When Bad Ideas Won't Die

from the believe-in-yourself dept

Not too surprising, but this new study (with the extraordinarily small sample size of two) suggests that the reason why companies continue to work on doomed products is because people at the company still believe in them. This seems so obvious that I wonder why someone would bother writing it up. Basically, the article points out that people involved in a project tend to believe in it, and thus discount any evidence that comes their way suggesting the project might not be going as well as expected. The article even goes so far as to suggest that companies have a person who has the job of looking to give a reality check to any new product team. I'm not so sure I agree with this. I would think that companies should have a process in place that looks at these issues early on, but that the management team is in a position to adjust with the times. It's certainly a problem if the team never changes with the market, but a good team can take an initial good idea and adjust to changes in the marketplace as they grow.