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Why Most Things Fail: And How to Avoid It
 
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Why Most Things Fail: And How to Avoid It (Paperback)

by Paul Ormerod (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber (6 April 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571220134
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571220137
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 209,282 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
"'Engrossing and entertaining... A careful, comprehensible analysis of the limits of human rationality's ability to control the world.' Alasdair Palmer, Sunday Telegraph 'Gripping stuff.' Krishna Guha, Financial Times"

Product Description
This is the essential book on why some businesses fail...and how to avoid it. From the best-selling author of "The Death of Economics" and "Butterfly Economics", this is a ground-breaking look at a truth all too seldom acknowledged: most commercial and public policy ventures will not succeed. Paul Ormerod draws upon recent advances in biology to help us understand the surprising consequences of the "Iron Law of Failure". And, he shows what strategies corporations, businesses and governments will need to adopt to stand a chance of prospering in a world where only one thing is certain.

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Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, 11 May 2006
I was expecting to get more from this than I did. As a critique of mainstream economics it succeeds, and as a way of modelling economic activity it appears to offer some genuine insight. The idea of bringing economics up to date with some of the more creative methods from the natural sciences is a welcome one, and it is even a good read.
The ending (what is to be done) is really weak though, so having teased us with little asides from Shakespeare and Voltaire, appearing to be leading us towards a brilliant final twist, we are left with a resounding 'so what'.
Does the model he has developed tell us anything new or important about fizzy drinks, and if it does, why would it matter? This can't be the main purpose.
On the other hand, there are some curious, mildly radical, political issues arising here and there, about endogenous, inevitable system failure, and even how this might be a good thing, but instead we get rather forced case studies, usually involving Anglo American business stereotypes as reassurance.
I would have preferred it if he had simply stated that the technique he is developing is new, and that he doesn't know what it means. However, for anybody studying economics, read Ormerod, but maybe not this one first!
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars counter intuitive findings, 15 Jun 2007
By Stephen Parry "Author of Sense and Respond" (Lean Service Transformation Designer London) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Paul has written a fascinating and entertaining book on the probability of failure and develops what he calls an extinction model. As a strategist working within large corporations I found the application of these ideas to the world of work a novel and practical use of the 'extinction factor'.

He goes on to examine the factors that prevent extinction, one major finding was that only a small increase in the application of knowledge and information (5%) in the formation of Strategies will improve survival chances by 40%. Further improvement towards 10% and survival chances increase exponentially. The book uses many cases to explain how this is achieved.

One other counter intuitive finding was mild tendencies at the individual level within organisations create marked differences at the level of the corporate system as a whole. This has enormous implications for the world of organisational development.

I now use many of the statistics and contexts Paul provides in material I use with senior executives.

Excellent book.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars MIsses the mark, 21 Jun 2008
Ormerod's central idea in this book is that conventional economic theory does not explain why firms fail. By "conventional economic theory" he seems to mean Marshallian microeconomics together with general equilibrium theory. The fault lies, he says, with unrealistic assumptions about utility-maximising behaviour in perfectly competitive markets. (Wow! Who would have thought? ROTFL)

He then goes on to examine models of extinction in biological systems and failure of firms in economies and shows they both exhibit a power law of failure. Further he discusses, without mathematics, some simple stochastic models of extinction and failure and shows that they are a good match to reality. Eventually the nub of his argument is reached. Some stochastic models of enterprise failure are accurate under certain assumptions about the behaviour of economic actors - but these assumptions are quite different from the assumptions made in conventional economics. In particular they are not consistent with the conventional assumption that economic actors are have perfect knowledge and it is the absence of perfect knowledge that dooms any form of planning, micro- or macro-economic to ultimate failure.

Astonishing! ROTFLMAO

It is patently obvious that the assumptions of conventional economics are wrong. Various economists have said as much several times in the latter half of the last century. Ormerod even quotes 2002 Nobel Laureate economist Vernon Smith's words, "We do not understand why markets work as they do." That nobody can possess the perfect knowledge assumed in the perfectly competitive market was pointed out in the 1940's by Hayek. Schumpeter also criticised unrealistic assumptions in the same vein. IMO, anyone wanting to explore these themes would be better off reading Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom".

On a more positive note, Ormerod's comparison of biological and economic systems is interesting. It provides a taster of the comparatively new interdisciplinary field of complexity theory. Alas, however, a taster is all that you get. The book would be IMO much the better for some material setting such comparisons in the broader complexity theory context. I suspect that he eschews this because it would require more mathematics than he was prepared to put between the covers (presumably because any sight of maths puts potential purchasers off). This, IMO, is intellectual timidity. The stochastic models that he describes are actually quite easy to understand (I recall playing with similar models in third form maths!). A few more diagrams and the odd spot of algebra (relegated if necessary to an Appendix) would IMO be a significant improvement. The overall length of the book could then be kept the same by a robust precis of the rest, which IMO takes twice as many words as necessary to say what it does. I also agree with the reviewer who thought the final chapter a big let-down.

Overall, for me, this book lacks balance and for that reason alone misses its mark.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars How evolution explains business failures
This excellent, short work by Paul Ormerod is a worthy successor to his remarkably successful Butterfly Economics. Read more
Published 21 days ago by Rolf Dobelli

2.0 out of 5 stars A really, really long winded explanation of basic probability theory
prehaps its just me, but this book seemed to be 246 pages of repetitive drone and little substance. The first half was a weak critique of economic theory. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Mr. Matthew M. Hull

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