own team makes a mistake -- and why hiding one is the only version that worries him.

Tiffany Auvil spent more than twenty years inside the U.S. healthcare system, starting as a volunteer firefighter and eventually serving as System Director of Outpatient Clinics for a three-hospital health system. She is a functional medicine health coach, she is completing a Doctorate of Science in Integrative Healthcare, and she is the author of "The No BS Guide for Caregivers: How to Survive the Healthcare Maze," available now. Episode page with links and more  Her favorite mistake was trusting the system she had worked inside for two decades. Her husband Dave was treated for renal cell carcinoma in 2016 and was cancer-free within three months. Seven years later it returned in his pancreas and liver. The night before Dave's first immunotherapy infusion, the oncology nurse called to say insurance had denied it. Tiffany had done prior authorizations for years and knew the denial did not add up, so she called the insurer, who had no denial on file at all. The failure was upstream: the hospital's prior authorization specialist had entered a diagnosis code in the field meant for the procedure code, and the portal rejected it as invalid. When they arrived for treatment the next morning, the oncologist was relieved someone had finally figured it out, because she had been watching authorizations get denied without ever learning why. That was not the only failure. A Gamma Knife authorization later sat unsubmitted because nobody attached the clinical notes or pressed the button. And the cancer in Dave's brain turned out to be central nervous system lymphoma, an entirely separate primary cancer that Tiffany believes had been in his eye all along. Mark and Tiffany talk about diagnostic error and the cognitive bias that makes a second primary cancer nearly invisible, about Code Help and the escalation paths families are rarely told about, about what it costs to be the employee who questions things and tries to connect silos, and about why "good catch" recognition is where organizational learning usually stops instead of starts. Dave died at home in April 2025. He used to ask Tiffany what people do who do not have a Tiffy. The book is her answer: scripts for talking with physicians, how to read a bill, how to appeal a denial and how to tell whether a denial is even real, and a closing section on end of life that most caregiving books avoid. What You'll Learn Why insider knowledge is not the same as protection How a single field on a single screen became a denial that nearly delayed cancer treatment Why Tiffany filed a grievance after the problem was already fixed How cognitive bias makes a second primary cancer nearly invisible, even to excellent physicians What Code Help is, and why most families never hear about it What it costs to be the employee who tries to close loops between silos Why "good catch" is where learning usually stops instead of starts How to make a fifteen-minute physician visit actually work Why starting hospice earlier is a practical decision, not a surrender

Bill Rasmussen got fired by the Hartford Whalers, then chased an idea almost nobody believed in: sports television around the clock. He burned through his own money, his credit cards, his son Scott's money, and money from his father, sister, and brother. Six months before launch, out of cash, he signed a deal with Getty Oil for the tens of millions ESPN needed. Episode page with video, links, and more Getty took most of the company. Other terms were left as loose ends to settle after the contract, and employment contracts for Bill, Scott, and the early team were among them. They never got settled. Two early leaders were pushed out almost immediately. Scott was shown the door at launch. Bill was gone a year later. Mike Soltys was hired as ESPN's first PR intern in 1980 and stayed 43 years, the last 20 as a vice president in corporate communications. He's now the network's official historian, and he tells this story on Bill's behalf, because Bill has never called it a mistake and doesn't look back. The lesson holds up for any founder taking outside money: financial control and employment protection are two separate negotiations, and it's easy to lose the second one while focused on the first. Scott Rasmussen says he negotiated far better after watching what happened. Mike also shares why ESPN's first live remote failed on opening night, why the network celebrates its bloopers instead of burying them, and how he used Bill's 1978-79 business diary to settle disputes when everyone remembered the same night differently.

In fighter jet aviation, errors can be fatal -- so the systems built around learning from them have to actually work. My guest is Christian "Boo" Boucousis, a former Royal Australian Air Force fighter pilot and CEO of Afterburner, a leadership firm that has spent three decades translating combat aviation discipline into frameworks for business leaders. Episode page with links and more Boo's favorite mistake is really a reframe of the whole concept: in fighter pilot culture, there's no word for "mistake," only outcomes to debrief. He tells the story of his first mission as a commander, which ended in a visible, ten-second failure in front of three of the most senior leaders in the Air Force -- and how every one of them owned their own error first in the debrief that followed. That moment became the foundation for ORCA (Objective, Result, Cause, Action), the method he now teaches business leaders to replace blame with structured learning. We also get into the difference between "perfect" and "flawless," why an estimated 86 percent of leaders may carry undiagnosed perfectionism, and how that shows up as a need for control at work. If you lead a team and want a more honest way to talk about what went wrong, this conversation is for you.

