Congratulations to Amy Edmondson for winning the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Award for her book Right Kind of Wrong about learning from business failure.
When I was a student at the London School of Economics in 1980, the three books we were told to read by our lecturers because they were seen as prescient as well as prescriptive were Roger Bacon and Walter Eltis’s Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers (1978), General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War (1978) and Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980).
Only the Toffler book is still in print, indicating that the other two may not have been as insightful as we all thought at the time.
My view is that Toffler was wrong to say that technology would soon banish humans from having to do dead-end and repetitive jobs, while the situation in Ukraine vindicates Hackett, and Bacon and Eltis’s book is as relevant today for the state of Britain as it was when it first came out.
So, let’s hope we’re not still having to learn from failure and how
to take business risks correctly in 50 years’ time.
Tom Orchard
Manchester, UK
