Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
By Tim Harford
4/5
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About this ebook
Tim Harford introduces a new way of thinking about how to solve the world's most urgent problems, from climate change to terrorism, African poverty to global finance - even the problems we encounter in our own daily lives. When faced with such challenges, we instinctively look to leaders, experts, and gurus to provide us with pre-chewed solutions. Harford argues that the world has become too unpredictable and complex for that. Instead, we must adapt - improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up, take baby steps.
Adapt draws on exciting new work by passionate young economists and on innovative ideas from across the sciences. It looks at how and why innovation really comes about, extolling the value of trial and error and arguing that we should learn to embrace failure. Above all, Adapt applies hard-won lessons learned in the field, from a spaceport in the Mojave Desert to the street of Iraq, from a blazing offshore drilling rig to the frozen tundra of Siberia. The book shows that it's up to individuals - us - to change the world.
Tim Harford
Tim Harford is the Undercover Economist and Dear Economist columnist for the Financial Times. His writing has also appeared in Esquire, Forbes, New York magazine, Wired, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. His books include Adapt, The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life. Harford presents the popular BBC radio show More or Less and is a visiting fellow at London's Cass Business School. He is the winner of the 2006 Bastiat Prize for economic journalism and the 2010 Royal Statistical Society Award for excellence in journalism.
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Reviews for Adapt
95 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book. The narrator, with his British accent, was enjoyable. There were times, however, that I wondered if this was one of those rare books that were just impossible to listen to in a car. Some books are so complex, some have an annoying narrator, some you just get lost if you miss a few seconds of. There were times when I was left going "huh?" But overall I enjoyed listening to it in my car.I've tried to explain this book to a few people and it's very difficult. Basically it presents the theory that an environment where failure is welcomed is an environment where experiments are welcomed. And an environment with many experiments--even though the majority will be doomed to failure--is one where innovation, originality and success are most likely to occur. The author presents case studies from everything from military history to grocery stores to Silicon Valley companies to Broadway theatre.While I think this is a good book for both personal growth and business growth, it did feel like there was a lot more philosophy than practical solutions. Sure, if you own a business or are top-level management, this book would definitely be useful. When you're not at that level, this book is still very helpful and interesting, but not as practical.I would love for the author to follow up with more practical ways, especially on a personal level, that these principals can be applied. Nonetheless, everyone can find this book useful in the way they live and work from day to day.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The book argues that in all human endeavors that exceed a certain complexity (military campaigns, government policies, financial markets etc...) it is an illusion to expect to be able to anticipate and plan for all consequences of one's decisions. In these circumstances it is far better to set up systems that can perform a very large number of frequent and small experiments on the outcome of which the entire system can be optimized. Not exactly a novel idea, although an important one. That said, Harford writes very clearly and is able to pull together a lot of disparate strands to show how pervasive the basic idea is. Also useful is the fact that many examples are very very current and the academic references are very up to date.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5One problem is that we often do not know what the feedback says. Like the dance woman. Good that when her show flopped she took the criticism seriously and had friends also analyze whether it was reasonable. But in the earlier episode, it was supposedly crystal clear that she had married her husband because of the earlier abortion and that the marriage was the wrong choice. In general it is not clear whether one is experiencing a failure or not from the information that one has.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I had a difficult time with this audio book version because I was listening it in the car to and from work. Although their were some interesting subject talked about I would not say too many of the concept were new or earth shattering. I did enjoy the book and even if I did not agree with everything I do suggest reading it..
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book is about applying concepts from biological evolution and complexity theory to economics.I started listening to the audio book version. In one of the first tracks there is a reference to Chapter six. Where is chapter six in these eight cds? There is no table of contents, and no reference to chapter numbers in the track titles. No index or footnotes or references or any other text from the book anywhere in the package.The author is breezy and proceeds by anecdote. Good Brit reading voice. The packaging looks nice.This was my first attempt to listen to an audio book version of a nonfiction book and I think it will be my last.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It took me awhile to review this after receiving it from The Early Reviewers club. I only listen to CDs in the car. It was an interesting book which was well narrated. The author provides many terrific examples of the point he wishes to make. I need to learn more about running a business and this was a pleasant place to begin. It was quite motivating. I hope people like me hear about it. It can be depressing to do poorly at something so hearing the many instances where a successful person failed in the beginning is inspiring.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I received the audio version of this book.Tim Harford's "Adapt" was compared on the jacket to Gladwell. That's a good assessment. Adapt was a good once-around-the-world of case examples of failure, learning, and the institutional structures that enhance and impede the process.Harford's commentary spans US strategy in Iraq, development aid, research and development, oil spills, and the 2007 credit bubble, sewing a continuous thread through all these very disparate discussions to support the thesis.It was informative, coherent, and engaging, but it was not stellar. It was certainly appropriate for a book in terms of breadth, cohesiveness, and lengths, but still came off a bit as though it were a series of periodical articles.Good, but not great. Certainly worth buying.The accents rendered by the British narrator on the audio version were a bit odd. . .
