Been reading this book 'why most things fail' It argues, based on evidence and mathematics that most things: businesses, public policy ventures, species… will fail. Over 17,000 companies a year go bust in the UK alone. And the reasons for this are so varied and complex as to make 'business planning' arguably futile. if huge, smart companies like Enron and RBS can go so spectacularly wrong, what hope is there for the likes of us at W+K? It's quite heavy going in places – some of the maths left me baffled – but it's thought-provoking and worth picking up from your local library. Here's a short extract:

Company brands fail for a whole variety of reasons. After the event, after the failure, like any good historian or social scientist, the brand manager or ad agency responsible for the account can construct a narrative to account for the failure. But these stories, to give them an equally accurate but more homely description, are precisely that. We can never know for sure why a brand or even a company failed. More importantly, we can never know for sure in advance how a new product or company will perform.

Here, for example is perhaps the most spectacular brand failure in the whole of the twentieth century: in the early 1980s, Coca-Cola's leading position in the soft drinks market as being gradually undermined by Pepsi. The latter brand had built successfully on its 'Pepsi challenge' campaign, a blind test for consumers on its own product and Coca-Cola. On taste, Pepsi seemed to be winning hands-down. After a massive research effort, Coca-Cola responded by withdrawing its own product and introducing New Coke on 23 April 1985. On 11 July 1985, New Coke itself was withdrawn and the old brand reintroduced because sales had collapsed. And here is the CEO of Coca-Cola, Donald Keogh, justifying this decision at a press conference: 'The simple fact is that all the time and money and skill poured into research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people. The passion for the original was something that caught us by surprise. It is a wonderful American mystery, a lovely American enigma, and you cannot measure it any more than you can measure love, pride, or patriotism.'

Almost all brands fail eventually. More importantly, most fail very soon after their introduction…Companies know this to be an inherent fact of life and they respond by constant innovation, constant testing of new ideas and new brands, new products…

Karl Marx famously wrote that the motto of the capitalists was 'Accumulate, accumulate, that is the law of Moses and the Prophets!' As in many other respects, Marx was completely wrong. 'Innovate! Innovate!' – that is the guiding principle which companies have used to try to overcome the inherent and pervasive uncertainty which surrounds all their decisions. It is the best strategy for individual survival and it is a strategy from which we all, as consumers and citizens, have benefited immensely.

So, what I take out from the book is: don't fret about long term planning – there are too many unpredictable variables to make any plan viable. Instead, focus on trying new things. Abandon the things that don't work and push the things that do as far as possible. Or in other words, walk in stupid, embrace failure and swing for the fences. Which kind of was the plan we had already, economic visionaries that we are.

Rob Brydon presents the BIG winner of winners cheque for Honda 'back to work' at the ANNAs to, from the left, Wieden + Kennedy's creative team Fabian and Ida, and account director Ryan.