The up side of down Why failing well is the key to success

Review by Choice Review

With an MBA from the University of Chicago and an honorary doctorate from the School of Hard Knocks, McArdle has found a way to legitimize her self-absorption by having it bound in a book. Part memoir, part self-help tome for Great Recession survivors, the book unpacks the concept of "failure, the kitchen junk drawer of concepts." Distinguishing failure from a mere accident or mistake, the author does a thorough job giving dimension to failure's many faces in the financial sector, the medical arena, and the modern workplace. McArdle's account of her mother's hospitalization and near death is truly harrowing, and only the most hard-hearted would not be moved by her honesty and vulnerability as she confesses perpetrating a series of personal failures, even as she bears witness to numerous systemic ones in health care. The grab bag set of examples from traditional business management lore (e.g., GM/Ford, the Challenger disaster) mixed with personal anecdotes through participatory journalism makes the book feel less coherent and compelling than if she had gone straight up by creating a memoir or management book. Recommended for graduate students on the verge of a job hunt. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students. --Grace E. Leaf, Whitworth University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

BOOKS about failure put both their authors and their readers in awkward positions. Writers are at pains to abase themselves somewhat, to show that they know the terrain by sacrificing some dignity without losing all credibility. Many readers, meanwhile, may be willing to ponder how they fail or why they fear it, but few will pick up a book for people who think of themselves as "failures." Add to this the fact that all books fail to be everything their authors hoped and that almost all books fail to sell, and it becomes clear why books about failure remain few and far between. Two at once is even more unusual, especially two that fail (which I mean in the nicest possible way) in different ways and take such different approaches to essentially the same question: How do we learn to stop worrying and love it when we bomb? Both authors appear to have worried about failure more than they have experienced it. Sarah Lewis, an art historian and curator who was named to 0, the Oprah Magazine's 2010 "0 Power List," celebrated her past and future failures in her college application essay (she went to Harvard) and alludes to life lessons from a janitor grandfather. Lewis invites us to think deeply about failure as a "gift" that is essential to creativity. Megan McArdle earned her M.B.A. but graduated after the dot-com bust, moving back into her parents' New York City coop and working part-time in her father's firm. Eventually, she blogged her way into a journalism career at The Economist and an array of impressive print and online outlets. In "The Up Side of Down" McArdle wants to teach us how to "fail well" by changing how we react to inevitable setbacks. Chatty and digressive (six pages on her breakup in a chapter about the General Motors bailout), McArdle's book remixes some of her magazine writing into small, easy doses. Lewis's voice is so lyrical and engaging that her book, "The Rise," can be read in one sitting, which is so much the better since its argument is multilayered and needs to be taken whole. The book's title (seemingly inspired by the repurposing of Manhattan's abandoned High Line, an elevated railway turned urban meadow) exalts the hidden or "outworn, maligned foundation" that can lead to unexpected innovation. The gift of failure, she observes, is akin to the gift of grief. After pain and loss may come a new appreciation of incompleteness and therefore of possibility. Lewis perceives "an ever onward almost" in surrenders, near wins and the perpetually unfinished masterpiece. "Managing the gap between vision and work, which often looks to others like being swallowed by failure, is a lifelong process," she writes. Failure is ever-present in the unending drift toward mastery. The lineage of such ideas includes Peter Brook's "The Empty Space"; Richard Sennett's "The Craftsman"; and "The Gift," by Lewis Hyde (she quotes him, he blurbs her; she also quotes my book on a tangential point). Even so, "The Rise" is strikingly original - as in a chapter on Frederick Douglass and injustice as a failure of the imagination, and another that places Samuel F. B. Morse, the struggling artist who invented the electric telegraph, in dialogue with the psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth, a MacArthur fellow who applies science to the study of good old-fashioned "grit." Lewis shows a lot of that stuff in this thoughtful book about striving; nevertheless, her appreciation for nuance may try the patience of readers who prefer practical advice. "Perhaps we have grown impatient with the incomplete," she admits about halfway through. We long "for the immediate, fully prepared for consumption." McARDLE HAS WRITTEN a more straightforward if not traditional self-help book. "Since we cannot succeed simply by not failing," she writes in "The Up Side of Down," "we should stop spending so much energy trying to avoid failure or engineer it away. Instead, we should embrace it - smartly." In lieu of seven effective habits, she recommends failing "early and often," teaching failure in schools, making it easy to recover, shedding biases that keep us from perceiving our mistakes, distinguishing between novice errors and criminal