Sunday, December 22, 2013

17 Epic Business Fails To Avoid In 2014

Don’t do these things. Especially if you’re trying to make money!


DON'T say your yoga-wear company missed product flaws because it skipped the "bend over" test.


DON'T say your yoga-wear company missed product flaws because it skipped the "bend over" test.


It was a tough year for the high-end yoga-wear company Lululemon, which suffered a serious hit to its reputation after it was forced to recall a batch of its black Luon pants for being too sheer. Chief Executive Officer Christine Day, who will step down next month, made headlines when she described the issue to analysts on an earnings call, saying: "The truth of the matter is the only way you can actually test for the issue is to put the pants on and bend over."


The notion of the "bend over" test raised eyebrows on Wall Street and beyond.


"Just putting the pants on themselves doesn’t solve the problem," Day said on the March call. "It passed all of the basic metric tests and the hand-feel is relatively the same, so it was very difficult for the factories to isolate the issue, and it wasn’t until we got in the store and started putting it on people that we could actually see the issue."


Lucas Jackson / Reuters


DON'T compare criticism of your employees' bonuses following a more than $100 billion bailout to lynching.


DON'T compare criticism of your employees' bonuses following a more than $100 billion bailout to lynching.


Robert Benmosche, the CEO of insurance giant AIG, really, really doesn't like the politicians who criticized AIG for handing out more than $100 million in bonuses in 2008 following their massive bailout that rescued the company from collapse and eventually added up to more than $130 billion. In an interview in September, he said that the widespread outrage over the bonuses “was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that — sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago],” he continued, “And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.” He later apologized.


Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images


It all started as a way for college students to ask one of JPMorgan's longest tenured and most prominent executives, Jimmy Lee, about "leadership & career advice." People would tweet their questions and Lee would respond using the @jpmorgan Twitter account. The night before the scheduled "#TwitterTakeover," the hashtag was flooded with harsh criticism and snark: "How do you decide who to foreclose on? Darts or a computer program? #AskJPM" and "Do you have a secret jail in your offices so your executives get at least one chance to see the inside of one? #AskJPM" or even "I have Mortgage Fraud, Market Manipulation, Credit Card Abuse, Libor Rigging and Predatory Lending AM I DIVERSIFIED? #AskJPM." After literally thousands of negative tweets, JPMorgan pulled the plug, "#Bad idea! Back to the drawing board!" a JPMorgan spokesman said.




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