WEBVTT - How Does the Museum of Failure Work?

0:00:01.840 --> 0:00:06.960
<v Speaker 1>Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey

0:00:07.040 --> 0:00:11.799
<v Speaker 1>brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum Here. Some of the biggest, richest,

0:00:11.880 --> 0:00:14.920
<v Speaker 1>and smartest companies in the world have a long track

0:00:14.960 --> 0:00:20.440
<v Speaker 1>record of spectacular fails. Remember Google Glass Time magazine named

0:00:20.480 --> 0:00:23.759
<v Speaker 1>the augmented reality I wear one of the best inventions

0:00:23.800 --> 0:00:28.800
<v Speaker 1>of but the public strongly disagreed and decried its wearers

0:00:28.920 --> 0:00:34.760
<v Speaker 1>as glass holes. And Apple, arguably the most successful technology

0:00:34.760 --> 0:00:37.280
<v Speaker 1>company in the world, was also the creator of the

0:00:37.320 --> 0:00:41.440
<v Speaker 1>doomed Newton clunky touchscreen PDA from the late ninety nineties,

0:00:42.000 --> 0:00:45.160
<v Speaker 1>plus during the same time period, a six dollar gaming

0:00:45.159 --> 0:00:51.080
<v Speaker 1>console called Pippin that absolutely no one bought before the article.

0:00:51.159 --> 0:00:53.280
<v Speaker 1>This episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with

0:00:53.320 --> 0:00:57.440
<v Speaker 1>Samuel West PhD, an organizational psychologist and the founder and

0:00:57.480 --> 0:01:01.320
<v Speaker 1>curator of the Museum of Failure, a touring collection of

0:01:01.400 --> 0:01:05.840
<v Speaker 1>product flops and fiascos. According to him, it may be

0:01:06.000 --> 0:01:09.080
<v Speaker 1>easy to laugh at the misfortunes of billionaires, but it's

0:01:09.120 --> 0:01:13.320
<v Speaker 1>also instructive, he said, we need to accept failure if

0:01:13.319 --> 0:01:16.560
<v Speaker 1>we want progress and innovation. You can't have innovation or

0:01:16.600 --> 0:01:19.720
<v Speaker 1>progress without taking meaningful risks. And as soon as you

0:01:19.800 --> 0:01:22.559
<v Speaker 1>try to be innovative, there's going to be failure. There's

0:01:22.560 --> 0:01:28.400
<v Speaker 1>no way around it. For every iPhone, Oculus, and Netflix,

0:01:28.680 --> 0:01:31.119
<v Speaker 1>the Museum of Failure reminds us that there was an

0:01:31.160 --> 0:01:35.280
<v Speaker 1>Amazon fire Phone, a Nintendo Virtual Boy, and a Blockbuster video.

0:01:36.440 --> 0:01:38.759
<v Speaker 1>You can't hit a home run without taking a swing,

0:01:39.040 --> 0:01:41.480
<v Speaker 1>and it's okay if some of those swings are full

0:01:41.520 --> 0:01:46.520
<v Speaker 1>blown whiffs. When West launched the first Museum of Failure

0:01:46.520 --> 0:01:50.520
<v Speaker 1>exhibit in Sweden, in he wanted to show corporations and

0:01:50.600 --> 0:01:54.880
<v Speaker 1>organizations that failure itself isn't bad. He had noticed companies

0:01:54.920 --> 0:01:57.440
<v Speaker 1>were averse to taking the kind of risks that can

0:01:57.520 --> 0:02:02.080
<v Speaker 1>lead to very successful innovations. The only real failure, he notes,

0:02:02.200 --> 0:02:05.080
<v Speaker 1>is failing to learn from your mistakes and adapt, a

0:02:05.240 --> 0:02:09.960
<v Speaker 1>popular engineering concept known as failing forward. But what surprised

0:02:10.000 --> 0:02:13.840
<v Speaker 1>West was how much the general public embraced the museum's message.

