Failure is big in the news lately, because people are getting smarter about it. I’ve written before about my admiration for Google’s philosophy, as expressed in this quote from Senior Business Product Manager of Google News, Josh Cohen, in a recent Atlantic article: “We believe that teams must be nimble and able to fail quickly.” Now, we get that failure and innovation are joined the hip. But I still hear failure spoken of as a kind of necessary cost, a purgatory one goes through in order to enter the heaven of success. It’s like the old song: Pick yourself up, Dust yourself off, Start all over again. But let me suggest that failure is not an unwanted consequence, but a necessary ingredient of innovation. And you’re not starting all over again after a failure. I learned this lesson years ago, when …