Design failure: If your product or service is misdesigned, then people don’t understand it, don’t purchase it, or may even harm themselves when they don’t use it, and you have failed.

Failure of opportunity: If your assets are poorly deployed, ignored or decaying, it’s as if you are destroying them and you have failed.

Failure of trust: If you waste stakeholder’s good will and respect by taking shortcuts in exchange for short-term profits you have failed.

Failure of will: If your orgznization prematurely abandons important work because of internal resistance or a temporary delay in market adoption, you have failed.

Failure of priorities: If your management team chooses to focus on work that doesn’t create value, that’s like sending cash to your competitors and you have failed.

Failure to quit: If your organization sticks with a mediocre idea, facility or team too long because it lacks the guts to create something better, you have failed.

Failure of respect: If you succeed without  without treating your people, your customers and your resources with respect and honesty you have failed.

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The most self-referential for of failure is the failure to see when you’re failing.