Dejan — The Failure Enthusiast.
I am Dejan Stojanovic. As “The Failure Enthusiast”, failure is my subject — and it has been long before it became a trend.
Where does a passion for failure culture come from?
I am a lawyer by training. Mag. iur. — a career that looks perfectly respectable on paper. Then I founded companies. Several of them. With everything that comes with it: wrong decisions, misunderstandings, and that particular taste in the mouth when something you built for yourself does not go the way you planned.
That took me to San Francisco. Silicon Valley, where failure genuinely is treated differently — not romanticised, but analysed. Not hidden, but told. That is where I understood that the way an organisation deals with failure determines everything: innovation, trust, learning, culture. And that this insight had not really arrived in Europe yet.
I have given a TEDx talk on the subject, I lecture at TU Wien, and I developed the MBA course “Error Management” there. As co-author I published the book “All the wiser — learning from our mistakes”. I am booked at conferences as Dejan — The Failure Enthusiast, and I speak about failure culture, psychological safety and what organisations need in order to stay genuinely capable of learning.
And, last but not least, I am grateful to work every day with organisations that have understood this — or are in the middle of getting there.
The Failure Institute.
In 2014 I brought the Fuckup Nights to Austria. At the time it was a bet. Today, after more than ten years, the Fuckup Nights in Vienna, Linz and Carinthia are a fixed part of the Austrian corporate culture scene.
What began as an event format became a consulting business. The Failure Institute is today the first place to turn to in the German-speaking market for organisations that mean failure culture as a genuine organisational strategy rather than a buzzword.
We have analysed more than 300 failure stories — from founders, managers and specialists across a wide range of industries. That is our body of knowledge. Not a theoretical model, not an imported business school framework. Real stories, real patterns, real lessons.
Our formats — Corporate Fuckup Nights, keynotes & stage programmes, workshops & Failure Audit and speaker coaching — have all grown out of that practice. There is no format that we have not tested, refined and measured against real organisations ourselves.
A small selection of the great names I am able to call clients.
