Failure is everywhere but most of the time we prefer to ignore that fact and focus on success.
In a business park in Ann Arbor, Michigan is the Museum of Failed Products. It looks like a haphazardly organised supermarket, with no shoppers, and shelves crammed with tens of thousands of packages of food and household products. However, the striking difference to a real supermarket is that there is only one of each item and none of the items could be found in a real supermarket.
All the items are failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months because almost nobody wanted to buy them. Consumer capitalism’s graveyard.
It is now the only place where you can find Clairol’s ‘A Touch of Yoghurt’ shampoo, Gillette’s equally unpopular ‘For Oily Hair Only’, Pepsi’s ‘AM Breakfast Cola’, caffeinated beer and the cereal ‘Colon Blow’. In the 1960s a now-retired marketing man, Robert McMath, intended merely to accumulate a “reference library” of consumer products, not failures per se.
He began purchasing a sample of every new item he could find. What McMath hadn’t taken into account was that most products fail. More than 90% of start-up products end up being the wares almost nobody wants to buy. Simply by collecting new products indiscriminately McMath had ensured that his hoard would come to consist overwhelmingly of unsuccessful ones. The museum itself is now a viable, profit-making business with executives and product developers anxiously visiting to learn from the collection.
The problem with our usual and general reluctance to think about or analyse failure is that it leads to a distorted picture of the causes of success. We are keen to consider and study successful people and products but spend far less time and effort studying failure.
The traits of successful people are likely to be the traits of extremely unsuccessful people too, both often having substantial perseverance and charisma. As management theorist Jerker Denrell notes: “Incurring large losses requires both persistence… and the ability to persuade others to pour their money down the drain.”
But the cardinal difference between successful charismatics and unsuccessful charismatics is that the opinion of their own worth held by the successful matches their power to achieve, but the unsuccessful have an inflated estimate of themselves and the efficacy of their ideas. Partly because people take unsuccessful charismatics at their own value and invest them with power, they can do great damage before being found out.
The fascinating museum has a central message: that failure isn’t a rarity, it’s the norm. Failure requires confronting and examining to consider what went wrong, but those involved with failure often, sometimes unconsciously, conspire to never think or speak of it again.
December 2013