“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” ~ Socrates
Photo Credit: Kevin Jordan, Sunrise at Zion National Park, June 23, 2025
Greetings -
I hope you, your families and friends are enjoying the start of the summer months! For those folks on the East Coast, stay cool and safe during these extremely hot (and humid) early days of the season.
Our "nomad summer" road trip officially kicked off a week ago Saturday, with visits to beautiful Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo, CA. The week was a wonderful mix of work and play, culminating in a great lunch + wine tasting at the Calcareous Vineyard overlooking the beautiful westside of Paso Robles. For you foodies and adult beverage connoisseurus, there is no shortage of great and eclectic dining (Les Petites Canailles, Il Cortile Ristorante, S'Aranella) and wine (and other) tasting options. These came in handy for celebrating Father's Day (a big thanks to my wife's parents) and our wedding anniversary!
This week finds us in St. George, in stunning (and hot!) southern Utah. We took today off to enjoy a hike near the southern entrance of Zion National Park. For the better part of two hours, we had the Watchman Trail and mother nature, in all her resplendent early morning glory, to ourselves. Our hike was marked by breathtaking views, serenity and a fantastic sunrise that illuminated the red desert rock in a magical array of color.
The voyage of discovery continues and I will share insights and experiences throughout the course of the summer months. Stay tuned!
With respect and deep admiration for you all, happy reading and listening!
Be well, take good care of yourselves, families and community.
-kj
PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)
Featured: Failure and Rescue, by Atul Gawande, MD
For the burgeoning adult children of friends and colleagues, the past few weeks have been marked by commencement ceremonies and celebrations. Graduates lucky enough to be embarking on the early days of their careers (no small feat in this chaotic labor market) will be navigating new contexts, expectations and opportunities. There will be ambiguity, risk and uncertainty. And there will be mistakes and failures of all shapes and sizes. How they respond and what they learn will be driven as much by their own curiosity and desire for growth as it will be by the people and organizations they work for. Are failures treated as learning laboratories anchored in accountability, trust, respect, safety and inquiry? Or are they opportunities for blame and shame?
Our "failure culture" is a complicated one with starkly contrasting messages and measures of success. On the one hand, we are implored to avoid failure at all cost, minimize risk and "color between the lines." Small "i" innovation and incremental change win the day. On the other hand, especially in the tech community, failure (especially spectacular failure) is extolled as a virtue, with mantras like fail rapidly, frequently and break all kinds of stuff along the way. (Though, it's worth noting, these stories almost always seem to be told after the fact. How often do we hear of failure(s) in real-time?)
Neither polarity serves us well nor helps us improve our probabilistic thinking before we take actions or risks that might lead to failures. We lack context or a framework for assessing the meaning of failure, how failure can manifest, what constitutes "good" vs "bad" failing (from which we might learn a great deal) and how the best organizations both foster and learn from failure.
This edition's featured article, Failure and Rescue, by Atul Gawande, MD, is his commencement address to the 2012 graduating class of Williams College. Insightful and thought-provoking, Dr. Atul Gawande's perspective continues to resonate. As we aspire to professional goals, seize opportunities and propel our careers forward, we will make mistakes and fail. What we learn, how we adapt and the steps we take to further our development matter most. "...A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it—will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?—because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue."
Articles
Harvard Business Review: 4 Reasons Why Managers Fail. "Gartner research has found that managers today are accountable for 51% more responsibilities than they can effectively manage — and they’re starting to buckle under the pressure: 54% are suffering from work-induced stress and fatigue, and 44% are struggling to provide personalized support to their direct reports. Ultimately, one in five managers said they would prefer not being people managers given a choice. Further analysis found that 48% of managers are at risk of failure based on two criteria: 1) inconsistency in current performance and 2) lack of confidence in the manager’s ability to lead the team to future success."
Harvard Business Review: What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety: Six misconceptions that have led organizations astray. "Timely input, candid feedback, and robust debate are as vital for ensuring innovation as for preventing strategic blunders. Leaders who create the kinds of teams that practice these ways of interacting will be poised to outperform those who do not. Ultimately, psychological safety is about changing the expectations for how we work together to successfully navigate the storms ahead."
The Wall Street Journal: The Man in Silicon Valley Who’s Completely Obsessed With Failure. "A tech investor is turning his home office into a shrine to failure. His collection has more than 1,000 relics from business fiascoes—and it keeps expanding."
Book
Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmondson, PhD. In this great book (IMHO), Amy Edmondson not only unpacks the "failure landscape,"- basic vs complex vs intelligent failures - she provides a framework to "... discuss and practice failure wisely...[with an emphasis on how to]...minimize unproductive failure, pursue intelligent failure" and ultimately analyze and learn as much as we can about what and how failure occurred. Weaving a rich tapestry of analysis, insights and a range of examples and case studies across multiple industries, "...Edmondson gives us specifically tailored practices, skills, and mindsets to help us replace shame and blame with curiosity, vulnerability and personal growth."
Blog Posts & Opinions
Big Think: When to quit: A simple framework for life’s toughest decisions. "Annie Duke, a poker champion turned decision scientist, talks with Big Think about how to choose well under uncertainty."
Seth's Blog: Choose Your Fuel Wisely. "We thrive when we find a goal and a metric that’s resilient and easily replenished. It turns out that making a contribution is something we can do, again and again, and it never gets old."
The Wall Street Journal's Rachel Feintzeig: Eight Lessons From 11 Years of Writing About Work and Life. "After more than a decade covering careers, our columnist signs off."
Podcasts
Freakonomics: The Hidden Side of Everything. How to Succeed at Failing: Parts 1-4 (recently updated from the original 2023 series airing)
Part 1: The Chain of Events. "We tend to think of tragedies as a single terrible moment, rather than the result of multiple bad decisions. Can this pattern be reversed? We try — with stories about wildfires, school shootings, and love."
Part 2: Life and Death. "In medicine, failure can be catastrophic. It can also produce discoveries that save millions of lives. Tales from the front line, the lab, and the I.T. department."
Part 3: Grit vs Quit. "Giving up can be painful. That’s why we need to talk about it. Today: stories about glitchy apps, leaky paint cans, broken sculptures — and a quest for the perfect bowl of ramen."
Part 4: Extreme Resiliency. "Everyone makes mistakes. How do you learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease."
Arts, Music, Culture & Humor Corner
The Guardian: Spanish masterpiece resurfaces after being hidden for more than a century. "Joaquín Sorolla’s Paris Boulevard was sold to a private collector in 1890 and disappeared from public view."
The New York Times: Maggie Rogers: The Truth About Dreams. "This essay was adapted from [her 2025] commencement address to the graduates of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts."
The Wall Street Journal: A ‘Pay Penalty’ Is Keeping Men Out of Classrooms. "Male teachers can help struggling boys, but few men choose to go into teaching.
McSweeney's: On My Deathbed, I Have Just One Regret: Not Spending More Time Resetting Passwords. "Come closer, grandchild. Thanks for visiting me one last time before I die. I’ve lived a great life. I climbed Mt. Everest, founded a Fortune 500 company, and had six amazing children. But there’s one mistake that haunts me: not spending more of my life creating, entering, and re-entering passwords."
Reflections
"The greatest business failures often come not from playing the game poorly, but from continuing to excel at things that no longer matter." ~ Shane Parrish
"Failure is most useful when you give your best effort. If you fail with a lackluster effort, you haven't learned much. Perhaps you could have succeeded with a proper focus. But if your best effort fails, you have learned something valuable: this way doesn't work."~ James Clear
"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."~ F. Scott Fitzgerald