What can businesses learn from failing, if there's a stigma attached to failure? PwC vice chairman Tim Ryan joins Sara Murray on the News Hub. Photo: iStock/mediaphotos
WHAT'S the biggest mistake you've ever made at work? Forgot to send an email on time? Left your dishes in the sink? At least you didn't destroy the company.
The Darwin Awards, a tongue-in-cheek reference to natural selection, are handed out to people who have removed themselves from the gene pool through acts of stupidity.
A user on Reddit has posted a thread asking for the best Corporate Darwin Awards — decisions made by companies that effectively killed the business.
Here are some of the responses:
MadManuel: "So I used to work for Harland Clarke. They print Avon Catalogues, cheques, Scantron forms etc. Their business is dying because they leveraged everything on cheque printing. They do something like 98 per cent of cheques in the US. If you have a chequebook, I bet $10 it's a Harland Clarke cheque. So anyway … They spun up a company called Fiddipidi. A $100 million investment. Super-custom stationary printing. They organised call centres, set up hundred-line VOIP systems in anticipation of the millions of orders they were going to get. Dozens of graphic artists recruited. No one bothered to tell them that the advertising platform they'd already blown $40 million on 1) Didn't work, and 2) Targeted an audience that had very little interest in old school stationary, or even one-off custom cards. Advertising platform chosen: Facebook. Total orders taken: 13."
kmikey: "There's a restaurant in Austin that is practically famous for its chicken wings. At one point a few years back the wings were taken off the menu because they were 'too popular' and 'slowing down the kitchen'. That lasted about a month before someone realised it was a better idea to put some time and effort into improving the kitchen rather than kill off their best-selling item."
teatops: "We love rice here in the Philippines. There's a popular and relatively cheap Japanese restaurant that served unlimited rice for every meal, and it was well known for it. Some brilliant guy decides to take it out, word gets around, and people stop going there. A few months later they decide to put the promo back but the customers just stopped coming."
hwoodo94: "This year, POWDR, a group that ran Park City Mountain Resort, the number three family ski resort in the country, got absorbed by Vail, its competition, and removed from ownership of its resort. Why? Because after 20 years of having the greatest lease in history (about $150,000 a year for a resort that grosses millions and millions) the end of the lease time rolled around … and they forgot to renew it. Literally, that's it. They didn't take down a note, and they turned their paperwork in three days late, got sued, and lost everything. Do your paperwork."
May the merchandising rights be with you. Source: AFP
Thompson_S_Sweetback: "Enron for paying their executives 'idea bonuses' before the ideas turned a profit. They paid one guy millions for inventing an online movie downloading service about 10 years before that was feasible. Ironically, the documentary is available on Netflix."
joeldare: "Iomega requiring a <1 per cent failure rate. After the Zip drive boom and considering the legal problems that the 'click of death' brought to the company, Iomega had a new policy of not releasing a product until the failure rate was below 1 per cent. The Clik drive was ready to ship but the failure rate was slightly higher than 1 per cent. The company spent the next two years trying to reduce that failure rate. During that span, SD and Compact Flash became the storage media for cameras and other small devices. I don't know if Clik could have survived against SD and Compact Flash in the long run, but it would have helped to sell a few million units before they came along."
the_englishman: "Strand cigarettes launched one of the most disastrous advertisements in the history of cigarettes. Admittedly their sales were low, but this nailed the coffin lid securely shut. This television advertisement depicted a dark, wet, deserted London street scene in which a rain-coated character lit a cigarette and puffed away as a voice-over declared, 'You're never alone with a Strand — the cigarette of the moment.' Cigarettes are generally seen as cool, are massively addictive and available, so selling them shouldn't be too hard. Not for Strand! After the advert they became known as the lonely old man cigarette and were soon withdrawn from the market. Oddly enough, sitting on your own in the rain with a cigarette for company is not everyone's life goal."
Don't kill your customers. Source: Getty Images
Kamaria: "Peanut Corporation of America. Found salmonella in their products. The owner covered it up and told them to 'just ship it'. Infected hundreds and killed nine people, the company went bankrupt almost immediately after it was traced back to them, and the owner was charged and prosecuted."
JasperStraits: "When MySpace decided to let advertisers rebrand their entire front page, so when you came to login, you'd see like a whole new McDonald's theme, with burgers in the background, a completely new look for a couple days. It cheapened the brand IMO. I worked there at the time, and a lot of us voiced concerns over this. One of the execs responded, 'Find us a way to replace the million dollars per day those campaigns generate, and we'll remove them.' To me, that was the beginning of the end."
not_charles_grodin: "Eddie Lampert, the CEO of Sears, is one of the best contenders for the Corporate Darwin Award. He's an Ayn Rand-loving, free-market ideologist who attempted to take this out of the lobbyist/Congress-rigged world of hedge funds and into retail. He laid off, cut, and trimmed back everything he could and forced departments, managers, and employees to fight against each other for resources and pay believing that the company would benefit from a 'survival of the fittest' atmosphere. Since that time, Sears has lost half its value in five years and has closed more than half of its stores, not to mention damaged one of the oldest and most trusted brands in the history of the United States."
horseyhorseyhorsey: "Several years ago, Digg and Reddit were approximately equally popular. One day — completely out of the blue — Digg turned itself 'Facebook blue' and filled the front page with giant square sponsored links. It estimated to be worth $US200 million in its heyday, and was sold in 2012 for $500,000."
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