Commercial Failure Research Articles

"Heaven save the market!": Henry James in the Fin de Siècle Literary Field

Abstract: This article situates James's late nineteenth-century career within the context of the British literary field. Taking The Princess Casamassima (1886) as an example, I recast the novel's socialist drama as an exploration of tensions between aesthetic autonomy and external commitment, especially the pressures of a commercial literary marketplace. While James vies for simultaneous critical and commercial success in mid-career novels like Princess , after its commercial failure he turns to a new "experiment": seeking these polarized incentives in separately designated experimental and marketable works.

In the Black Ships’ Wake

This paper focuses on the micro-actors—merchants, whalers, and would-be diplomatic representatives—who followed in the black ships’ wake in anticipation of opportunities at the newly opened treaty port of Hakodate. Examining the backgrounds, connections, and activities of these actors, we show that American commercial activity in Japan contrasted with the almighty image projected by Commodore Matthew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy. Viewed from the perspective of treaty port Hakodate, the American presence in Japan in the decade following its opening was characterized by fragility and commercial failure. This fragility has implications for our understanding of commercial and power dynamics in the mid-nineteenth-century Pacific.

Haloperidol’s introduction in the United States: A tale of a failed trial and its consequences

ABSTRACT Haloperidol, the first butyrophenone neuroleptic, was created in Europe by Janssen Pharmaceuticals in 1958 and was introduced swiftly throughout the continent with great enthusiasm. On September 15, 1959, at Janssen’s headquarters in Belgium, teams from around Europe praised the effectiveness of haloperidol. In the United States, on the contrary, its introduction was a tremendous failure, plagued by accusations of inefficacy and patent disputes. A clinical trial in Manhattan has been blamed for this commercial failure. The results of the Manhattan trial were seen as radically different from the results obtained in continental Europe. This divide would have considerable impact not only with regard to haloperidol’s path on both sides of the Atlantic, but also possibly on the practical experience and theoretical construction of psychiatry. This article tries to reconstruct the story of that trial based mainly on published papers and interviews. Exploring how societal changes and issues of gender and race shaped this process, this investigation attempts to understand and contextualize different possible reasons for this Atlantic rift.

The Influence of Status Quo Bias on the Behavior of Micro Subject

The article uses an online experiment to set a questionnaire to participants in order to investigate the effectiveness of status quo bias in peoples daily life based on the Coca-Colas real case in 1985. Since in 1985 Coca-Cola met the commercial failure because of the reformulation of new coke and ignore the effectiveness of status quo bias for consumers. By asking their preferences of two types of coke in different situations, the research tested the impacts almost each explanation of status quo bias on participants decision making of which type of coke to buy. The result shows that transition cost, uncertainty and loss aversion all influenced participants decision since most of the participants chose the coke classic instead of new coke. And the article deepened the research of the effectiveness of status quo bias in decision for consumption. Companies could learn from it in order to value the importance of status quo bias in order to avoid the happening of commercial failure, especially when they plan to do the reformulation. And consumers can based on it when they need to make purchasing decision.

The Necessary Additions for Making Good Game Products

Through the analysis of the two studios in the game industry, Bioware and Bungie, this paper discusses the ways in which game companies can steadily scale up in commercial marketing, increase and maintain the sustainable development of the studios. Based on analysis of the commercial failure of Anthem, a large-scale 3A multiplayer co-op game produced by Bioware, released by EA, elicit the failure of Bioware and Bungie in contrast. At the same time, this paper adopts the method of combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to demonstrate the theme of the article. As a result, the studio as a team needs clear and directional leadership to guide the philosophy and direction of game production. In the game creation, there should not be too much interference from the publisher or outside the studio. Furthermore, when the game fails initially but is not dead yet, resources should be mobilized to remedy it, changing the route and strategy of the game, rather than giving up prematurely. Moreover, during the period from project initiation to completion of production, the working methods of the production staff should fully reflect the efficiency, which is also closely related to the supervision of the game project manager.

The roller-coaster ride continued for Alzheimer’s drug candidates

A tumultuous sequence of events in 2021 and 2022 surrounded Biogen and Eisai’s Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab. But in September, the companies reported positive clinical trial results for lecanemab, a second amyloid-eliminating monoclonal antibody. In spite of the clinical failure of yet another anti-amyloid drug from Roche 2 months later, experts hail 2022 as an exciting year for Alzheimer’s treatment. During lecanemab’s Phase 3 trial, the compound slowed cognitive decline by 27% among participants with early Alzheimer’s symptoms. The drug candidate is currently under priority review by the US Food and Drug Administration, with a decision slated for Jan. 6. The positive results were a counterpoint to developments with aducanumab. Late last year it became the first anti-amyloid therapy to receive approval from the FDA, but the decision was controversial because the drug had conflicting clinical outcomes during two Phase 3 trials. Aducanumab was a commercial failure , generating low sales

