Adaptability summary

At the height of the 2008 financial crisis, the United States government offered to bail out car manufacturing giant, Ford. Despite being up to its eyeballs in debt and looking like it might go under any day, the company ultimately turned down the proposal. 

There was a good reason for this refusal. Chairman Bill Ford was convinced that companies that don’t adapt simply fail, period. Sure, an injection of government cash might have solved Ford’s short-term liquidity issues, but it wouldn’t have gotten to the root of the problem – its longstanding failure to adapt to the new realities of the automobile market.

In the summer of 2011, the Italian government was facing financial issues. Deciding to cut back on expenditures, it introduced a reform to incorporate villages with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants into larger administrative units headed by a single mayor. But one small village called Filettino resisted these measures. It understood that adaptability sometimes means swimming against the current. 

As far as the villagers were concerned, reacting to new developments didn’t mean rushing into old reforms or embracing change for change’s sake. In their view, one way of adapting was to defend the status quo, and that’s precisely what the mayor of Filettino decided to do. 

It was a regular day in New York in 1985 when Pedro Bach-y-Rita, a Spanish teacher who’d lived a happy and successful life in the city for many years, suddenly collapsed. He’d suffered a massive stroke and was left paralyzed. The doctors treating Bach-y-Rita claimed there was nothing they could do for him. 

But they were wrong. 

When people first fail at a task, they tend to lower their expectations and claim that at least they learned something from their mistakes. The crucial question, though, is what past failures teach us: Do we learn how to fail, or do we learn how to improve so that we don’t fail again?

Adaptability is, in large part, the art of learning from mistakes – ideally, the mistakes of others! Take the British automobile industry. In the 1950s, virtually every carmaker was set on developing ever more powerful – and fuel-guzzling – vehicles. They were so fixated on this goal that they overlooked a massive segment of the market: young, urban, and environmentally-minded people. 

In 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered the shutdown of all weapons development research programs expected to take longer than six months to reach completion. It was a costly miscalculation for Germany. Why? Because experimentation is the cornerstone of effective adaptation. 

The mistake would haunt Nazi Germany as the tide gradually turned against it in the Second World War. While German scientists were shackled to short-term targets, their Allied counterparts were given free rein to experiment with new weapon technologies for as long as they pleased. When defense scientist William Butement came up with an idea to develop a proximity fuse, for example, he was encouraged to delve deeper.

Learning to drive is thrilling. The world suddenly becomes broader as exciting new possibilities come into focus. But you have to be careful. It’s easy to get carried away and put your foot down. That’s when things go wrong and you find yourself at risk.

The same thing happens to businesses when they push too hard: the wheels come off and they crash. Take Netflix. The company understood that the future of movie watching was streaming before any of its competitors, and it steamed ahead. What was the problem, then? Well, it was too quick for its subscribers, who were still satisfied with the old offer that allowed them to rent DVDs and stream for $9.99 a month. 

It’s easy to look good when the economy’s booming and you’re backed by a reputation built up over decades. But success can breed complacency. The result of taking your eye off the ball? You lose sight of your goals. 

Take Starbucks. Everything had been plain sailing for decades when it hit the rocks in 2007. The coffee chain’s chairman Howard Schultz had an idea about what had gone wrong: its dominant position had incubated an arrogant outlook and the company had stopped taking care of its customers.