THE UP SIDE OF DOWN

Most new products fail. So do most startups, and most political campaigns. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with enormous success? The economist Joseph Schumpeter famously said that “creative destruction” lies at the heart of capitalism, but there is more to it than that. Not all destruction is inherently creative. It takes work to learn how to fail well—and that, as Megan McArdle argues in this hugely stimulating and thought-provoking book, is what makes all of the difference. If you want to succeed in business and in life, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure.

McArdle culls from a variety of situations to build an exhilaratingly fresh way of looking at life and work. She takes from economists the concept of “sunk costs,” which in simple terms means “don’t throw good money (or time) after bad,” and the “normalcy bias,” which accounts for why so many of us prolong bad relationships, why most people freeze when confronted with a catastrophe like an airplane crash or a fire, and why once innovative companies find it so hard to turn around before it is too late. She looks to cutting edge medicine and turns to educators and psychiatry to draw essential lessons on motivation, incentives, and learning. She tells us about personal experiences of failure—for example losing her job and sending resumes into a void – to help tease out vital lessons on how to train yourself to recognize when you are in a rut and to figure out how most strategically to move on. Like Malcolm Gladwell or Daniel Pink, McArdle writes accessibly and well for a clear and eager business audience, telling captivating stories based on original research of surprising thought-leaders in a wide range of fields. THE UPSIDE OF DOWN is for readers of The Power of Habit, Outliers, How Children Succeed, and Failing Forward. McArdle’s is well connected in the media—she contributes to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and NPR—but not over-exposed. She is strongly supported by The Atlantic—where she worked for 8 years—and Newsweek/Daily Beast—where her cover stories and feature articles have been generating huge buzz. She also has a lot of fans at the Economist—where she wrote for 5 years. She is a very popular blogger and has a big online presence and following.