HBR Guides to Building Your Strategic Skills Collection (3 Books)

CHAPTER 18

Your Initiative Needs an “Exit Champion”

by Isabelle Royer

You can still find them on eBay, sleek and gleaming video disc players with LP-sized discs. The product: RCA’s SelectaVision—one of the biggest consumer electronics flops of all time.

But it isn’t simply the monumental failure in the marketplace that makes the SelectaVision story worth remembering. It’s that RCA insisted on plowing money into the product long after all signs pointed to near certain failure. When the company developed its first prototype in 1970, some experts already considered the phonograph-like technology obsolete. Seven years later, with the quality of VCRs improving and digital technology on the horizon, every one of RCA’s competitors had abandoned videodisc ...