Black Box Thinking

BOOK
NON-FICTION
World John Murray (Ed. Nick Davies)
2015

By Matthew Syed Film Rights

BOOKS Jonny Geller, +44 (0)20 7393 4357, gelleroffice@curtisbrown.co.uk p Available

Contact Nick Marston for more information

In The Precision-Guided Missile, Matthew Syed, award-winning Times columnist and bestselling
author of Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, reveals the secret of high
Audio Rights
performing individuals and organisations. He will reveal that this has little to do with intelligence,
p Available
clever planning or refined strategies, and everything to do with a revolution in our attitude to failure,
and a sophisticated way of wielding our most difficult and traumatic experiences to shape future
The audio rights are handled by Alice Lutyens.
success.

This journey will take us to some compelling destinations. We meet the victim of a miscarriage of
justice and a head-teacher who introduced Failure Week into her school. We hear about the
unconventional childhood of David Beckham and visit a velodrome in Manchester where a
spectacular crash helped to create one of the world’s most successful sports teams. We see how a
new approach to high-tech start-ups, based on the power of failure, has radical implications for
military strategy in the Middle East.

Weaving insights from complexity theory, evolutionary biology and behavioral economics with vivid
stories and counter-intuitive experiments, this book will challenge the way we see the world. It will
appeal to parents, managers, students, teachers and anyone else looking for an edge in
performance, and who want to glimpse a radical new picture of how success happens.