Fear of flopping

Still, the surest way to guarantee failure in the long term is to be so paralysed by the fear of it that you don’t try anything new. The line that separates a hit from a flop is thin. Companies sometimes have to slaughter sacred cows to escape obsolescence: IBM only recovered from its death spiral when it abandoned its focus on building hardware. Some of the most successful products are the result of mixing oil and water—most obviously, phones with computers and entertainment systems.
What looks like a flop can flip into a success. After New Coke fizzled, sales of the original version rebounded, lifting the firm’s stock price and reviving what had been a fading brand. Pringles (the stackable crisps, not the alarming jumpers worn by golfers) started life as one of Procter & Gamble’s greatest flops. They are now munched everywhere, including over this kybard#. This is not to say that readers should put aside their doubts and spend good money watching a civil-war veteran battling monsters on Mars. But the existence of flops such as “John Carter” is perverse proof that the Walt Disney Company is doing something right.