Every successful company has some skeletons in their closet. Some turkey of a product, service or idea which didn't pan out. Sometimes the flop is so big that it drives the company right out of business. But, many times failure evolves into something very successful.

Everybody thinks of the Edsel as a big failure. The fact is, the Edsel was part of Ford Motor Company's plan to expand their car line into the middle-priced automotive field. The same management group which developed the Edsel also developed the four-seater Ford Thunderbird. While automotive purists bemoaned the demise for the little two-seater T-bird, the four-seat model quadrupled sales. It defined the emerging market for the mid-priced personal luxury coupe; it was a success for almost 40 years. And it gave Ford increased market share in the medium-priced field. By introducing the Thunderbird and the Edsel simultaneously, Ford hedged their bets. The Edsel was a loser, but the T-Bird more than made up for the Edsel's losses.

In the early 1970s, Hewlett Packard introduced the HP3000 minicomputer. The first version failed to deliver on the hype and failed miserably. Reintroduced a year later with improved working features, the HP3000 went on to become a commercial success. Hewlett Packard had learned from their failure and evolved a turkey into a successful product.

The Apple Lisa was an overpriced ($10,000) flop. But it was the first commercial use of the graphical user interface and featured pull-down menus and a mouse. It begat the next generation of Apple computer - the lower-priced Macintosh introduced in 1984 which became a commercial success and led to other Apple products.

In my plastics company, we introduced a line of acrylic store fixtures, featuring clear Plexiglas domes in various diameters to protect merchandise and exhibits. The clear plastic dome was a popular concept in European and Japanese fixturing. The domes themselves were poor sellers but their presence positioned us in the eyes of prospective customers as an innovative display company, rather than just another acrylic knock-off artist. Customers ordered and re-ordered our more mundane offerings; our sales soared. The influx of profits from these sales allowed us to introduce other, more successful products to our line. We expanded our offerings each year. A few years later, we quietly discontinued the Plexiglas domes. They had served their purpose.

The difference between a failure which sinks a company and a survivable flop is simple. None of the success stories I mentioned involved committing a fatal amount of capital into the failing project. Companies which succeeded held back enough reserve capital that they could easily survive the cost of the flop. And use the capital to succeed. Secondly, the companies involved used the experience from the marketing/product failure to introduce newer and better products which achieved commercial success in the marketplace.

What about you? Do you have a product or service that's going nowhere? That's the answer to the question no one is asking? What can you learn from this flop? How can you redevelop what you have to make it more appealing to your present customers? Or, does it have an application to a new class of customers? Think about how you can learn from your failure and turn it into something new that may be your next great idea - it may be your path to increased success.