Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

After reading and then re-reading this book, I remain unconvinced that success [begin italics] always [end italics] starts with failure but agree with Tim Harford that it frequently does, usually through a process of trial and error in combination with experimentation and elimination. There are two keys to the success of that process: learn from each error, and, do not repeat it. Long ago, Charles Darwin observed, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." I was again reminded of that observation as I began to work my way through Tim Hartford's lively and eloquent narrative.Here are his own thoughts about the resiliency that is required of those who seek success, however defined: "The ability to adapt requires a sense of security, an inner confidence that the cost of failure [what I prefer to view as non-success or not-as-yet-success] is a cost we will be able to bear. Sometimes that takes real courage; at other times all that is needed is the happy self-delusion of a lost three-year-old. Whatever its source, we need that willingness to risk failure. Without it, we will never succeed."The quest for business success involves constant experimentation. Obviously, the prospects for success are improved substantially within a workplace culture that encourages, supports, recognizes, and rewards prudent experimentation. But, as with ideas, the more experiments that are conducted, the more likely that there will be a breakthrough. The first challenge to leaders is to establish such a culture; the next and greater challenge is to sustain it. Harford has written this book to help his reader respond effectively to both challenges. His approach is philosophical, yes, because there are significant issues with important implications and potential consequences to take into full account. However, in my opinion, his approach is also pragmatic and his recommendations are eminently do-able.Peter Palchinsky (1875-1929) is one of the most fascinating people discussed in the book. He was a Russian industrial engineer (often viewed as a technocrat) whose progressive ideas about human rights during Stalin's consolidation of power led to several arrests and finally, execution by a firing squad. Here is Harford's brief but precise explanation of Palchinsky's principles: "First, try new things; second, try them in context where failure is survivable. But the third an critical step is how to react to failure...[to avoid] several oddities of the human brain that often prevent us from learning from our failures and becoming more successful...It seems to be the hardest thing in the world to admit that we have made a mistake and try to put it right."These are among the dozens of passages of special interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the scope of Harford's coverage.o The Soviet Union's "pathological inability to adapt" (Pages 21-27)o Why learning from mistakes is hard (31-35)o The Tal Afar experiment (50-56)o Friedrich von Hayek and "knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and space" (74-78)o Lottery tickets, positive black swans, and the importance of variation (83-86)o Skunk Works and "freak machines" (86-89)o "We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops." (140-143)o The Greenhouse Effect, 1859 (154-156)o The unexpected consequences of the Merton Rule" (169-174)o Why safety systems bite back (186-190)o Dominoes and zombie banks (200-202)o Making experiments survivable (214-216)o Adapting as we go along (221-224)o Google's corporate strategy: have no corporate strategy (231-234)o When companies become dinosaurs (239-244)o "Challenge a status quo of your own making"(249-256)Here is a brief excerpt from Chapter One: "We face a difficult challenge: the more complex and elusive our problems are, the more effective trial and error becomes, relative to the alternatives. Yet it is an approach that runs counter to our instincts, and to the way in which traditional organisations work. The aim of this book is to provide an answer to that challenge."Bullseye!

This is a very good book on providing how to think in an every changing world. It stresses trial and error as the best approach more than once. It touches to evolution and complexity theory but is mostly about behavior. It talks about how we need to herd new ideas, details on some of the horrible accidents we have seen so far and how our judgment can be different under stress.Given all the good information, the examples were sometimes too detailed and boring to make the point. Sometimes reading page after page, writer comes to a conclusion that could have been much shorter.

There are numerous that things can go wrong with an individual, the government, energy production, and finance. This book focuses on what can be done to prevent a small failure in any of these from taking down a person, system or government.There are lots of wonderful perspectives in the book. To me the most interesting was the concept of decoupling implemented in the design of banking, nuclear reactors, and oil drilling platforms. If one part of a system fails, the other parts are protected from collateral failure. An absolute worst case failure causes very limited damage.Decoupling a large, diverse bank would involve keeping the ordinary deposits accounts of individuals and corporations in a stand alone bank division. If the stand alone bank fails government protection of operations would be appropriate.The rest of the banking activities would be in a separate bank that had no claim on the ordinary bank deposits or reserves. This means that capitalization for the ordinary bank part would in no way be connected to capitalization of the more speculative activities. If the speculative activities go bust they would have no affect on the capital and operations of the stand alone bank. The capital could not be moved or used in any way to cushion the speculative activities. An appropriate setup of the speculative bank should then be able to minimize the need for government backing.Life is not risk free, but this book suggests that tremendous risks can be reduced by decoupling by design. I heartily recommend the book.

The author takes the time to walk the reader through several well known cases where the bosses approach to problem solving was ineffective at best. Often low level organic approaches to problem solving by lower level managers who are closer to the problem are often better.Simple approach is that often the simpliest is actually the better approach to problems.

This book looks at failure from the point of view of being an inevitable - and natural - part of the fabric of things. It draws on the work of many others, like Thaler and Kahneman and suggests that we should develop strategies that mean that failures are part of the learning process, rather than disastrous. Most projects that engineers work on in Google, for example, go nowhere. But the few that do mean that the overall process is a success.

Ever since Harford's "the undercover economist", I have read most of his books. To be fully honest, none has been as good as the first one. Maybe "The undercover economist" was really fresh and original, and the others, although equally good, are not "that fresh and innovative".Anyway, I didn't like the military examples and all the stuff related to Irak. Maybe such examples make a clear point, but war stories are definitively not my my cup of tea. The main argument, trial and error are needed to reach success, is interesting, and many other sections of the book are valuable. If this is your first Harford's book, then I would suggest you having instead the one mentioned earlier. Otherwise, for those who like Harford, this is not his best (in my opinion), but it is not that bad.

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A very good read, full of interesting ideas and real life examples around adaptation. I especially like the knitting of ideas across domains (economy, psicology, military, decision making, climate change...)

When I originally bought this book it was for management type reading and it was only after reading it a second time that I realized that while it is a good "management" type book that the real value of it is that it tells every parent something that we are prone to forget. When we were growing up (depending on your age cohort) our parents let us figure things out. Too frequently today parents try to organize every aspect of their child's life - there is no room to experiment and to fail as part of the learning process, since if our kids fail we see it as a reflection on ourselves. At work we need room to fail in order to learn and grow and there is no doubt that we need to give our children the same freedom. So you can get it for business reading but parents need it more.

bien construit . Plein d'analyses - un livre qui peut être utile à tout le monde.Absolument à lire pour les gens en transition de vie proffessionnelle

Good