Research and Development

The Dumbest Moments in Business History: Useless Products, Ruinous Deals, Clueless Bosses, and Other Signs ofUnintelligent Life in the Workplace
by Adam Horowitz

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A bad idea has to start somewhere. It's that old business maxim: You can't make a defective omelet without designing a really inefficient, expensive and dangerous way of breaking some eggs. Welcome to R&D.

Thanks, but We're Happy with the Double Entendres We Get in Beer Commercials.

"If a cheerleader, for argument's sake, introduces a tight end...there may be a little double entendre. Not unsavory, but things that are different from the NFL."

— World Wrestling Federation chairman Vince McMahon, explaining how research and development for the XFL, a supposed rival for the NFL created in collaboration with NBC, came up with a few new wrinkles for pro football. The league folded in 2001 after one season and a $100 million investment, but left its mark on television: one game broadcast was believed to be the lowest-rated prime-time program ever.

Hellbent for Pleather

The 1964-65 World's Fair was a veritable cavalcade of ingenuity. IBM was showing off the latest in mainframe computer technology. RCA was broadcasting TV shows - in color! NASA brought in a full-size, first-stage Saturn V rocket. Impressive stuff.

Oh, and DuPont had a musical about Corfam.

The Wonderful World of Chemistry was actually about all sorts of DuPont products. As smiley actors and actresses sang "The Happy Plastic Family," audience members sat in Antron-Fabrilite chairs on Nylon carpets, watching the performers in front of a Mylar curtain. But Corfam, a new synthetic leather, was the star of the show. Promoted as having the feel and durability of leather, Corfam shoes also were water-repellent and were supposed to never need shining - attributes that inspired DuPont to proclaim that soon 25 percent of America's footwear would be made of Corfam. But then the other shoe dropped: The plastic was so unyielding that you could never, ever, break in a pair of Corfam shoes. People hated 'em. After seven years, DuPont told its wonder shoe to take a walk, at a cost of $100 million.

Try Our New Cigarette: All the Foul Taste You Expect, Plus the Aroma of Squandered Millions.

"A new era for smoking is about to begin," announced RJ Reynolds Tobacco in an ad for its Premier cigarette in 1988. Yes, and the new era lasted, oh, about 16 weeks.

Developed under the code name Project Spa (sounds refreshing, no?), the Premier was RJ Reynolds' attempt to create a "smokeless" cigarette, designed to shut up the worrywarts who were starting to make a nuisance of themselves with warnings about the dangers of secondhand smoke. Though the Premier would feature all of the lung-corroding toxins that generations of smokers had come to love, it was promoted as a "cleaner" cigarette. Development and promotional costs reached $68 million, enraging the company's board of directors, who hadn't been informed of the Premier's existence until spending already had run amok.

There was scant evidence the product warranted the outlay. Even the company's own research reports didn't offer much support. The Premier might have looked out for the sensitivities of nonsmokers in the room, but it was hell on anyone who fired one up. Only 5 percent of smokers in an American focus group liked it. The smokeless cig even challenged the politeness of a Japanese test group, where one participant took a puff and reported, "This tastes like shit."

There was another problem, referred to by RJ Reynolds execs (they might make coffin nails, but who says they don't have a sense of humor?) as the "hernia effect." The Premier's smokeless design was so user-unfriendly that you practically needed a Dirt Devil to suck out the yummy nicotine-and-tar ambrosia. Smokers, never known for their prodigious lung power anyway, decided the Premier was itself a huge drag. Four months after the Premier's premiere, with tens of millions of dollars up in flames, RJ Reynolds discontinued the product, making the world safe again for unsafe cigarettes.

At Last, Nike Gives Something Back to the Third World.

Great innovations often result from asking the question "What if?" The invention of the Kenyan ski team started that way, too.

Looking for that last cranny of the world that hadn't been swooshed by the late 1990s, Nike hit on a novel brand-extension opportunity for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan: what if the athletic shoe and clothing manufacturer secretly funded a training program to turn some of Kenya's fabled long-distance runners into cross- country skiers? Sort of a kicky new twist on the whole Jamaican-bobsled-team thing.

Spending about $250,000, Nike introduced two Kenyan runners, Henry Bitok and Philip Boit, to the pleasures of XC-skiing. The duo showed up in Nagano representing their country and keeping Nike's backing quiet. Bitok failed to qualify, but Boit managed to stumble to a last-place finish, 20 minutes behind the gold-medalist. Still, it made for a cute feel-good story about perseverance - at least until word of Nike's patronage leaked. Sports journalists turned the episode into a biathlon, pulling out their rifles to mix a little target practice with the skiing. One writer called Bitok and Boit "marketing pawns financed by well-heeled publicity seekers." Another dubbed Nike's machinations "Orwell at the Olympics."

"I can assure you that it is not a gimmick," said the chairman of the Kenyan National Olympic Committee. "You're going to hear a lot about Kenya and skiing." True enough. The water skiing near Mombasa is supposed to be terrific.

Great. That Means We'll Have to Pay Double for Light Switches, Too.

"They're multipurpose - not only do they put the clips on, but they take them off."

— Pratt & Whitney spokesperson Robert G. H. Carroll III, in 1990, explaining why it charged the Air Force $999.20 for a pair of pliers

No, That's Love in the Air. It Only Smells Like Butane.

The trouble with cigarette lighters is that they just don't lend themselves to lavish, Humvee-ish consumption of petroleum products. Oh, there was a spike back in the 1970s whenever Bob Dylan would keep 'em begging for encores till their BICs melted. But otherwise, it's just flick-flick and back in the pocket.

Don't blame Ronson. The folks at the butane and cigarette lighter manufacturer took their shot at ramping up butane usage back in the 1960s, after looking over the sales numbers and deciding the fuel had so much more potential.

The boys in R&D came back with a device guaranteed to burn off a hell of a lot more lighter fluid than a chain-smoker could use in a week: the Ronson Veraflame. Priced at $30 and made from brushed aluminum, the Veraflame was a candle for hipsters who'd had it with antiquated wax technology.This flame, the ads bragged, was adjustable: "Low for intimate dinners. Medium for dinner parties...high for swinging soirees."

But then, as now, Americans were generally satisfied with the performance of the candles they had always used when they weren't just relying on electricity. And when they did just have the lights on, most folks were familiar with the dimmer-switch concept. And so the Veraflame slowly, sensually, odoriferously guttered out.

Katie, Your Party's Only Going to Last Two and a Half Minutes This Year If We're Going to Tape It. So Choose One: Clown or Cake?

By all accounts, Edwin Land was a genius 99 percent of the time. Land revolutionized photography - and minted money in the process - with the invention of instant color photographs in the 1960s. As the head of Polaroid in the 1970s, he acquired a reputation for being allergic to market research. He often guessed right, but unfortunately one of his most cherished ideas popped up while the nongenius one-percent window was open.

Land seemed to have convinced himself that the only way he could top the invention of instant photos was to come up with the instant color movie. Proclaiming himself director of research on top of his CEO duties, Land approved $250 million in R&D funding to create his "living image system." He even plowed $68 million of his own cash into the project.

Copyright © 2004 Adam Horowitz. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Adam Horowitz is the executive editor of Business 2.0 magazine and a creator of "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business."