ones, resisting the instinct to blame, and erring on the side of forgiveness. Rooting her advice in American exceptionalism, she remarks: "Failing well can't be that hard, because America spent several centuries being really good at it. We're the descendants of failures who fled to these shores from their creditors, their failed farms, their disastrous love affairs. If things didn't work out in New York, we picked up and moved to North Dakota. Somewhere along the way, we built the biggest, richest country in the world. And, I'm going to argue, we did it mostly because we were willing to risk more, and forgive more easily, than most other countries." Later on, she reiterates "why most of us are here: because some restless ancestor got to wondering if the pastures might not be greener on the other side of the Atlantic." One need not have descended from involuntary immigrants, Native Americans, the landless, the unloved, the unforgiven or the Pacific Rim to recognize that if Lewis occasionally overthinks, McArdle's weakness is blunt generalization. In an autopsy of Enron, she pauses to ask, "Why is it easy to get rich in America, and hard to get rich in Zimbabwe?" The answer (reached via detour from Enron, through the lost "communist Eden" of hunter-gatherer societies, to "the American Bourgeois Synthesis") is "the culture and rules surrounding risk and failure." McArdle interviews social scientists and experimental economists, invoking concepts like normalcy bias and inattentional blindness à la David Brooks. She augments the more familiar hedgehogs, foxes, blamestorming and tipping points by coining her own phrases: "Modern life has a lot of what you might call a 'spellcheck factor,"' for example, and "what I've taken to calling 'groupidity': doing something stupid because other people around you seem to think it's safe." In her best chapter, on the crushing emotional and structural costs of long-term unemployment, she offers, "The best way to survive unemployment is to adopt what you might call the Way of the Shark: Keep moving, or die." Lewis argues the opposite. "When we surrender to the fact of death, not the idea of it, we gain license to live more fully, to see life differently," she writes in tribute to a friend who drowned while saving a child, "to walk down paths of my own choosing, which to some might seem like failure." For Lewis, failure is the progenitor of new thinking and risk-taking. By contrast, McArdle concludes by reminding readers to "understand failure as the natural consequence of risk and complexity." Whether one accepts Lewis's idea that failure is a gift that keeps on giving or adopts McArdle's advice that failing well is the best revenge depends, of course, on what you understand by "failure." Neither book can answer that question for readers, and neither author really tries. Early on, Lewis avers that the word has no stable definition, because as soon as we try to rethink it into a boon or an opportunity, failure is no longer failure and again recedes into shadows or silence. McArdle, for her part, shrugs: "'Failure' is sort of a junk drawer of a word. We dump all sorts of meanings into it, and then when something goes wrong, we rummage around and pull one out." This shared evasion is the only serious failure by either author, because it skirts what keeps so many of us awake at night: that we may fail simply by not succeeding, that failure may become an engulfing identity rather than an ennobling opportunity. Regenerative failure is nice work if you can get it, but what if you can't? SCOTT A. SANDAGE, a cultural historian, is the author of "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 6, 2014]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In her first book, McArdle, a Bloomberg View columnist and author of the blog Asymmetrical Information, presents a thought-provoking study of failure-our greatest fear and greatest motivator. McArdle's lively prose underscores an entertaining roster of tales of risk-taking, all the way from the production of Titanic, the highest-grossing movie in history, to welfare reform. Productive failure, as described here, is characterized by intentionality; accidents are not failures. McArdle's one stumble is her chapter-long digression into a grievance-filled tale of her mother's hospitalization and the mismanagement of her care. She charges back with examples from her own life-getting a job with the Economist after two years of unemployment-and from companies, like GM, that have needed to accept failure as an instigator of change. Take a tip from 12-step programs, she advises; you have to recognize you have a problem before you can change. Her advice is important not only for individuals, but for wider economic growth; society has to reward experimentation, risk-taking, and working outside our comfort zones. This funny, cheerful look at helping teams overcome failure and find room to experiment will be a boon to business readers. