F +ve: Failure
Positive
By Harish
Bijoor
‘Let us try for once not to be right’
-Tristan Tzara
That was classic Tristan Tzara
for you. And who is Tristan Tzara to the un-initiated?
A Romanian and French Avant Garde
poet, essayist and performance artist. A passionate voice of the
anti-establishment Dada movement, which later began to be called Dadaism. In facetitious sum, a guy who in many
ways believed there was a lot of merit in not being correct all the time.
Over to Tim Harford now. Having
been a fan of his ‘The Undercover Economist’ column in the Financial Times and
an equal fan of his best-selling book of the same title, I picked “Adapt” with
a near reverential feeling of wanting to savor and experience. I picked this
book to read with a feeling of wanting to discover something new. Harford however disappoints. This is
very old wine in a very new bottle.
It is a mix of the philosophy of
Tzara and a very old truth in business, marketing and all of life in reality:
Failure is good. Failure teaches us. Failure strengthens us. Failure makes us
that much more resilient and that much more innovative. If you have not been a
failure, you cannot be a great big success.
Harford essentially treads the
path of this old and very resilient truth, and takes us through a very diverse
and seemingly un-related tapestries of the battleground of failure. He makes us
go through a spaceport in Tequila land to the ruthless street shootings in Iraq
and a myriad set of tapestries that make you wonder where you are going.
As you meander through these
diverse sets of ground experiences you wonder where you are going once again. Somewhere
on the way, you know what he is talking about, and you literally want to drop the book. If however you plod on, you will
encounter a very compelling basis of logic. You will also enjoy the handcrafted
words of Tim Harford, sprinkled with wit and research.
The good part of the book is the
very diverse sets of research that lead to this just one compelling argument
which is the spine of the book. Failing is good.
If Tim Harford does anything
significant with this effort of his, it is the fact that he underlines the fact
that life, management and all business is indeed today very amoebic. There is
just no systemic pattern out there. Making meaning out of this pattern lies in
the hands of the manager. The Chameleon manager even. The one who fails learns
a lot faster than the one who does not. The one who fails is that much more
resilient a manager.
Harford is a master with words.
Add to it his uncanny ability to weave together psychology, evolutionary biology
(whatever that is), anthropology, physics, and his favorite economics, and you
have a book that is a good read. A good read not for a path-breaking thought
that will take you somewhere, but a feel-good read that tells you that all the
failures you have been through have been actually very good for you. You are a
richer being today.
Did I have to read this to know
this? No.
Follow me on
Twitter.com/harishbijoor
Email: harishbijoor@hotmail.com
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