Adapt Book Review

BOOK REVIEW ON “ADAPT”

                          -  TIM HARTFORD

Presented by:

BAISHALI JAISHI

PGDM -06

ENROLLMENT NO: 030106059

GLOBSYN BUSINESS SCHOOL.

Change itself presents another layer of problematic intricacy. In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman studied the best organizations in business and held them up as model companies in their book In Search of Excellence. Within two years, 14 of the original 43 companies “were in serious financial trouble.” Greatness doesn’t last. Survival requires adjusting to changing circumstances and welcoming adaptation and experimentation as necessary aspects of evolution.

Leadership Error

Corporate organizational charts present the schematic of a widely held ideal of what leadership should be. In a perfect world, this model says, all information flows to the leader, who uses perspective and good judgment to make sound decisions with the backing of a trained supporting team. Then, decisions flow back from the leader to the troops. The problem with this model is that it doesn’t work. Few leaders are great, and even great leaders can’t “make the right decision every time.” Napoleon was an unbeatable general, until he lost more than 90% of his “half a million men” when he invaded Russia. Because even the best leader errs, every organization needs processes to correct leadership mistakes. Organizations must walk a tightrope between being able to enact change rapidly, and to digest and consider deviations from normal business.

When an organization invests in research, its leaders want to know what they’re going to get for their money. However, with “blue-sky research” in a new field, no one can estimate the return on an investment. Indeed, most inventions fail, and “most original ideas” turn out to be “useless.” Even when ideas prove workable, return on investment can be difficult to assess. Rather than attempt to identify your best prospective innovations and focus on those, learn from evolution. As scientist Charles Darwin observed about wildlife in the Galapagos Islands, nature finds solutions by running many possible variations at the same time. These variations are nature’s way of adapting to changing circumstances. Successful adaptations thrive; unsuccessful ones die out.

In an organization, that means protecting those who experiment in search of new ideas. In society, it means that trying to underwrite innovation within a system almost ensures that no real innovation will occur. Grants from institutions such as the US National Institutes of Health go to projects that seem most likely to succeed. That’s paying to avoid failure instead of embracing risk in hopes of a rare breakthrough. Alternatively, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) supports insightful individuals who can’t say ahead of time where their research might lead. HHMI reviews funded projects for “convincing signs of effort.

Experimentation

Generating new ideas is an essential component of the evolutionary principle of adaptation, but new ideas alone are not enough. You have to find out which ideas work in specific circumstances, because no idea works in every situation. Identifying the exact cause of change is difficult in economics or the social sciences because multiple possible causes always appear and, for example, researchers cannot control the parameters of experiments on economies, the climate or societies. The subject is too vast and self-determining. Instead, to lead among complexity, you must learn to adapt to circumstances you can never predict or foresee.

“Failure is both necessary and useful.”

Since resources are almost always limited, you must find a way to select among ideas. Muhammad Yunus, the microfinance pioneer who founded the Grameen Bank, tried taking a “worm’s-eye view” to see how an economic solution works at the lowest, most intimately engaged level. Archie Cochrane, a Scottish epidemiologist who supported using scientific methods to test medication, tried controlled experiments on humans in prison camps during World War II. Cochrane maintained that while controlled experiments can be ethically disturbing, the alternative is to perform “uncontrolled experiments” on unwitting populations and persist in failed methods.One option is to try a number of small experiments to improve a narrowly defined situation, rather than trying to solve an entire problem at once. Another is finding better ways to represent problems and solutions. When Cesar Hidalgo developed new ways to visualize data about trade among countries, he let people see how and when various nations expanded trade into new market categories. These visualizations showed that government funding for expansion often flops, because governments tend to fund large but failing organizations and seldom understand the real results of the aid provided. Relying on top-down change often is a recipe for economic failure.

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