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ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, failure was believed to be a very bad thing. It is now seen as a means of living happily ever after. For some fail-fans, it is a magic kingdom called Acadreamia, where missteps make marketers stronger. For others, it is a heinous haunted mansion, ReviewView, where recurring nightmares reside. An unembellished autoethnography, this essay tells the blood-curdling tale of the author’s failed attempt to write a bestseller about failure. A marketing monstrosity, it has few redeeming features.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Famously tattooed on tennis star Stan Wawrinka’s forearm, Fail Better’s ‘memeification’ is inventoried by literary critic Ned Beauman (Citation2012), where my eponymous textbook is namechecked alongside many other management abominations (see also O’Connell, Citation2014).
2. Funnily enough – and I’d forgotten about this until now – my PhD thesis contained two chapters on failed retail businesses in Belfast city centre. One was historical, the other was an analysis of the commercial impact of Ulster’s ‘Troubles’.
3. And it got me where I am today, an embittered has-been with nary a doctoral student to his name. ‘Has-been’, I should add, is a bit of an exaggeration. Because I wasn’t a ‘been’ to begin with.
4. I’m thinking here of bestselling books like Neil MacGregor’s (Citation2010) History of the World in 100 Objects; Tim Marshall’s (Citation2021) Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of our World; Roberts (Citation2021) Prehistory of Britain in Thirteen Burials; and, for management types such as ourselves, Op den Kamp and Hunter’s (Citation2019) History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects.
5. Reflecting on the event in retrospect, I now realise that I was the ‘wind-down’ act. Wind-up act, I should say, because the audience was as hostile as I’ve ever encountered. And that includes my first-year undergraduates!
6. Apologies for the Shakespearian allusions – the bourn is from Hamlet and fathom’s from The Tempest, since you ask – but I own a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Knowles, Citation1999) and I’m not afraid to use it. Oh, and before you get in touch, I know the bourn line’s a misquotation. Lighten up, people!
7. Presumably he was getting even for what I put him through on that awful epic fail occasion. Revenge, clearly, is a diss that’s best served cold.
8. My rejected book Free Gift Inside!! eventually found a publisher, though it was superseded by Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside! which came out the following year. Maybe I overdid the exclamation marks! What do you reckon?
9. The inaugural double-issue of JCB is available as a free download from researchjcb.com/. Enjoy. All creatively-written contributions gratefully received. And sympathetically reviewed.
10. I suspect it had something to do with Snow White, hence the heading of this section. I’m not sure, though. My memory of the occasion is a bit, um, patchy.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephen Brown
Stephen Brown is a marketing management guru. In his own addled head, that is. Everyone else considers him a has-been. A never-was, rather. He lives in a dreamland of his own making and can be found wandering the eerie corridors of Ulster University Business School, wondering where it all went wrong.