Adapt book summary

This is my book summary of Adapt by Tim Harford.

The toaster project happened when someone tried to make a toaster from scratch and realized the intricacies of the level of madness.

 Our world is amazingly complex, but we are so engrossed in this complexity that we accept it.  We are blind to it.

 We can reduce the impact on a single person or leader because we have failed to see how current leaders are facing complex problems.

 The system we live in is complex for any one person to understand.  Even developing skills in a particular field is not as effective as you might expect because of the interconnection of things with my fields that you know nothing about.

 There are failures everywhere.  Ten percent of U.S. agencies disappear each year.

 Perhaps the only reason companies are not at the top is the only way down.  Staying on top is really tough and perhaps a Fortune 100 company depends on many factors beyond your control not just to run a good company.  When these factors change, you get incredible success.

 The market moves forward on the path to success.  Good thoughts go away and less successful people die.  It is like the development of the economy.

 Avoid the bias of survival.  Don’t just look at success.  Look at all the failures that ultimately lead to success.

 The process of development prevents the balance between discovering the new and exploiting the familiar.

 Small steps and sometimes wild gambling are the best way to find evolutionary mixing solutions.

 Developing ongoing produces “works for now” solutions and then builds those ideas.

 We are blind to what we think

 Most real-world problems are more complex than we think.

 Find new ideas and try new things.

 When trying something new, do it on a scale that survives failure.

 Learn feedback as you go along and learn from your mistakes.

 For some reason, we are eager to achieve an equally high standard in the industry, although this is exactly the opposite (discrimination and selection) that we got in the first place.  In fact, for example, if every hospital does things the same way, we will strive for improvement because no one will test new ideas.

 There is a limit to how most leaders want to hear feedback.

 Judging and admitting errors means accepting errors.  And the mind does not feel very good to do it.

 "A person who does not compromise on his own loss will probably gamble which would not be acceptable to him otherwise."  -Kahman and Towarski

 John Andler's Telltale Studies in the decade of And০ show how the environment drives development.

 Make sure you know when to fail.  Measure your progress.

 Measurements can come in a variety of shapes.  For example, new employees are required to complete a four-week trial of Whole Foods and they are only hired if they receive positive votes from 2/3 of their peers.  This is a form of peer monitoring (or we can call it peer measurement).

 Another example of peer monitoring is Google’s 20 percent time, because projects in good directions will gain peer interest.

 In an organization where your partners decide who lives here and there, there is no place for people who do not gain weight.

 Eighty percent of Google's projects will fail, but it doesn't matter.  People think only 20 percent are successful.

 "Success is the number of tests that can come out on top in 24 hours."

 You almost never get formal theory as an incredibly fast controlled process of trial and error.

 Niche products are grown and properly layered because they only appeal to a few users and seem inferior to those responsible.  They have long been neglected to grow in grave danger.

 For stimulating reasons, new ideas are ruined by companies: retaining new business models often requires new skilled people, and this will mean losing any major wig position in the current business.  So they subconsciously or unknowingly sabotage new ideas because they are inherently a threat to the innately developed career.  Yet one more reason you must be willing to constantly strengthen yourself.

 If you have failed in public, it is best to do so in front of a limited audience.  You need a relatively safe place to fail.

 Hidonic editing is a way to avoid thinking about problems and mistakes.

 The three obstacles that prevent us from learning from our mistakes are 1) denial, 2) self-destructive behavior, 3) remembering past mistakes as victories.

 Our response to failure should be, "I'm not a failure, but I made a mistake."

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