Adapt (edition 2011)

Great book. I totally agree on the importance of adaptation and learning through experimentation and trial and error. However, 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 often not clear whether one is experiencing a failure or not from the information that one has. When to stop? ( )

A very interesting book that talks about designing incremental change in a way that things improve continuously in a fault-tolerant way.

From a management perspective there are a number of good ideas about approaching change: for example in marketspace, in processes, and in culture.

I also found very interesting the deep-dive into just a sparse number of topics, from Afghanistan to Magnetogorsk. ( )

I 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.. ( )

Let 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.

Review also at my blog: http://www.read-irresponsibly.com/2011/10/adapt-tim-harford/ ( )

The 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. ( )

This 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 ( )

Truth told, the premise of this book is not particularly revolutionary, although its practice is not straightforward. The title hints at its origin in an ambiguous way. Rather than recovering from failure or even avoiding it, this book is about how to encourage failure as a strategy for greater gains. Though the title might hint at a business/self-help tome, the advice lends itself to maximize not individual gain or progress, but progress within an organization or society. Evolution does not happen at the level of the individual, and evolution is the theme of the work.

A note on format is in order. This reviewer listened to an unabridged audio version. Whether a strategic decision or fortuitous mutation, the book was well adapted for audio. Rather than one long narrative, the content proceeeds in chunks of anecdotes and themes, with ample return to previously-stated concepts and names. The content is suited to listening in small chunks, perhaps with the occasional distraction, without having to skip an audio track backwards to catch what was missed. Such a strategy might also work well for someone reading the text while commuting or on a plane. This reader could sometimes imagine accompanying PowerPoint slides with the (usually) three main points repeated through several examples. Others might find this repitition tiresome, and by later chapters it neared so even for this reviewer, but it mostly works in context.

The basic narrative goes thus. Even relatively simple products, such as the humble toaster, come to be in a complex, interdependent world. Once dominant products, business models, and economic systems will fail. Though we might like to believe that expertise and strategic planning can account for such changes, in practice planning is nearly worthless. The most effective "strategy" is trial and error. This mathematical pattern, akin to biological evolution, applies in many contexts, from business to political and economic challenges.

The rules of evolution are simple: 1. generate variations ("try new things") 2. limit the scope/effects of experimentation ("make failure survivable") 3. recognize and reproduce success, and cull unsuccessful variations (detect/act on failure). This is easier said than done, of course. The heirarchical organization is configured to funnel resources to only a few "visionary" central-planned strategies with little honest feedback from yes-men in the reporting chain.

Military examples feature prominently, and the lessons of the War in Iraq provide good illustration. Harford shows that new leaders succeeded because they embraced adaptive principles. The Planner's Dream of up-to-date explicit intelligence and analysis is not up to the task of real-world problems. Tacit, local knowledge is key. Development of World War II's Spitfire fighter provides another example of how organizations can block or nourish innovation. But "skunk works" are not only useful in war. Funding "blue sky" development, competitive prizes, or small-scale random experiments can help advance medical research, generate better movie recommendations and better clocks, make space tourism a reality, and discover the most effective ways to help poverty-stricken villiages. Problems such as climate change or building successful economies will take larger-scale efforts via incentives.

Some systems are so critical that failures are not so easily survivable. In such cases, it is critical to predict and control failure modes, but even more importantly, to work to decouple elements that might fail so that problems cannot spread in domino-like fashion. The recent financial crisis is compared with industrial failures such as Three Mile Island and Deep Horizon. The importance of local feedback and control (flat organizations and support for critical voices) is stressed. Google's 20% rule for personal projects will be cliche for many readers, but perhaps Tinsley and Whole Foods are more refreshing examples. The role of niche markets in nourishing innovation is discussed.

The book's final chapter takes a psychological turn to apply some lessons to personal adaptation, or coping. It warns of the ways the mind guards against recognizing failures, but the recommendation to find a personal critic/validation squad is not particularly novel advice.

I'm not sure the book told me anything I didn't already feel true; for instance, my job history has been an ode to variation, limiting the scope of failure, and adapting to local circumstances. Still, I think this book has a lot to offer for a wide audience. It is quite easily readable (listenable?) without knowledge of jargon or even much education, in a Gladwell-like style, though the financial parts might be a bit dry for some. I enjoyed the diversity of examples and the author's style of prose, which was voiced with lovely dry wit (including foreign accents for quotes!) by the British reader in the audio version. I would have liked a printed list of references/recommended reading, but examples are sufficiently mainstream; a quick Google search enabled me to find out the correct spelling and more for Peter Palchinsky. Overall, I recommend the work and look forward to reading more by this author.

I 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. ( )

It 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. ( )

I 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. . . ( )

This 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. ( )