A recent article in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper introduced me to what may be one of the most fascinating museums on the planet. Located in Ann Arbor, Mich., the facility run by GfK Custom Research goes under the informal name of the “Museum of Failed Products” and is a massive storehouse devoted to just that—products that some developer thought were going to change the world but ended up in the trash can.
If the museum has a central message, it’s that failure isn’t a rarity; it’s the norm. For every insanely successful product such as the iPhone or the Big Mac, there’s a whole host of ideas that only a mother could truly love, such as Colgate’s TV dinners and Pepsi’s breakfast cola.
Given the ubiquity of failure, shouldn’t business schools be teaching their students to follow Samuel Beckett’s injunction to “fail, fail again, fail better,” rather than filling their charges’ heads with unrealistic notions of winning every time?...
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