0:02:14.360 --> 0:02:18.000
<v Speaker 1>He said, people felt liberated. Did see all of these big,

0:02:18.040 --> 0:02:21.720
<v Speaker 1>bad multinationals with all of their resources and knowledge and realize,

0:02:21.840 --> 0:02:25.960
<v Speaker 1>if they can foul up, so can I. The Museum

0:02:25.960 --> 0:02:29.200
<v Speaker 1>of Failure has dug up some true technological turkeys that

0:02:29.320 --> 0:02:33.920
<v Speaker 1>should never have existed. Take the Twitter Peak. This was

0:02:33.960 --> 0:02:36.639
<v Speaker 1>a two d dollar device. Released in two thousand nine.

0:02:36.680 --> 0:02:40.520
<v Speaker 1>That did one thing access Twitter. You might be asking,

0:02:41.000 --> 0:02:43.640
<v Speaker 1>wasn't there already a Twitter app for smartphones in two

0:02:43.680 --> 0:02:48.440
<v Speaker 1>thousand nine? Yep? And wasn't it free? Also yep? So

0:02:48.720 --> 0:02:52.000
<v Speaker 1>why would anyone pay for a second handheld device just

0:02:52.120 --> 0:02:55.880
<v Speaker 1>to read and send tweets? They didn't, as it turned out.

0:02:57.440 --> 0:03:00.480
<v Speaker 1>Or take Google TV. It was ahead of it time,

0:03:00.680 --> 0:03:04.120
<v Speaker 1>though not in a good way. Back in the search

0:03:04.240 --> 0:03:07.120
<v Speaker 1>Giant knew that would be streaming YouTube and movies on

0:03:07.120 --> 0:03:11.520
<v Speaker 1>the small screen, but Google's TV execution was clunky. The

0:03:11.560 --> 0:03:15.520
<v Speaker 1>technology just wasn't ready for prime time. Exhibit A is

0:03:15.560 --> 0:03:19.600
<v Speaker 1>the Sony Google TV remote, which included a staggering eighty

0:03:19.720 --> 0:03:24.880
<v Speaker 1>eight buttons. The Museum of Failure features a fair share

0:03:24.919 --> 0:03:29.280
<v Speaker 1>of food and beverage fails. To release of new coke

0:03:29.480 --> 0:03:32.959
<v Speaker 1>was one of the most famous marketing disasters in recorded history.

0:03:33.120 --> 0:03:35.800
<v Speaker 1>Even the Coca Cola company admits that it was foolish

0:03:35.840 --> 0:03:38.840
<v Speaker 1>to mess with the year old formula for its flagship soda,

0:03:39.280 --> 0:03:41.960
<v Speaker 1>Even if hundreds of thousands of taste testers said that

0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:45.280
<v Speaker 1>they preferred the new flavor, The product only lasted a

0:03:45.280 --> 0:03:48.840
<v Speaker 1>few months before Coca Cola bowed public outcry and reintroduced

0:03:48.920 --> 0:03:53.400
<v Speaker 1>the classic taste. But let's not forget about some other

0:03:53.480 --> 0:03:57.800
<v Speaker 1>high profile food and beverage blunders. Remember Crystal Pepsi, a

0:03:57.880 --> 0:04:00.840
<v Speaker 1>Coke's rival, tried to capitalize on the year and natural

0:04:00.920 --> 0:04:04.320
<v Speaker 1>craze of the nineties with a clear cola. Why did

0:04:04.320 --> 0:04:07.640
<v Speaker 1>it flop? A former Pepsi CEO O David Novak said

0:04:07.640 --> 0:04:10.200
<v Speaker 1>in a two thousand seven interview with Fast Company, it

0:04:10.280 --> 0:04:11.840
<v Speaker 1>would have been nice if I had made sure the

0:04:11.840 --> 0:04:16.920
<v Speaker 1>product tasted good. Another food fat from the nineties was olestra,

0:04:17.320 --> 0:04:20.640
<v Speaker 1>the magic ingredient in fat free, low calorie versions of

0:04:20.680 --> 0:04:24.920
<v Speaker 1>snack foods like Pringles, Lays, Ruffles, and Derrito's. Procter and

0:04:24.960 --> 0:04:28.479
<v Speaker 1>Gambles spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars developing

