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The Shrine to Failure

By David Kidd, BPR

Sean Jacobsohn is a venture capitalist based in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.

Sean is in the business of searching for success. However, he recently did something that would have sounded completely at odds with his professional goals.

He decided to build his own personal monument to failure.

When he works from the desk in his home office, he is now sitting in the middle of “The Failure Museum”, which might be the world’s largest collection dedicated to business disasters, corporate malfeasance and spectacular flops.

There are Bear Stearns mugs, several models of BlackBerry and pieces of Bernie Madoff’s stationery. There’s a WeWork thermos and, of course, cans of New Coke. There is cologne from both Harley-Davidson and Burger King. And there is a Mattel doll, but it’s not Barbie or Ken—it’s Allan.

He estimates that he’s spent tens of thousands of dollars acquiring items that most people would rather forget. These days, Sean has more than 1,000 artifacts of disastrous, puzzling and virtually criminal business decisions in glass display cases and he would be surrounded by even more remnants of failure if not for one problem….he has run out of space.

Now as Sean points out, even the most successful companies in history have commemorative objects in the Failure Museum.

Apple quickly pulled the plug on a personal computer called the Power Mac G4 Cube. Microsoft’s clunky attempt to clone the iPod resulted in the Zune. Google Glass existed. Oh, and of course the U2 iPod (Apple again).

Jacobsohn believes there is a lesson to be drawn from every regrettable object in his collection. As he built the Failure Museum, he began to think more about the causes of business failures, and he developed his own framework to understand why most startups go belly-up. He calls his theory the Six Forces of Failure: bad product-market fit, shaky finances, ignoring customer feedback, tough competition, poor timing and people— ineffective management, lack of talent.

Does that sound familiar from a radio perspective?

His main takeaway is that failure is an integral, too easily ignored element of success. Anyone who wants to get something right should be aware of the many ways that it could go really, really wrong.

“If you only talk about success and never talk about failure, you’re missing half the equation.”

He crossed another elusive item off his shopping list when he paid $150 for an ESPN mobile phone, which Steve Jobs once called “the dumbest f—ing idea I have ever heard.”

In radio, we could no doubt have our own “Failure Museum”. Those stations that launched in a blaze of very expensive marketing, promotion & expensive talent, only to quickly implode into a ball of flames due to poor ratings and lack of revenue. Those radio station promotions that should never have left the whiteboard…please see my series of articles “Radio Promotions That Didn’t Go According to Plan”.

The formats that according to those who created them only failed because “they were ahead of their time”. Unfortunately, decades later, that time still hasn’t arrived.

The new Morning Show with the $ million plus talent and cast of what seemed like hundreds behind the scenes…..they had everything…..except on air chemistry!

While we love to remember the great radio success stories, it is also valuable to recall the great failures in our industry and delve objectively into the causes of those failures. That way, they may never be repeated……well, hopefully!