Buy Used

$9.54

Used: Good | Details

Sold by You Can Count on Us

Fulfilled by Amazon

Condition: Used: Good

Comment: Minor signs of wear, Receive Your Item in 3-5 Business Days! Eligible for FREE Super Saver/Prime Shipping. Amazon Customer Service 24/7 with Delivery Tracking.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

58 used & new from $0.44

See All Buying Options

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure Hardcover – May 10, 2011

by Tim Harford (Author)

78 customer reviews

See all 17 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Amazon Price New from Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$9.74

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$9.99

$0.71

Hardcover, May 10, 2011

—

$15.83

$0.44

Paperback

"Please retry"

$12.07

$4.93

$2.18

Audible, Unabridged

"Please retry"

—

$18.69

—

Audio CD, Audiobook, CD, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$29.89

$18.98

$0.01

Unknown Binding

"Please retry"

—

$28.43

$17.07

In this groundbreaking book, Tim Harford, the Undercover Economist, shows us a new and inspiring approach to solving the most pressing problems in our lives. When faced with complex situations, we have all become accustomed to looking to our leaders to set out a plan of action and blaze a path to success. Harford argues that today’s challenges simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinion; the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex. Instead, we must adapt.

Deftly weaving together psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, physics, and economics, along with the compelling story of hard-won lessons learned in the field, Harford makes a passionate case for the importance of adaptive trial and error in tackling issues such as climate change, poverty, and financial crises—as well as in fostering innovation and creativity in our business and personal lives.

Taking us from corporate boardrooms to the deserts of Iraq, Adapt clearly explains the necessary ingredients for turning failure into success. It is a breakthrough handbook for surviving—and prospering— in our complex and ever-shifting world.

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Tim Harford

66

Hardcover
Eliyahu M. Goldratt

320

Paperback
Eliyahu M. Goldratt

671

in Production & Operations
Paperback
$17.30
Tim Harford

215

Hardcover
Tim Harford

46

Hardcover
$27.95
Sarah Lewis

48

Hardcover

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Product Details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 10, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374100969
ISBN-13: 978-0374100964
Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #678,498 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1001 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Applied Psychology
- #1056 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Theory
- #1402 in Books > Business & Money > Skills > Decision Making

Would you like to update product info, give feedback on images, or tell us about a lower price?

Customer Reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars

5 star		54%
4 star		26%
3 star		11%
2 star		0%
1 star		9%

See all 78 customer reviews

Share your thoughts with other customers

Write a customer review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

67 of 71 people found the following review helpful

A Blueprint for Adapting

By John Chancellor TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on April 4, 2011

Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )

You may wonder about the need for adapting. Tim Harford, the author makes a very strong case for learning to adapt. "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. The aim of this book is to provide an answer to that challenge."

There is no doubt that the world and our individual lives are becoming more complex and challenging. The conventional approach to solving problems does not seem to work.

Mr. Harford builds a case for an unconventional approach - an experimental approach involving trial and error.

The book puts forth that there are three essential steps for successful adapting: The first is to try new things with the knowledge that some will fail; to make failure survivable since some of the attempts will surely fail and to make sure you know when you have failed.

The essential steps seem fairly straightforward. But Mr. Harford takes the reader on a journey through history, recalling many failures - Robert McNamara's handling of the war in Vietnam; Donald Rumsfeld's stubbornness dealing with the war in Iraq; The Piper Alpha rig explosion in the North Sea; and the Lehman Brothers financial meltdown.

He also recalls many things that worked and contrasts the different approaches used by the successful - trial and error and adapting.

There is a wonderful collection of historical events, psychological experiments and insights that we can put to use in our daily lives.

Some of the insights deal with large organizations and governments.Read more ›

Comment Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback. If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

95 of 104 people found the following review helpful

Interesting anecdotes, unconvincing thesis

By PriceTheory on May 22, 2011

Format: Hardcover

As always, Tim Harford finds the most interesting economic research and explains it well. As I read Adapt, I was frequently inspired to go online and look up the economics he reports on. The section on evolved virtual creatures prompted me to visit YouTube and watch for myself how animal-like forms evolved through computer simulations. After reading about the unintended consequences of some foreign aid programs, I had to see what a Play Pump looks like and watch the interviews with teachers who preferred the old borehole pumps. Adapt is an excellent collection of quotes, stories, and research findings on innovation and economic evolution.