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you have read Tipping point or Freakanomics then you will probably enjoy this
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Let me re-title this book for you: Adapt: Tim Harford Makes Out With Markets. Adapt is Harford claiming markets are great because they are so effective, comparing markets and capitalism to evolution because both have use trial and error to select winners. Then Harford cherry-picks lots of examples of people rigidly not adapting in order to show … well, I think he’s trying to show that markets work because of failure. What he actually shows is that he’s good at finding interesting stories of failure. But so does failblog.org, and we don’t acclaim it to be an economic guru.Harford uses the evolutionary process and it’s results as a basis to promote markets. That’s a very inapt comparison. On the surface, both use trial and error to a degree. But it’s extremely important to remember that proving something about biological evolution does not transfer the proof to markets (and vice versa). I can think of a lot of differences, and I am neither a biologist nor an economist.Mr. Harford compares biological extinctions with extinctions of companies (we’ve apparently now narrowed down the idea of economic evolution to just corporations). Except that the extinction of a company is never defined. And why does that bother me? Because companies rarely go away, even in bankruptcy. The singular legal entity might. However, most of the time in bankruptcy, other companies buy up pieces of the old company (sometimes everything about the company except it’s specific legal entity and its debts) and continue it on in another form. Additionally, companies get bought up all the time and cease to exist legally but practically speaking they are still surviving. And there are times when companies might be thought to survive, but they really have transformed themselves into another entity. Biology and economics are not the same!A lot of the examples and stories concern military operations, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan. How this applies to markets or evolution, I don’t have the foggiest idea. Again, what’s success on the battlefield has no direct analogy in capitalism. Perhaps his point is that differing views were suppressed, and because of that the military failed, and the same thing could happen in economic situations.Except that Mr. Harford is comparing apples and orange in his examples. Take his contention that Lyndon Johnson failed because he didn’t get multiple views (according to Adapt at least). The experiments that show multiple views aren’t comparable to the situation asked for by Lyndon Johnson, that his advisers sort out their views before coming to him. There may be serious problems with that method, but the problem wasn’t that there weren’t multiple views. There were. Someone still had to resolve them and come up with a single view. It was just not Johnson that heard the multiple views and resolved them. It was someone lower down on the food chain. The problem is that someone picked the wrong view. There’s no evidence that Lyndon Johnson would have chosen better had he heard the differing things himself.Mr. Harford puts together some principles that I don’t actually disagree with: that we should be experimenting, that we should make failing survivable, and that we need feedback from the experimentation and failure. However, his evidence for these is fuzzy, at best. And these are presented on the level of management-guru. They don’t provide guidance to anyone to be able to create experimental cultures. He doesn’t explain how to tell if something is survivable ahead of time. And he presents multiple examples of feedback in economics where some feedback wasn’t feeding back and some that was, and doesn’t explain how to tell the difference.Which doesn’t make it any worse than hundreds of other management-guru books that are out there. That genre of book presents ideas that serve as guiding principles, but rarely are detailed enough to follow effectively. Kind of like telling people to buy low and sell high. Of course that’s what we want to do, but telling when something is underpriced is not easy or nearly everyone would be doing it. Same thing here.Someone running a business (or an economy) could ask themselves will we survive if we try this? are our other operations sufficiently decoupled from the experiments we’re about to try? But that’s just the sort of thing upper level management tells underlings all the time with no guidance to make it happen. At least that was my experience in the corporate world. At a macroeconomic level, I’m sure the people who supported repealing Glass-Steagall thought we had enough other protections built in to the banking sector that we didn’t need that one. In retrospect, we didn’t.Adapt is worth reading to get the high level principles as well as a few entertaining cherry-picked stories that illustrate them. Mr. Harford’s attempt to connect natural selection and capitalist markets in the first third is pretty thin.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This readable and interesting book is about applying concepts/rules from Darwin's theory of evolution and complexity theory to economics and other human activity. The author uses examples such as the military, climate change, business successes etc. “Tim Harford has made a compelling and expertly informed case for why we need to embrace risk, failure, and experimentation in order to find great ideas that will change the world. I loved the book.” —Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality