Change Archives - Page 6 of 7 - understand-culture

The First Company Failed

Henry J. Heinz started a company that bottled horseradish. It went bankrupt in 1875. The next year he founded another company with his brother and a cousin.

Henry Ford’s first company, the Detroit Automobile Company, went out of business in January 1901 because “it offered a poor vehicle.” His second company became Cadillac after he left. He founded Ford Motor Company in June 1903.

Walt Disney’s animation studio in Kansas City, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt in 1923. He moved to California “for a new start.” Milton Hershey’s first candy business went bankrupt in 1882. His second, in New York, also failed. In 1900 he sold his third, the Lancaster Caramel Company, for $1 million.

A Clear Field for Future Effort

In 1934 the Supreme Court explained what personal bankruptcy is for. In Local Loan Co. v. Hunt, it said that bankruptcy gives “the honest but unfortunate debtor” a “new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort, unhampered by the pressure and discouragement of pre-existing debt.”

The federal courts still describe it in the same terms: “Bankruptcy can provide a fresh financial start for consumers who cannot pay their debts…” In 2025, Americans filed 540,603 consumer bankruptcy cases.

A Single Courageous State

In 1932 the Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law that required a license to sell ice. Justice Louis Brandeis dissented. “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

Americans now speak of the states as “laboratories of democracy,” an idea that takes its name from this dissent. One example is the health care law Massachusetts passed in 2006. It became the model for the federal Affordable Care Act.

The Pilot Episode

An American television series usually begins as a pilot, a single episode made to sell the show to a network. In the traditional cycle, each network hears about 500 pitches every summer, orders about 20 pilots, and chooses four to eight of them as series. By one estimate in Variety, only a little over a quarter of all pilots made for American television go on to become series.

The first pilot of Star Trek, “The Cage,” did not sell. NBC agreed to a second pilot, and that one became the series.

The First 90 Days

Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days was published by Harvard Business School Press in 2003 as a guide for managers starting a new job. It advises them to pursue small-scale “early wins” to build credibility.

New Coke

In April 1985 Coca-Cola changed its formula for the first time in 99 years. The new drink had won about 200,000 taste tests.

Customers revolted. The company hotline, which had taken 400 calls a day, took 1,500. About 40,000 complaint letters arrived. On July 11, 1985, after 79 days, the original returned as Coca-Cola Classic. Peter Jennings interrupted General Hospital to report it.

The company now calls it “the most memorable marketing blunder ever.”

The Minimum Viable Product

In 2011 Eric Ries published The Lean Startup. The book named a practice already common in new companies. It is the minimum viable product.

Ries defines it as the fastest way to get through the build-measure-learn loop. His example was Zappos. The founder posted photos of shoes from local stores online. When an order came in, he bought the shoes at full price.

The test answered the real question. Would anyone buy shoes on the web? The website cost almost nothing, and it produced a real answer.

At-will employment

The default rule across almost all US states is that either party may end the employment relationship at any time, for any reason that is not illegal, without notice. Whatever else it does, it makes staffing decisions fast. A manager who wants to change a team can change it this week.

We choose to go to the moon

Kennedy at Rice University in 1962: we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

The difficulty is offered as the reason rather than the obstacle. Nobody had been to the moon, no vehicle existed that could go there, and the deadline was set anyway.

The career change

Americans change fields, not only employers, and the career-change is a recognised genre with its own advice literature, bootcamps and retraining programmes. Arriving from outside a field is treated as a credential of adaptability.