The Up Side of Down

Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

By: Megan McArdle

Narrated by: Mia Barron

Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

For fans of Drive, Outliers, and Daring Greatly, a counterintuitive, paradigm-shifting new take on what makes people and companies succeed.

Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. 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 a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work. Drawing on cutting-edge research in science, psychology, economics, and business, and taking insights from turnaround experts, emergency room doctors, venture capitalists, child psychologists, bankruptcy judges, and mountaineers, McArdle argues that America is unique in its willingness to let people and companies fail, but also in its determination to let them pick up after the fall. Failure is how people and businesses learn. So how do you reinvent yourself when you are down? Dynamic and punchy, McArdle teaches us how to recognize mistakes early to channel setbacks into future success. The Up Side of Down marks the emergence of an author with her thumb on the pulse whose book just might change the way you lead your life.

©2014 Megan McArdle (P)2014 Recorded Books

Everyone should read this book

What did you love best about The Up Side of Down?

The information in this book is useful in the classroom, in the work environment, in personal budget planning and in life in general. It was useful and inspiring.

M. McArdle is a star. Dares to think; can write.

This is fundamentally a story about learning. Valuable personally and also interesting from a policy wonk perspective. The tone of the narrator is OK to good. The story is excellent.

Perfect is the enemy of the good

I totally recommend this book to parents, people starting a business, heck everyone.
The author uses personal and other anecdotal stories to tell a bigger story of how we are forgetting that we learn from our mistakes and not making mistakes or the effort to prevent mistakes does us no favors. One was that of bankruptcy. In America you can start a business, fail, go bankrupt, and later try again (hopefully learning from the 1st effort). In other countries you only get to fail once, with sad results for the country as a whole.
The narration coupled with the story made this audiobook a good listen. it was informative and a little entertaining.

Changed My For The Better

I don’t think I will view my life in quite the same way again. That’s for your time spent failing Mrs. McArdle!

Some good ideas. No miracles.

Any additional comments?

Not enough answers and solutions. The book uses several examples I have read before and some new ones. There are some good recommendations on how to view different situations. I am glad I listened to this book but I had hoped for some new ideas on dealing with problems. If you have read several books on this subject, don't expect a lot of new information. On the other hand it is a good overall picture of how to deal with and view failures. If you are new to this subject matter this book is a good choice.

Great news! We have freedom to try and even fail.

Loved the balanced, expertly argued approach to taking a risk, and being ok with the outcome. Thanks, Megan!

Successful Failures

'm not a 'B-School graduate'. My undergraduate degrees is in Business Administration. It's from a prestigious private university. I could have chosen to go on to get a Master's from the same place. Instead, I chose to get a Juris Doctor, and I've been a litigator ever since.

Do I want to manage people? Unless it's a trial team assembled on an ad hoc basis, I would rather clean tile grout with a toothbrush. I still love the theory of business management. I've been following it for the last quarter century. I work for a Major Company (you've heard of it) and I get to watch how the theories come and go, from the managed point if view.

Some trends are a flash, or so radical they won't happen for at least a generation - but it Is fun to watch management try the ideas. Adam Grant's "Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success" (2013) is an example. Nice idea, but it didn't work for the Soviet Union (1922 - 1991) and it's not working now. It might eventually - but the world's leading economy, the United States, and it's business leaders aren't at the tacit socialism Grant proposes.

Megan McArdle's "The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well Drives Our Success" (2014) discusses a "trend" that's working well, from the perspective of the managed worker: learning from failure. I'm using "trend" in quotes because it sounds like a facile lesson, but it's really not. It's also not new - "Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years" (2008) is a wonderful book on the same subject by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui.

After discussing Old Coke/New Coke (THE quintessential B-mistake), "The Upside of Down" and "Billion Dollar Lessons" talk about different failures; the ways to approach and analyze them; and their causes.

McArdle distinguishes an accident as "while there's lots of things you could have done differently, there's nothing you should have done differently" (Chapter 5 on Audible) and "failure" as a "mistake, performing without a safety net." It's a good way to distinguish them. McArdle emphasizes that a lot of mistakes are the result of large, well funded research that carefully asks exactly the wrong questions, or asks the right questions in the wrong situation.

"The Upside of Down" is thought provoking, but there's an issue that I'd like to see addressed more fully: how to create an atmosphere where employees aren't subtly - or sometimes even overtly - required to hide mistakes, especially those that can compound and result in failure. After all, even one of the world's most successful investors, Warren Buffett, reported an $873,000,000 investing mistake to shareholders May 1, 2014. Referring to a bad investment, Buffett said, "Most of you have never heard" of the company, he wrote. "Consider yourselves lucky; I certainly wish I hadn't." What a no-nonsense way to share a problem without sharing the blame.

The Audible narrator was fine, but the editing was rough - there were some long pauses.

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Insanely Inspiring

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I LOVED this. Not only is the book awesome, the narrator is the epitome of awesomeness. The content and real life experiences of people are super interesting and made me feel like I could do anything. In order to be great you have to fail at some things first and that's ok. Awesome read.

Good Book

First of all, this isn't a self-help book (fortunately). Rather it is an interesting look at some solid research with the author's own failings as a minor backdrop.

Some of her examples seem to go a little far afield to make the point, but she manages to tie it all up pretty tightly before she's done. That a successful life requires a little friction isn't entirely new of course, but nothing in the book is tired or rehashed and all in all the reader walks away with some pretty good insight.

The importance of failing well to success

There are a lot of possible ways to express the premise of The Up Side of Down. The one I like best is, "success is unlikely unless you first risk, and likely experience, failure". Failure is a great teacher. The concept is hardly new, but Megan McArdle provides so great examples from personal lives and businesses. McArdle is a journalist with an MBA degree. She currently writes a business and political opinion column each weekday for Bloomberg View. She has worked for the Economist, The Atlantic, and several other publications.

I first became of familiar with McArdle's work when two months after 9/11/2001 she worked to help clean up the WTC site and blogged about it in the evenings. I have followed her career since. She is responsible for Jane's Law of US politics; "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane." She was blogging at the time under the pen name Jane.