The Graveyard of Forgotten Dreams
In a nondescript building in Ann Arbor, Michigan sits a peculiar collection: The Museum of Failed Products. Row after row of shelves house the ghosts of corporate ambition – Colgate TV dinners, Crystal Pepsi, and countless other products that died quiet deaths in the marketplace.
This museum isn't open to the public. These failures are hidden away, accessible only to paying corporate clients who come to study what went wrong. It's perfect metaphor for how we treat failure in business.
We bury our failures. We sweep them under quarterly reports and rebrand them as "strategic pivots." We hide them in basement museums where only those with the right credentials can peek behind the curtain.
What if we did the opposite?
What if, instead of a secret museum, we created public spaces celebrating our boldest mistakes? Imagine walking through an exhibition where every failed product came with a story – not just about what went wrong, but about what we learned.
Because here's the truth: Crystal Pepsi taught PepsiCo more about consumer behavior than most successful launches ever could. Every product in that museum represents a million-dollar lesson that could benefit the next generation of entrepreneurs.
But we're too busy polishing our successes to share our stumbles.
The real failure isn't in the products gathering dust in that Michigan warehouse. It's in our collective decision to lock away these lessons, to treat failure as something shameful rather than essential.
Maybe it's time to unlock the doors.
After all, every failed product on those shelves represents someone who was brave enough to try something new. And in a world that desperately needs innovation, isn't that exactly the kind of courage we should be putting on display?