However, the book falls short in a few ways. First, although Harford's writing is generally clear, he employs some annoying rhetorical devices that should have been edited out. One is that he repeatedly withholds the name of the person whose work he's discussing until he has built up all the details of the story. Only once he's laid out the research results does he reveal that the anonymous manager is a famous figure or someone we met in the last chapter. It's as if Harford isn't confident that the research will hold anyone's attention, so he has to play games with the reader. Equally irksome is his tendency to repeat points again and again, reminding readers of things he mentioned two pages back that no one could have forgotten.

The chapter on the financial crisis was also a disappointment. It devolved into boring jargon and obscure terms for different loans and contracts. Maybe it's not possible to make subprime mortgages entertaining, and I don't know if any other writer could have done a better job. But the book would have been more enjoyable without that tedious interlude.Read more ›

5 Comments Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback. If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

Important book

By Aretae VINE VOICE on May 10, 2011

Format: Hardcover

Adapt is a well written book with compelling examples that covers, in my opinion, the single most important topic in how to think about thinking:

To a first approximation, rational deduction fails 100% of the time, when applied to the messy real world. The ONLY path to success is to try, fail, and adapt.

The examples are engaging, the writing is pleasant, and there are soundbites throughout that are wonderful. My favorite in the second half of the book was a joke making fun of self-help and business books.

The flow of the book goes roughly:

1. What's the likelihood of getting something wrong? (~100%)
2. What can we do? (Feedback + Adaptation)
3. What about situations where we have to get it right (Nuclear power plants?)
4. How do organizations adapt (Low central control).
5. How do individuals adapt (It's hard).

The book was generally very strong. The variety of examples throughout was particularly impressive. Anyone who doesn't already understand the idea that we all are wrong up front most of the time should have this book stapled to their hands. Considering myself well read in this space, I saw a new example I was unfamiliar with every third page.

Among my favorite of the little examples that I was unfamiliar with:
Paul Ormerod ran math models of corporate extinctions that lined up pretty well with math models of species extinctions.Read more ›

1 Comment Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...

Thank you for your feedback. If this review is inappropriate, please let us know.

Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again

See all 78 customer reviews (newest first)

Write a customer review

Most Recent Customer Reviews

Great review of the application of the evolution of species ...

Great review of the application of the evolution of species theory to both everyday life and long term problems.

Published 1 month ago by ArturoFornes

What other book dream to be

I’ve read many books about adaptation including the ‘Righteous Mind’ and ‘That Used to Us’ to name two. Read more

Published 5 months ago by Jes

Fascinating

This book may have started a failure, if its central premise is to be believed, but it clearly ended a success. Interesting, enriching and enjoyable.

Published 6 months ago by Greg Salter

Harford hits a home run!

Published 6 months ago by Claire Dorotik-Nana

Why do we spend our lives avoiding "Failure."

We have heard it, Success Starts with Failure and then we spend our whole life trying to avoid "Failure," WHY, it is all about "Pride," one of the 7 deadly sins,... Read more

Published 8 months ago by Daniel M.

Four Stars

Good

Published 9 months ago by Mostafa Nageeb

I really wanted to like this book

I really wanted to like this book; I quite like Tim's work in the FT. But, this book was full of the most obvious "wisdom" that even a college grad would be well versed... Read more

Published 9 months ago by Raj Nair

Beautifully written, covers a wide variety of interesting topics

Very insightful book on decisionmaking in government and firms, adaptive trial and error, strategies for coping with innovation, behavioral economics, etc. Read more

Published 10 months ago by Bryan L. Boulier

I Believe

I know many people don't believe that startups must fail to succeed, but I'm a believer. There are examples of blooming startups that have never "pivoted" (Puppet Labs),... Read more

Published 13 months ago by Hobson Lane

Revolutionary. Another exceptional book from Tim Harford.

I read this because I enjoyed and learned a lot from Tim Harford's other books. Undercover Economist has become the test I use when teaching undergraduate Economics classes. Read more

Published 14 months ago by S. Power