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Columnist McArdle (Bloomberg View; author, Asymmetrical Information blog; the Economist; the Daily Beast/Newsweek) offers a substantial analysis of how to gain inspiration from failure. Her counterintuitive view is that defeat is an experience that can reveal worthy insights and that success cannot be achieved simply by not failing. Drawing on a variety of research from such fields as psychology, medicine, anthropology, social psychology, economics, and business, she presents a lively discussion about the fundamentals of failure, the culture of nonsuccess in free markets, how high-risk takers deal with inadequacy, what medical trauma teams can teach about imperfection, business crises, addictive behaviors, classic American attitudes toward blame for failure and the accompanying punishment, with a sobering view of forgiveness. Blended throughout are the author's own experiences. While McArdle is not suggesting that American business commit to defeat in order to learn, her ideas do provide an absorbing and valuable understanding of how to maximize positive outcomes of what might otherwise be wasted learning opportunities. VERDICT Focused on organizations and businesses, McArdle's analysis nicely complements the individual focus found in Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz's Fail Fast, Fail Often: How Losing Can Help You Win. Highly recommended for all libraries supporting business and the human sciences curriculum. [See Prepub Alert, 8/12/13.]-Dale Farris, Groves, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An illuminating look at the psychology behind rebounding from defeat. "Failure can be the best thing that ever happened to you (though it may sometimes feel like the worst)," writes Bloomberg View columnist and blogger McArdle, who has found a humble, intelligent way of infusing positivity and opportunity into personal losses. The author, a self-admitted "Mozart of misfortune, the Paganini of poor luck," adroitly examines the many facets of the spirit-crushing failure and rebound synthesisfrom welfare reform to the blame game and debt forgiveness. McArdle states her points in prose saturated with a self-effacing lightheartedness, lending levity to the crestfallen reality of loss. A detour into her mother's disastrous treatment for a ruptured appendix, however, feels odd when buttressed against chapters on the government bailout of General Motors and the art of self-identifying a recurring problem. Especially noteworthy is the fact that McArdle's observations are not the thoughts of a detached outsider. The author has indeed been in the trenches of disappointment and disillusionment and gets personal in later chapters describing her hard-knocks ordeal fighting the depressive effects of being ill-qualified for a corporate job and then spending months on unemployment ("It is difficult to communicate the progressive corrosion of long-term unemployment to someone who has not endured it"). McArdle's message is a significant one with both personal and economic impact: There can be no vast success without initial failures, and it's important to foster a culture of risk-takers who embrace experimentation in working outside of their comfort zones. Mistakes are learning tools for the greater good of society, she advises, and they should not inherently be classified as failures. Sage counsel on how to learn from failure with humor and grace.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Failure is Fundamental How a Brain Scientist and a Psychologist Helped Me Stop Procrastinating Around the turn of the millennium, Peter Skillman embarked on an interesting exercise in design philosophy. Skillman, who is now an executive at Nokia, was the head of "user experience" for Palm, the company that essentially invented the handheld computer. For five years, he ran various groups of people through a design exercise he created, which would come to be called the Spaghetti Problem. He assembled a variety of different groups, from American students to 150 Taiwanese telecom engineers, and split them into smaller units of three or four, at which point they were given twenty pieces of spaghetti, a meter of tape, a marshmallow, and a piece of string. They had eighteen minutes to create the tallest freestanding structure that would support a marshmallow. This sort of team-building exercise is not new; I did a version of it involving straws and an egg with eight fellow students during my business school orientation weekend. What was new was Skill- man's perspective: instead of looking at it like a management guru, Skillman thought about it like a designer. In 2007, he shared what he had learned with the Gel conference, a sort of smaller version of TED.1 Unsurprisingly, the engineers did very well. The business school students finished dead last, which is probably also unsurprising to anyone who has spent a weekend doing team- building exercises with future MBAs. According to Skillman, they spent too much time arguing about who was going to be the CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Lawyers did almost as badly. And who did the very best? Skillman unveiled their pictures, and a wave of laughter swept through the audience. Up on the screen was a series of snapshots of kindergarten students, mugging for the camera in front of . . . well, about what you'd expect if your kindergartner made you something out of spaghetti and tape. How did the kindergartners beat the engineers? By the simple process of experimentation and iteration. They didn't let themselves get hemmed in by assumptions about what the rules were-they were the only group of people who asked for more spaghetti. And because they had more spaghetti, they didn't have to waste time sit- ting around talking about how the tower should look, or who should get to write the vision statement. They just dove in and started creating, discarding anything that didn't work. Since, as Skillman points out, "very few people understand the structural properties of spaghetti," this was the fastest route to success. The structures built by the engineers rose above the workspace with the elegant logic of a suspension bridge. The