0:04:28.520 --> 0:04:31.440
<v Speaker 1>an artificial fact that tasted just like the real thing,

0:04:31.760 --> 0:04:36.040
<v Speaker 1>but wasn't absorbed by the digestive tract. Unfortunately, the science

0:04:36.080 --> 0:04:40.800
<v Speaker 1>of a lestra backfired, literally, leading to unpleasant side effects

0:04:40.880 --> 0:04:46.800
<v Speaker 1>arranging from painful gas to urgent diarrhea. A West might

0:04:46.920 --> 0:04:50.480
<v Speaker 1>giggle at fumbles like Google Glass and Google Wave, which

0:04:50.560 --> 0:04:53.720
<v Speaker 1>was an early and overly complicated version of Slack, but

0:04:53.839 --> 0:04:55.960
<v Speaker 1>says he has nothing but respect for what he calls

0:04:55.960 --> 0:05:01.160
<v Speaker 1>Google's evolutionary approach to innovation, basically invest tons of resources

0:05:01.200 --> 0:05:05.680
<v Speaker 1>into hundreds of new ideas and seeing what sticks. In evolution,

0:05:05.839 --> 0:05:09.600
<v Speaker 1>generally only the beneficial mutations are passed on, and so

0:05:09.680 --> 0:05:13.040
<v Speaker 1>it is with innovation. The bad ideas either go extinct

0:05:13.160 --> 0:05:15.480
<v Speaker 1>or are folded back into the gene pool for a

0:05:15.600 --> 0:05:19.760
<v Speaker 1>new and improved development later. If you want a lesson

0:05:19.800 --> 0:05:23.720
<v Speaker 1>in failing forward, check out the Google Graveyard, a comprehensive

0:05:23.760 --> 0:05:26.760
<v Speaker 1>list of every single Google product and service that's been

0:05:26.880 --> 0:05:29.880
<v Speaker 1>killed since two thousand one, all two hundred and sixty

0:05:29.880 --> 0:05:32.240
<v Speaker 1>four of them. You can find it it killed by

0:05:32.279 --> 0:05:36.880
<v Speaker 1>Google dot com. So before you let your own dreams

0:05:36.920 --> 0:05:39.919
<v Speaker 1>get derailed by a minor setback or a major flop,

0:05:40.320 --> 0:05:43.560
<v Speaker 1>consider this quote from Alberta Alesie, an award winning product

0:05:43.560 --> 0:05:47.760
<v Speaker 1>designer and favorite of West's. He said, revel in your

0:05:47.800 --> 0:05:52.240
<v Speaker 1>glorious failures. Dance on the borderline between success and disaster,

0:05:52.760 --> 0:05:58.120
<v Speaker 1>because that's where your next big breakthrough will come from.

0:05:58.320 --> 0:06:00.400
<v Speaker 1>By the way, the Museum of Failure does not have

0:06:00.520 --> 0:06:03.719
<v Speaker 1>a permanent site, but tours around the world. It's currently

0:06:03.760 --> 0:06:07.400
<v Speaker 1>in Taiwan, and Samuel West welcome suggestions for other items

0:06:07.400 --> 0:06:10.400
<v Speaker 1>to include. You can send your ideas to info at

0:06:10.520 --> 0:06:18.480
<v Speaker 1>Museum of Failure dot com. Today's episode is based on

0:06:18.520 --> 0:06:21.800
<v Speaker 1>the article The Museum of Failure Celebrates Flops and Fiascos

0:06:21.880 --> 0:06:24.080
<v Speaker 1>on house to works dot com, written by Dave Rus.

0:06:24.560 --> 0:06:26.800
<v Speaker 1>Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership

0:06:26.800 --> 0:06:29.200
<v Speaker 1>with how stuffworks dot com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang.

0:06:29.839 --> 0:06:32.080
<v Speaker 1>Four more podcasts on my heart Radio, visit the i

0:06:32.120 --> 0:06:34.839
<v Speaker 1>heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to

0:06:34.880 --> 0:06:35.720
<v Speaker 1>your favorite shows.