Spheres of Life and Scales of Action among Gujarati and Omani Merchants in the African Great Lakes Region, 1920s–1930s

AbstractBased on bankruptcy and inheritance files and on population and business registers from Ruanda-Urundi, this paper reconstructs the local and long-distance professional and affective relations of Indian and Arab merchants operating in and around Bujumbura in the two decades before and after the Great Depression (1920s–1930s). The story complements the historiography on Asian diasporas in East Africa by going beyond the Indian Ocean coast, beyond the precolonial period, and beyond British-governed territories. Looking at different spheres of life and scales of action and assessing both commercial success and failure, this article makes a case for the importance of local dynamics and the relevance of cross-community relations within the relatively small foreign trade sector in the region. The reliance on “home” and kin remained important as mutual insurance at times of arrival and misfortune: firmly established first-comers assisted their relatives upon arrival, while at times of bankruptcy, death, or old age, long-distance family ties proved vital as well. However, facing discriminatory colonial measures, the Arab and Indian merchants were gradually relegated to the role of intermediaries in long-distance trade. Consequently, day-to-day business relations were increasingly a local, cross-community, and above all, precarious affair.

Abstracts: ALA 2022-Chicago

AbstractsALA 2022-Chicago Adam Fales Melville's Authorship Throughout his career, Herman Melville offered diverse characterizations of authorial personae. For Melville, authorship is a "ditcher's work," whereby the author "dig[s] in [his] soul for the fine gold of genius." It's also a practice of architecture that leaves "the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower." Literature can be a kind of weapon that the author aims at a reading public, "every canto a twenty-four-pound shot." The list goes on, but as generations of feminist scholars have shown, Melville's authorial labor was also deeply unequal, relying on the uncompensated and unrecognized work of the women in his life. Over the past two centuries, the author has been differently characterized as a tormented genius, a commercial failure, a grieving father, an abusive husband, a poet who wrote novels, a novelist who wrote poems, and in the words of one contemporary reviewer: "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY." Considering all this, it's unclear whether Melville's authorship should be understood as one thing—or even as the work of one person. This panel provided new approaches to studying Melville and the question of authorship, focusing on two aspects of his authorial representations. Two of our panelists turned to Melville's Spanish-language intertexts, with Maria H. Barrera-Agarwal uncovering a previously overlooked and unpublished Spanish translation of Typee. Leah Leone Anderson turns to a later interlocutor of Melville, studying the shifts in meaning that take place in Jorge Luis Borges's own translation of "Bartleby, the Scrivener." The other half of our panel took up one of Melville's novels most preoccupied by the presentation of [End Page 147] the author: Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. Timothy Morris traces Melville's complex play of identification and representation across his depictions of authorship. Samantha O'Connor turns not to the character of Pierre but to the character of Isabel as Melville's authorial figure in the novel, tracing her depiction as a "poisonous muse," which she historicizes alongside criminal cases of the period. Across these various papers, Melville's authorial figurations are multilingual, multigendered, and never straightforward. _______ Imaginary Authorship: The Unknown First Translator of Typee into Spanish Maria H. Barrera-Agarwal Independent Scholar The process of translating Herman Melville's works into Spanish was arduous and belated. The first publication of one of his works—unsurprisingly, Moby-Dick—occurred only in 1940, almost ninety years after the book had appeared in English. Typee would be rendered two years later, in 1942, and Benito Cereno in 1943. The reasons for these late editions run parallel to Melville's authorial fame in the English-speaking world: without wide prominence and critical approval, it was rare for a nineteenth-century author to be translated into Spanish. In Melville's case, even when posthumous celebrity finally arrived, the difficulties created by the specialized language he used in his fiction added to the delay, as well to the contrasting readability of the versions published. This paper unveils for the first time the existence of the earliest translator of Melville into Spanish. A Spaniard and a contemporary of Melville, the translator was a man eminently suited to the task: he was a polyglot, knew English exceedingly well, and had full command of nautical nomenclature, having worked as a seaman and become an erudite in sea-related subjects. He chose Typee as the book to render into Spanish, and he likely achieved the task within the three decades subsequent to the original publication of the book. Despite these facts, his translation was never published, and his close circle of friends believed that he used the name of Herman Melville as a pseudonym, a façade for the creation of a book they fully ascribed to his imagination. _______ Borges Translates "Bartleby": From Moral Allegory to Fantastic Narrative Leah Leone Anderson John Jay University As one of the twentieth century's major innovators of unreliable narration in fiction, and a champion for irreverent translation practices that privilege translators' own artistic sensibilities, Jorge Luis Borges is the last author one would expect to make a narrator more reliable. Yet in his translation [End Page 148...