wild, asymmetrical kindergarten creations lurched drunkenly like modern art installations on a debauched spree. Yet they all supported a marshmallow, at a height that was on average a full inch taller than what the engineers had achieved. The engineers had years of schooling and work experience to teach them how to build sound structures. But the kindergartners had something even more powerful: they were not afraid of failure. By trying and failing, they learned what didn't work-which, it turned out, was all the knowledge they needed to figure out what did. "Multiple iterations," Skillman told the audience, "almost always beats single-minded focus around a single idea." The people who were planning weren't learning. The people who were trying and failing were. "If you have a short amount of time, it's more important that you fail," he said minutes later. "You fail early to succeed soon." I was sitting in the audience the day he gave that talk. Five years later, interviewing people for this book, I have heard this thesis echoed over and over again by entrepreneurs. For most of the rest of us, Skillman's story goes against every instinct we have about how the world is supposed to work. It should not be possible to blunder your way to the top. Success is supposed to be the product of hard- won skill and prudent planning, not breaking spaghetti with abandon. The problem is, most of our instincts about failure are wrong. Jim Manzi, the founder of Applied Predictive Technologies, tells a typical story.2 His company, which you'll hear about in a later chapter, was struggling with its business model. They were designing custom software products that they then installed at the client's location using thousands of dollars worth of equipment, and struggling to get enough sales. Then one day, their biggest client happened to notice the on-site team using a Web interface to do some testing. "Can't we just do it this way, on the Web?" the client asked. Manzi said no. Then he said it again. And again. The client kept asking. Eventually, with money getting very tight, Manzi gave in. He had discovered the software-as-service model of delivering applications to a client, where you own the servers, and they pay you monthly rent to access your product. Then novel, it now dominates most application development. "It was a combination of luck, having our backs to the wall, running out of money, and listening to what the market was telling us," says Manzi. "In my experience, most entrepreneurs, they'll have a similar story. 'The company almost died, and then we figured out in crisis what we really did for a living.'" "When we're sitting in our offices perfecting a product," says Jeff Stibel, the CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp, "we're making the product better for us. The problem is, we're not the customer."3 Failure, says Stibel, is "the only way a business grows," because it's "the only way you really learn." When he says that, he's not just staking out a philosophical position. Before he was a serial entrepreneur, Stibel was a graduate student in cognitive science at Brown University, where he talked his way into the program by passionately arguing to his adviser that "the Internet is a brain." Stibel is the distilled essence of a successful entrepreneur: lean and compact, with an intense dark gaze, and the hypomanic charm you find in so many business founders. He fires off ideas like "the Internet is a brain" at a steady rate of about one per minute, usually some mixture of philosophy, management theory, technofuturism, and his beloved cognitive science. Like Skillman, he is voluble on the role that failure plays in learning. Only, he thinks that failure isn't just a way to learn faster: it's the only way to learn at all. "The brain is a failure machine," he told me. "When you're born, you have about all the neurons you'll ever have. When you're four, you have pretty much all the connections between those neurons you'll ever have. Then the brain starts pruning. The brain starts shrinking . "When the brain is shrinking," Stibel says, "you're actually learning by failure." Think about the last time you tried to learn a new skill-using a spreadsheet, hitting a badminton shuttlecock, baking a cake. When you watched someone else do it, or read the instructions, it probably seemed pretty straightforward. Then you tried it, and nothing came out right. You lost a column and couldn't get it back. The shuttle- cock flew off in entirely unexpected directions, or landed, unmo- lested, on the ground near your feet. The cake was half an inch of soggy crumbs. Maybe you gave up right then. But if you tried again, you probably had a few more frustrating efforts. And then, after a little while, something clicked. Possibly by accident, this time when you hit the shuttlecock, it went in the direction you'd intended. And you had that little flash of joy that comes from getting something right for the first time. That flash is your brain's reward system. Dopamine serves a lot of functions in the brain-it's implicated in everything from Parkinson's disease to heroin addiction. One thing it does consistently is regulate your reward systems. It's like a teacher handing out gold stars when your work is done correctly, and an extra sticker or two when your performance is superlative. When you're expecting something to happen, dopamine levels rise in anticipation. And if what you expected doesn't happen, they plummet.4 We perceive this rise and fall as elation and frustration. What we don't notice, says Stibel, is the role of dopamine in