Perseverance doesn’t always pay off for companies – sometimes it’s better to ‘fail fast’ |
Across the business world, companies often double down on struggling ideas, retreating only after clear evidence shows they won’t work.
A recent spectacular example was Meta’s metaverse push. After the organization invested US$80 billion over several years, it announced changes in March 2026 that all but abandoned its grand strategy.
But many companies are following the opposite approach of quickly walking away from failure instead of blindly sticking to a vision. Google ended its cloud gaming service Stadia when it failed to take off, choosing instead to reuse the technology elsewhere. Mercedes abandoned its zero-sidepod F1 concept once it clearly hit a competitive dead end. And Slack transitioned from a failed gaming app to a ubiquitous intra-office messaging platform.
What drove all these decisions wasn’t a tolerance for failure. Instead, executives read signals of weakness early, confronted inconvenient evidence and changed course before greater losses accumulated. In other words, they embraced “failing fast.”
As business professors who study sales performance and sales failure, we argue that this concept is one of the most important yet most misunderstood ideas in our field. It’s not about celebrating mistakes or lowering standards, nor does it give leaders permission to abandon rigor or give up easily.
At its core, it’s about creating the conditions for faster learning: building the managerial discipline to recognize when an opportunity is unlikely to pay off, stopping before sunk costs deepen, and redirecting scarce resources to more promising bets. And this is a strategy that can work for any company, at any level, no matter how high or low the stakes.
Slack is everywhere these days. But few recall that it was actually founded in 2011 as a multiplayer online game called Glitch that........