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Tim Harford

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

by Tim Harford (Author)

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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.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

May 10, 2011
Dimensions

6.34 x 1.16 x 9.28 inches
ISBN-10

0374100969
ISBN-13

978-0374100964
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[Harford] offers a very useful guide for people preparing to live in the world as it really is.” — David Brooks, The New York Times

“Brainy . . . Harford has a knack for making complicated ideas sound simple.” — James Pressley, Bloomberg News

“Tim Harford’s terrific new book urges us to understand profit from our muddling . . . Harford is a gifted writer whose prose courses swiftly and pleasurably. He has assembled a powerful combination of anecdotes and data to make a serious point: companies, governments and people must recognise the limits of their wisdom and embrace the muddling of mankind.” — Edward Glaeser, Financial Times

“Harford’s case histories are well chosen and artfully told, making the book a delight to read. But its value is greater than that. Strand by strand, it weaves the stories into a philosophical web that is neat, fascinating and brilliant . . . It advances the subject as well as conveying it, drawing intriguing conclusions about how to run companies, armies and research labs.” —Matt Ridley, Nature

“One of the best writers who also happens to be an economist.”—Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics blog

“This is a brilliant and fascinating book—Harford’s range of research is both impressive and inspiring, and his conclusions are provocative. The message about the need to accept failure has important implications, not just for policy making but also for people’s professional and personal lives. It should be required reading for anyone serving in government, working at a company, trying to build a career or simply trying to navigate an increasingly complex world.”—Gillian Tett, author of Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe

“Harford’s wide-ranging look at social adaptation is fresh, creative, and timely.”—Sheena Iyengar, author of The Art of Choosing

“Adapt is a highly readable, even entertaining, argument against top-down design. It debunks the Soviet-Harvard command-and-control style of planning and approach to economic policies and regulations and vindicates trial and error (particularly the error part) as a means to economic and general progress. Very impressive!” —Nassim N. Taleb, Distinguised Professor of Risk Engineering, NYU-Poly Institute and author of The Black Swan

“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

“Tim Harford could well be Britain's Malcolm Gladwell. An entertaining mix of popular economics and psychology, this excellently written book contains fascinating stories of success and failure that will challenge your assumptions. Insightful and clever.” —Alex Bellos, author of Here’s Looking at Euclid

About the Author

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 previous books include 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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Adapting

‘The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.’

– Friedrich von Hayek

‘Cross the river by feeling for stones.’

– Attributed to Deng Xiaoping

1 ‘You could easily spend your life making a toaster’

The electric toaster seems a humble thing. It was invented in 1893, roughly halfway between the appearance of the light bulb and that of the aeroplane. This century-old technology is now a household staple. Reliable, efficient toasters are available for less than an hour’s wage.

Nevertheless, Thomas Thwaites, a postgraduate design student at the Royal College of Art in London, discovered just what an astonishing achievement the toaster is when he embarked on what he called the ‘Toaster Project’. Quite simply, Thwaites wanted to build a toaster from scratch. He started by taking apart a cheap toaster, to discover that it had over four hundred components and sub-components. Even the most primitive model called for:

Copper, to make the pins of the electric plug, the cord, and internal wires. Iron to make the steel grilling apparatus, and the spring to pop up the toast. Nickel to make the heating element. Mica (a mineral a bit like slate) around which the heating element is wound, and of course plastic for the plug and cord insulation, and for the all important sleek looking casing.

The scale of the task soon became clear. To get iron ore, Thwaites had to travel to an old mine in Wales that now serves as a museum. He tried to smelt the iron using fifteenth-century technology, and failed dismally. He fared no better when he replaced bellows with hairdryers and a leaf-blower. His next attempt was even more of a cheat: he used a recently patented smelting method and two microwave ovens, one of which perished in the attempt, to produce a coin-sized lump of iron.

Plastic was no easier. Thwaites tried but failed to persuade BP to fly him out to an offshore rig to collect some crude oil. His attempts to make plastic from potato starch were foiled by mould and hungry snails. Finally, he settled for scavenging some plastic from a local dump, melting it down and moulding it into a toaster’s casing. Other short cuts followed. Thwaites used electrolysis to obtain copper from the polluted water of an old mine in Anglesey, and simply melted down some commemorative coins to produce nickel, which he drew into wire using a specialised machine from the RCA’s jewellery department.

Such compromises were inevitable. ‘I realised that if you started absolutely from scratch, you could easily spend your life making a toaster,’ he admitted. Despite his Herculean efforts to duplicate the technology, Thomas Thwaites’s toaster looks more like a toaster-shaped birthday cake than a real toaster, its coating dripping and oozing like an icing job gone wrong. ‘It warms bread when I plug it into a battery,’ he told me, brightly. ‘But I’m not sure what will happen if I plug it into the mains.’ Eventually, he summoned up the courage to do so. Two seconds later, the toaster was toast.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 10, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374100969
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374100964
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.34 x 1.16 x 9.28 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,370,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,880 in Theory of Economics
- #2,752 in Popular Applied Psychology
- #3,167 in Popular Psychology Personality Study

Customer Reviews:
235 ratings

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Tim Harford

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Tim is an economist, journalist and broadcaster.

He is the author of nine books including “How To Make The World Add Up”, “Messy”, and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s “More or Less”, “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, and the new podcast “Cautionary Tales”.

Tim has spoken at TED, PopTech and the Sydney Opera House. He is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Tim was made an OBE for services to improving economic understanding in the New Year honours of 2019.

Customer reviews

5 star		62%
4 star		21%
3 star		9%
2 star		3%
1 star		5%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Hardly ground-breaking. In fact, quite boring.

Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2018

Verified Purchase

My God...this is one of the dullest books I have ever read. The entire book can be summarized into three sentences.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

"Look a the big picture."

"Do your research."

There is nothing ground-breaking in this book. It is filled with anecdotal stories of how people failed a few times before they found success in whatever plan they created. Hardly novel. If I wasn't required to finish the book for a class, I would have set it aside by now.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Weihao L.

Mr. Harford's own experiment

Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2012

Verified Purchase

Different from Mr. Harford's other work in economics, this book aims to cover a wider subject: how to solve large and complex problem such as fighting terrorists? The main idea is, instead of following a master plan laid out by leaders, we should experiment and approach complex problems by trial-and-error. Solving problems by iterative approaches is hardly new, and you would expect Mr. Harford to elaborate on how to run experiments more efficiently or shorten the discovery process. After all, exploring takes resources and is not free. However, this is where the book falls short of scientific precision. Mr. Harford argues mostly based on anecdotes, although from a variety of fields, not rigorous scientific or economic studies. Moreover, rather than providing positive examples, Mr. Harford spent more time on the failure of leadership and complexity of problems nowadays. The reports around climate change, although interesting, do not enhance the logic connection between solving complex problem and trial-and-error main thesis.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Daniel V.S.

A little bit disappointing.

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2013

Verified Purchase

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.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Disappointed

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2017

Verified Purchase

Author has a compelling thesis, but the ideas somehow get lost in the middle of the book. Chapters 1-3 are interesting but chapters 4-6 are very unpleasant to read (many anecdotes and lots of storytelling, but the content is not so strongly related to the core ideas presented earlier). The book could have been 50% shorter.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Tucker McClure

Best book I've read this year

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2013

Verified Purchase

A fantastic combination of evidence, discussion, and interpretation fit to influence anything from personal choices to the organizational issues of a large company. I've read numerous books from the last few years on business issues, learning from data, and the role of failures, several of which are cited by Hartford, and Adapt, I believe, is the strongest, both in its evidence and in the style of its presentation. Refreshingly, it is neither meant to be a ridiculously formal treatise nor an unfounded opinion, but presents simply a series of lessons learned about successes and interesting commonalities. Since reading this book, I can't help but find patterns matching those Hartford describes, and have begun to estimate the success of the various activities I see as a function of how well they accept and learn from their failures.

Hartford's resources and interpretation are excellent, and the citations alone form a formidable addition to any "must read" list.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Natural selection and the creative process

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2013

Verified Purchase

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!

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Morandi

Genius

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2019

Verified Purchase

Brilliant. An examination of the necessity of experimentation, probing, failing and learning. An argument against reductive, linear, supposedly rational methods, against centralisation and standardisation, and a celebration of local knowledge, emergence, iterative discovery and enhancement. Sparkling writing.

2 people found this helpful

William Cohen

Why don't more people read business books like this?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

I'm an evangelist for business books because I find them so useful in shaping my behaviour, but it's so hard to persuade other business people to read them.

Tim Harford's book looks at many different trial and error strategies and evaluates them. I'd never heard of Archie Cochrane before - his research into whether drugs worked or not proved so influential they started an Oxford institute in his name. Harford explains why Donald Rumsfeld was so useless and why General Petraeus was much smarter. The story of Peter Palchinsky proves what a price they paid in Russia for criticising the system.

Sadly sin and folly is what tends to work in big organisations. A character like Twyla Tharp is inspirational. Her musical got panned by the critics, but she took it on the chin and turned it around, despite her star credentials.

This book is light and fun, and gives me the confidence to embrace failure in my business en route for something better.

3 people found this helpful

Samson

Worth the investment and the read!!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 24, 2019

Verified Purchase

Amazing read! Great book for individuals/entrepreneurs and even students who are working on an idea and need a little or more encouragement on the way. Reading this book made me realise that failure is essential when we want success. The popular work and invention of others were built on failure. If we can understand that we can end up with winning ideas!

2 people found this helpful

Noel

Will this author ever fail?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 26, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is written in a way an economic fool can easily follow the thought process and analysis of a professional.

Tim Harford does not go into the depth of each situation that would leave the average reader lost in mathematics or psychology and therefore it is pitched perfectly.

The subject matter is both relevant and recognisable using examples of companies everyone will have heard of.

The references to other authors leaves the reader wanting to read their books as well.

Learning that in certain circumstances failure can lead to success is not a principle many of us would be comfortable with. The book explains how, under certain conditions, these failures have led to some successes that were never seen as probable. It makes you want to go out and fail (in a controlled way).

Anyway I loved the book and all of the authors previous books and now hope Tim Harford keeps on producing these fascinating books. A book looking at the economics of a class system comparing countries like India, England and America might be interesting. Don't worry if it fails as that will hopefully mean a success will come later from it.

Love the books.

2 people found this helpful

Guy Grobler

Helpful insights

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 20, 2011

Verified Purchase

I quite enjoyed reading this book. Harford is not afraid of taking his economic background into other non-economic spheres, which makes this book more of a how to manage and prevent disasters manual (disasters of all kinds... from economic meltdowns to nuclear plant meltdowns) then an economic book.
The message Harford delivers in his book is quite clear - as in science, one must experiment and be willing to fail, in order to find success, and while this is fine for science, it can be quite volatile in social science were the public is affected by wrong decisions which is why Harford recommends 3 basic rules:
1) always try new things, knowing that some will fail
2) always try to make failure survivable (as you expect to fail in some places)
3) always know when you've failed.

If you look at our current economic crises, it is quite obvious our economic leaders didn't follow rule 2. Harford does analyze the crises and does offer some solutions which are still relevant, even though the meltdown already happened.

2 people found this helpful

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