pruning the synaptic connections we've made. If our anticipation is correct, dopamine levels stay high, and strengthen the association between action and reward. ("When I beat the eggs and sugar together for a full five minutes, the cake is lighter and fluffier.") If something we anticipated fails to occur, the connection weakens. ("I thought moving my hand like that would make the shuttlecock go to the right, but it didn't happen.") That's why everyone mostly gains skills by practicing, not by watching someone else or developing an elaborate theory of shuttle- cock physics. The naturally gifted get a head start, of course. I could practice for ten hours a day, and I still wouldn't be a candidate for the Bolshoi Ballet, or MIT's physics department. But even the most extraordinary prodigy will not qualify for those august institutions unless they spend years practicing their art over and over and over, letting their frequent mistakes and occasional moments of triumph strengthen the neural connections that tell their body how to pirouette across the stage or solve a mathematical equation. What Skillman and Stibel and Manzi and about a zillion management theorists are telling us is that effective groups work with the brain's natural learning style, instead of trying to supplant it. They fail early and often-"fail heroically," as Stibel puts it. "When most people look back on their successes," he told me, "they realize they were a series of failures that allowed them to navigate to success." Stibel is very serious about failure. When he took over at Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp, a spin-off of Dun & Bradstreet that pro- vides credit counseling to businesses, the company was stagnant- not losing tons of money, but not really succeeding either. He decided he needed to put failure back at the heart of the firm- literally. He, his wife, and his assistant spent an evening with a few gallons of paint and a bottle of wine, stenciling quotations about failure on an office wall. It took almost all night, but when workers came in the next day, there was Jeff, writing on the wall about his own worst failure. Slowly, other workers followed suit. He knew he'd succeeded, Stibel says, when he overheard one employee yelling at another, "Why haven't you written on the wall? Why don't I get to learn from your failures?" Even his performance reviews include a section on failure-"It's a positive section," he says. "We want to know, has the employee failed? Have they failed enough? Have they shared that with other people?" That doesn't mean wildly betting the farm, of course; it means calculated risks. "You don't want to fail too much," Manzi acknowledges. Rather, it's about "being able to kind of fall down, dust your- self off, get up and move on." Stibel agrees that it's about taking smart chances, not failing for the sake of failure. He is careful never to bet the farm on anything and puts a great deal of effort into ensuring that the failures aren't too costly. The object is to take lots of small, manageable risks, because that, he says, is the only way to figure out what really works. Of course, as Manzi drily notes, failure is, well . . . "it's very difficult, for obvious reasons." Those plummeting dopamine levels may be doing important work in our brain, but they don't feel good. That's unfortunately inherent: failure feels bad precisely because it's the way your brain says, "Hey, don't do that anymore." That's why Stibel had to work so hard to convince his colleagues that failure was a positive thing. If we want an educated population, a skilled workforce, an innovative society, then we will have to work just as hard as he did to persuade people that the pain of failure is like a blister in tennis- a sign that you are trying hard enough to im- prove. The Opposite of Failure is Not Safety: It's Nothing Like most writers, I am an inveterate procrastinator. In the course of writing this one chapter, I have checked my e-mail approximately 3,000 times, made and discarded multiple grocery lists, conducted a lengthy Twitter battle over whether the gold standard is actually the worst economic policy ever proposed, written Facebook messages to schoolmates I haven't seen in at least a decade, invented a delicious new recipe for chocolate berry protein smoothies, and googled my own name several times to make sure that I have at least once writ- ten something that someone would actually want to read. Lots of people procrastinate, of course, but for writers it is a peculiarly common occupational hazard. One book editor I talked to fondly reminisced about the first book she was assigned to work on, back in the late 1990s. It had gone under contract in 1972. I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he man- aged to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. "Well," he said, "first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write. That's when I get up and go clean the garage. After that, I go upstairs, and then I come back downstairs and complain to my wife for a couple of hours. Finally, but only after a couple more days have passed and I'm really freaking out about missing my deadline, I ultimately sit down and write." Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: we were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out. Most writers were the kids who easily, almost automatically, got As in English class. (There are exceptions, but they often also seem Excerpted from The up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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