View your mistakes, even innovative ones, with caution: theory of embracing mistakes may not fit the editorial page. (Symposium: The Creative Edge).

The Masthead editor, Kay Semion, had a logical reason to ask for a review of Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins. The little book by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes is another of those guides to better management that preach the values of aggressive innovation in the marketplace.

As editor of this periodical, Semion has done a lot to chronicle new ways our colleagues are finding to make their pages more interesting to readers. It stands to reason that she would want to acquaint Masthead readers with this additional information on harnessing the innovative spirit.

So I agreed to review the book.

For reasons that have more to do with me than with the authors, that may have been a mistake.

I am not one who automatically genuflects at the altar of editorial page innovation. I am rather of the opinion that too many people seek glitz to conceal the damage they have done to their readership with tepid, mealy-mouthed editorials on inconsequential subjects. "Innovation," unless it includes better thinking, better writing, better topic selection, avoids the issue in all to many cases.

So even if Farson and Keyes made a compelling case for broadening the definitions of success and failure (in order to make room for the brilliant eccentrics who might otherwise be washed out of the corporate world), I might not easily embrace the same idea for editorial pages.

So I plunged in. Certainly the book contains a workmanlike distillation of ideas that have been presented elsewhere and with greater documentation. It reprises familiar anecdotes from the corporate world, of a 3M researcher's "mistake" that led to the introduction of Post-It notes, of a self-defeating policy at Xerox that had the effect of discouraging innovations that pointed away from the business of making photocopying machines. It even has coach Willis Reed appearing at one point to argue that losing a well-played basketball game can produce more athletic satisfaction than an easy win.

All this leads the reader toward a conclusion that the corporate world needs to embrace a broad definition of success and failure. This will make it more adaptable to the changing marketplace we've all heard so much about. The corporate world will seem inviting to the truly creative souls, the ones who might not be professionally happy in a world of gray flannel suits. (Indeed, another coach, Vince Lombardi, is thrown in to illustrate the lockstep thinking of the gray flannel world. Winning, Lombardi famously said, is the only thing.)

Now all this seems difficult to dispute in the case of a high-tech company or a manufacturer of gadgets. Attempting to apply it to editorial pages may have been my second mistake. Certainly a bright, innovative mind is an asset to any editorial page. But it's worth remembering that chefs eat their errors while journalists print them in the paper. Journalistic errors sap credibility. So if "innovator," in newspaper circles, is to be defined as an eccentric genius who, in the course of brilliant trial and error, commits many errors, I'm not so sure the link is there.

Certainly this book contains much to agree with, and some that is useful to editorial writers. In the latter category comes the very idea of avoiding the casual conclusion that something was hands-down a success or a failure. As editorial writers, we should be more schooled in nuance, realizing that the really good editorials are often not the ones that repaint the black and white of certainty but rather those that give readers a rational analysis of the many gray shades of contention.

We should take nothing for granted, the writers prove in one of their nicer touches. They reintroduce Coach Lombardi to back away from his "winning is the only thing" comment. In a passage from later in life, the late Lombardi said he was extolling a winning attitude, not "winning" itself.

How many of us have quoted Lombardi without knowledge of his second statement?

On the other hand, the book unnecessarily irritates by sporting a title that its text does not earn. The authors argue that organizations should provide a friendly climate for bold innovation and embrace even those hiccups that occur along the way. This is not the same thing as arguing that whoever makes the most mistakes wins. The authors display little tolerance, for example, for mistakes caused by laziness or poor preparation. And they yield no impression of tolerance for mistakes per se. The book does not promote mistake-making; it urges a re-examination of what constitutes a corporate victory.

Considering some of the mistakes we have seen corporations make in recent months -- loser mistakes, one and all -- a re-examination is long overdue.

RELATED ARTICLE: Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation

BY Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

Hardcover, 144 pp.

ISBN 0743225929

The Free Press/Simon & Schuster

$22

NCEW member Frank Partsch reared this year from the Omaha World-Herald, where he had served for 20 years as editorial page editor. F-mail him at [e-mail]