Education Quote by Charles F. Kettering

Failure gets romanticized as a badge, but Kettering treats it like shop-floor technique: something you can teach, measure, and get better at. The phrase "fail intelligently" is the tell. He is not praising chaos or daring for its own sake; he is describing disciplined iteration, the kind that produces usable information instead of bruised egos. In an industrial lab, an error that narrows variables is progress. An error that just repeats yesterday is waste.

Calling this the "biggest job" of onboarding flips the usual corporate script. New hires are typically trained to avoid mistakes, to protect the brand, to look competent. Kettering's subtext is that those habits quietly kill invention. A novice trying to look smart will choose safe tasks, avoid bold hypotheses, and hide results that don't sparkle. Teaching intelligent failure is really teaching psychological permission and procedural rigor at the same time: document what you tried, change one thing, learn quickly, and don't take the data personally.

The gendered "him" pins the quote to its era, but the managerial dilemma is current: organizations want innovation while rewarding only the appearance of certainty. Kettering, working in the early 20th-century engine-and-electrification boom, understood that breakthroughs come from repeatable experiments, not solitary genius. The line "over and over" is almost mechanical, like a piston stroke. He's describing invention as a system you build in people: resilience with a lab notebook, courage with guardrails.