I’ve just started reading Tim Harford’s book, Adapt: Why success always starts with failure.
Here are my highlights/notes from Chapter One, Adapting:
Planning vs Adapting
“Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy.”
“The Soviet failure revealed itself much more gradually: it was a pathological inability to experiment.”
Design Principles
Palchinsky principles’:
first, seek out new ideas and try new things;
second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable;
third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.
[note that Palchinsky worked in the Soviet Union]
Hierarchies
“There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.”
Next: the adaptive organization