Andrea Carpenter and Elizabeth Ledoux, co-founders of The Transition Strategists, were mid-negotiation on a business succession deal -- Andrea buying into Elizabeth's business -- when Andrea found out she was pregnant. The pregnancy wasn't the mistake. The mistake, as Andrea describes it, was her own rigidity: treating the closing of the deal as a fixed event that had to happen on schedule, instead of one point in an ongoing process. In this episode, Andrea and Elizabeth unpack what changed when they let go of that mindset, and what it taught them about succession more broadly. They talk candidly about being opposite personality types -- Andrea a planner, Elizabeth an adapter -- and how that tension shapes their partnership. They also share the two mistakes they see most often when family businesses transition ownership: starting too late, and leaving the successor out of the design process. Episode page with video, transcript, links, and more If you're navigating a leadership transition, planning to bring in a successor, or thinking about what comes after you step back from something you built, this conversation offers a practical framework for treating that process as a journey worth designing carefully, rather than a deadline to hit.

Larry Kasanoff has produced more than 200 films, including Terminator 2, True Lies, and the Mortal Kombat franchise. So it's fitting that one of the most useful lessons of his career came from a kid on a set tour. Episode page with links, video, and more Larry had decided to redesign the Mortal Kombat character Kano, dropping his metallic eye because it felt too close to the Terminator's exoskeleton. A junior-high student touring the set saw the new design and had a full-blown panic attack over the change. As Larry puts it, "My mistake hit me. My audience point-blank told me what to do." He had been designing for himself, not for the people who loved the character. He changed Kano back that day, and the character is still going strong decades later. That tension between an artist's instinct and what the audience actually wants runs through the whole conversation. Larry and Mark get into the bet-your-job decision behind Platoon, why an idea everyone instantly loves should make you nervous, and the 3D network that folded in six months because it chased technology with no real idea underneath it -- and what all of that says about the rush to make decisions by algorithm. A candid, funny, and useful conversation about creativity, risk, and the discipline of knowing when to trust your gut and when to listen.

Publishing strategist Wiebke Tasch had built a bestselling book and a comfortable full-time income on Amazon -- enough to quit her PR job. Then one morning an automated email told her she had violated Amazon's terms, and both of her accounts and all of her books were deleted. No warning, no explanation, no human to appeal to. Her mistake: she had opened two accounts, one for a pen name and one under her real name, not knowing Amazon allows only one per person. Episode page with video, links, and more That is Wiebke's favorite mistake, and losing everything turned out to be the start of her company, Digital Authors. In this episode, she shares how she rebuilt and what the experience taught her about never building a livelihood on a platform you do not control. We also get practical about publishing as a system: why book structure should start with market demand rather than your own wish list, why the first five days after launch shape an Amazon book's entire future, and how to spot the predatory "buy reviews" emails that prey on anxious authors. Wiebke is candid about AI, too -- a useful tool for proofreading and getting unstuck, but a fast track to forgettable, same-sounding books when it replaces your own voice. If you are an expert thinking about writing a book, or you just want a sharp reminder to own your audience instead of renting it, this one is worth your time.

To save a few thousand dollars in legal fees, six-time Silicon Valley CEO Mike Grossman decided to act as his own lawyer on a routine distribution contract. Years later, when Dun & Bradstreet moved to acquire his company, he reread that contract and realized a single ambiguous sentence could be read to block any sale without his competitor's permission. His board told him not to worry. His mentor, Bill Campbell -- the "trillion-dollar coach" -- told him the board was wrong and that he had to fix it fast. Episode page with video, links, and more  That story is Mike's favorite mistake, and it opens a candid conversation about what running a startup actually feels like when the cameras are off. Mike is the author of the new book Failure Is an Option: Reflections of a Silicon Valley CEO, and he doesn't filter out the hard parts. We get into why the most common layoff mistake is cutting too little rather than too much, how staged cuts become a "death by a thousand cuts" that erodes a leader's credibility, and why luck and timing often matter more than the Silicon Valley meritocracy myth admits. Mike also makes a practical case for radical transparency -- about finances, lost deals, and failures -- as the way leaders earn the trust they'll need when things get hard. If you lead a team and want an honest look at decision-making, psychological safety, and learning from mistakes, this one's for you.

Kate Lowry was fresh out of college and working at McKinsey when she saw a colleague do something she believed was seriously wrong -- something that could constitute blackmail, with another employee's ability to stay in the country hanging in the balance. Her instinct was immediate and absolute: this is wrong, and I'm going to tell everyone. She reported it and criticized the person sharply in reviews. Episode page for video, links, and more It backfired. She got marked down for not being a "team player" and carried that mark on her record for the rest of her time at the firm. The lesson Kate draws isn't that she should have stayed silent. It's that good intentions and zeal are not the same as effective action. The best ways to help people, she found, are often more sophisticated -- and when you're up against sophisticated actors who hold power over you, you need to bring equal sophistication. Kate is a CEO coach, venture capitalist, and author of Unbreakable: How to Thrive Under Fear-Based Leaders. In this episode, she and host Mark Graban get into the difference between high standards and fear-based leadership, why psychological safety is about mutual trust rather than comfort, and how the quiet, "West Coast nice" version of fear-based leadership is harder to spot than the cartoonish yelling kind. Kate also explains her concept of reading a leader's "emotional age" to predict their behavior, and offers practical tactics for anyone stuck under a leader who rules through fear.