In the movie Apollo 13, the actor playing NASA flight controller Gene Kranz utters the now immortal words that serve as the title of a book by the real-life Kranz: "Failure is not an option." These five words neatly captured the ethos at NASA as it succeeded in safely returning a doomed spacecraft and its crew to Earth.

Leaders in business and politics have repeated these inspiring words for years in their efforts to promote their agendas at any cost. What they don't recognize is that failure is both productive and necessary.

Business owners would do better to internalize an equally famous, though less-quoted, piece of wisdom attributed to Carnegie Mellon economist Allan Meltzer: "Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin."

For a business to avoid the ultimate failure--closure and liquidation--it needs to embrace smaller failures along the way. Think of failure as an opportunity to course-correct, or even to toss out whole strategies, programs or campaigns before they bring irreparable harm to your company.

Some pointers for entrepreneurs on how to stop worrying about and learn to love failure:

• Accept that failure is inevitable. Every business will suffer setbacks, missteps and outright disasters. Get over the idea that this will never happen in your organization. The first step in making the most of failure is to recognize that it's going happen to you some day and, if your company endures, will happen more than once.
   
• Keep your eyes on the prize. You have a better chance of overcoming a momentary lapse if your long-term vision and goals are clear, and if you embrace strategic planning as a process. This means setting aside time every month to review progress against your strategic plan--not dusting it off once a year for a tuneup. Having a long view not only puts near-term disasters in perspective, but it gives you and your team the necessary strategic tools to pull yourselves out of a mess--first and foremost by enabling you to remain focused on those activities that are most relevant and critical to your ultimate goals.
   
• Learn something. Failure is what some might call the ultimate "teachable moment." Your mother probably said it best when she told you to learn from your mistakes. It was good--although annoying--advice then, and it's even more relevant for business owners today. Dissect the problem dispassionately and make the necessary changes to minimize the chance of that particular failure recurring. If you need to bring in outside, objective counsel to help diagnose the issues properly and avoid the blame game, do it. There's nothing worse than compounding a failure by "fixing" the wrong things.
   
• Let failure happen. Sometimes we see the train wreck coming and throw all of our assets in the way to stop it, never pausing to ask whether the damage to our business might be worse than if we just let the crash happen. Not everything is fixable or worth the cost--in people, money, time, etc--to fix. Making this determination is critical; don't compound failure by compromising the assets you'll need to make things better.
   
• Give employees permission to fail. This isn't a free pass to slack off or mess up; it's a recognition that failure will happen and, if properly managed, can be a powerful and clarifying event. Determine your risk tolerance and communicate what is and is not acceptable to your staff. Companies with formalized R&D programs do this all the time: They decide ahead of time that a certain percentage of their efforts (and budget) will not yield revenue- and profit-generating products but are necessary to the overall success of their innovation pipeline. Employees who are afraid to fail are equally afraid to voice new ideas or try new things.

Ultimately, failure is an opportunity for creative destruction. It allows you to shed ideas, practices and strategies that were not productive forces in your business and, when embraced, can open your eyes to even greater possibilities for your business.