Child-directed speech in catechisms for the religious education of children under the age of three in early modern Germany and the Dutch Republic

This article presents three early catechisms for the religious education of children under the age of three, printed in Germany and the Netherlands. Two of them were best- and long sellers on the book market, while one of them was a commercial failure. Catechisms were influential reading primers. The children’s catechisms written by Jacobus Borstius, Johann Cyriacus Höfer and Nikolaus von Zinzendorf contained questions for children who were too young to read the texts themselves. Therefore, these catechisms had to be performed in the form of interactive read-alouds. Höfer, Borstius, and Zinzendorf used child-directed speech in their catechisms: short and foreseeable answers and a basic vocabulary to facilitate the understanding and the pronunciation of words in the process of language acquisition and the deliberate introduction of new religious vocabulary. Whereas the catechisms of Borstius and Höfer reckoned with pedagogical laymen and chose standardized questions and answers, Zinzendorf proclaimed an ideal of Socratic intercourse, enthusiasm and aesthetic-poetic affirmation – an ideal that exceeded the capabilities of average teachers and parents.

Purposeful Disownership: Paying Contract Manufacturers to Reduce Ownership and Termination Cost

Firms often persist with failing products due to excessive organizational ownership and relational commitments to suppliers. We propose that firms make strategic use of contract manufacturing to purposefully reduce ownership and termination costs. Using detailed data on 249,705 products (or designs) in the fashion industry, we show that firms are more likely to contract manufacture new products that have a high risk of commercial failure even when they can be readily produced in-house. In exchange, firms pay production costs that are 10 to 16 percent higher. Organizational hierarchy, which reduces ownership, significantly moderates the increase in contract manufacturing. Our findings suggest that firms actively manage escalating commitment and path-dependence through make vs. buy decisions and revise the prevailing view that contract manufacturing is a myopic strategy that trades learning opportunities with short-term cost savings. We show that our theory generalizes and successfully explains decisions between direct capital investment and rentals by US public firms.

Lessons From the Commercial Failure of Project Loon for 6G Research Roadmap Design

Currently, the sixth-generation (6G) communication research roadmap is being frequently discussed and designed, in which, undoubtedly, aerial telecommunication infrastructures play crucial roles for boosting transmission capacity, enlarging coverage, and democratizing the benefits of information and communications technology (ICT) over the globe. However, the sudden news released in January 2021 that Alphabet is shutting down Project Loon, one of the most important projects enabling communications over aerial infrastructures, surprises the academia of communications science. There is no question that the failure of Project Loon will yield profound impacts on and even shift the current 6G research roadmap design. The latent mismatch between academia and industry in communication science should also raise adequate attention. Therefore, in this article, we analyze the commercial failure of Project Loon by public information from reliable sources and summarize a series of important lessons for the 6G research roadmap design.

Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen, by Flavia Brizio-Skov

Flavia Brizio-Skov’s Ride the Frontier: Exploring the Myth of the American West on Screen comes at a crucial time for the western. It is no secret that the genre has suffered a loss in popularity in recent years, compared to its ubiquity in the Hollywood golden era—also due, for instance, to high-profile critical and commercial failures such as Cowboys and Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011) and The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013), the latter of which is examined in this book’s final chapter. The conventions of classical westerns have been reappraised many times before. Cahiers du cinéma critics like André Bazin had high regard for the films of Howard Hawks, whereas Laura Mulvey, writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, discussed how the western hero was often split between nostalgic narcissism and social integration.

Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London by Alex Ferrone

Reviewed by: Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London by Alex Ferrone Alessandro Simari STAGE BUSINESS AND THE NEOLIBERAL THEATRE OF LONDON. By Alex Ferrone. Contemporary Performance Interactions series. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; pp. 264. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London begins with a story. The book's author, Alex Ferrone, recounts his spectatorial experience of attending Matilda the Musical at the Cambridge Theatre in London's Covent Garden. Ferrone tells us that his booking of a West End show was an "unlikely" occurrence and that, although he took his seat as a [End Page 122] "resolutely sceptical" audience member, the "sheer pleasure" of his spectatorial experience resulted in his leaving the theatre with an "affective rush," as well as an enthusiastically purchased program tucked under his arm (1). Ferrone grounds his affective response to Matilda in its perhaps surprising political potential: that a mainstream West End show, packaged and sold as benign family-friendly drama, should "contain" (in both senses of the word) the capacity to interpellate child spectators as "active subjects with the ability to challenge and disrupt oppressive structures of power" (29) through the deployment of the dramaturgical mechanisms of the musical theatre. This opening anecdote, and the materialist semiotic analysis of several moments of performance from Matilda in the book's introductory chapter, neatly exemplifies both Ferrone's hopeful approach to his subject matter, as well as his methods for critical examination. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London locates and disentangles a perceived tension observed in commercial theatrical productions of an array of contemporary English plays, which are found to give voice to critiques of neoliberalism even as the theatre industry is itself financially reliant upon and "invariably enmeshed in networks of neoliberal capital and labour practices" (187). The single greatest contribution that Stage Business offers to the study of performance and political economy is its insistent attention, by way of richly detailed and incisive readings, to what Ferrone invites us to think of as "capitalist dramaturgy" (115), or the ways in which contemporary English drama visualizes, articulates, and critiques neoliberal policies and ideologies in its dramatic structures and stagings. Each chapter is organized around semiotic readings of performance in one or more significant London theatre productions, attending to how dramaturgical forms, theatre aesthetics, or performance and production practices articulate an opposition to neoliberalism. Ferrone's analyses are united by the adoption of an altitudinal approach to theatre that asserts a claim toward "the analytical and political viability of ambivalence" (5): to deliberately and optimistically conceive of theatre that, while conditioned and constrained by its position within market economies, nonetheless through its form, content, themes, and collaborative labor practices might resist if not rupture the "ethos of capitalism that fundamentally structures cultural life" (4). If there is one downside to this structured approach, it is that the meticulously compiled readings of playtexts, performances, and performance histories that Ferrone weaves together in his individuated assessments feel unmoored within the monograph. The absence of a conclusion to Stage Business—in which the author might have drawn an argumentative through-line between his case studies, drawing connections that provide a clearer insight as to how theatre's position within neoliberalism might instantiate instances of "capitalist dramaturgy" as a method of expressing the tension so aptly articulated in the monograph's introduction—seems something of a missed opportunity. The most striking and successful of Ferrone's readings is found in chapter 2, which focuses on theatre and corporate finance. Ferrone interrogates the dramaturgical concretization of financial instruments in stagings of Lucy Prebble's Enron (2009) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (1987), attending also to these productions as transatlantic theatre commodities with mirrored performance histories whose commercial successes and failures were determined less by artistic considerations than by the market imperatives that both plays work to critique. Ferrone makes the compelling case that these plays, in their production histories and stagings, "dramatize capitalist logic's infiltration of every aspect of social and cultural life at the turn of the century" (76), including if not especially the performing arts. In chapter 3, the spatial-temporal dislocations in Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica (2013), debbie tucker green...

Writing across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920. Lucas A. Dietrich

In Lucas Dietrich’s compelling exploration of the work of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century US writers attempting to bring the experiences of racially and culturally marginalized people into the mainstream, the figure of the trickster looms large. Describing writers including María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Charles Chesnutt, Finley Peter Dunne, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sui Sin Far as practicing a “double maneuver of entry and subversion” (5), Dietrich reads their work in terms of their attempts to appeal to white popular audiences while subtly but meaningfully challenging their assumptions about race, ethnicity, and identity. Writing across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 imagines writers as purposefully and sometimes playfully engaging those assumptions at the same time that they undermine them, for example, by “employ[ing] the ethnic caricature in order to critique the absurdity of the depiction itself” (5). Such critiques, cunningly employed, reveal to twenty-first-century readers accustomed to reading against the grain a kind of doubled message that risked misreading at the time of publication; this book convincingly argues for a recognition of such risks—even and perhaps especially those that ended in commercial failure—as part of the larger, uneven story of an “emergent literary critique of white supremacism” (163) in the United States.

Existential Definition at the End of the American Road

This article discusses three films that helped landmark American cinema in the 1970s. Although differing in inception and reception, all three belong loosely to the genre of the road movie and are linked by protagonists whose stances of rebellion and alienation were characteristic of the counterculture of the 1970s and by the broader theme of existential self-definition that still influences moviemaking today. A critical and commercial failure on its release in 1970, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point has been revalorized as an ambitious attempt to represent the political and cultural conflicts that seemed to be fracturing American society at the time. In contrast, Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point soon overcame the disadvantage of studio disinterest and established itself as a cult favorite. Arguably the definitive anti-hero of 1970s cinema, the amphetamine-fueled renegade driver played by Barry Newman achieves iconic stature through an act of defiant self-destruction that still leaves viewers of the film stunned. Finally, Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet, in which the actor-director breaks with his ‘Dirty Harry’ persona to depict a burned-out cop who redeems a ruined career, and enables himself a new start, not by making his own law but by enforcing the law on the books, and against all odds. In all three films, the still unspoiled landscape of the American Southwest, crisscrossed by its skein of highways, provides the tableau for escapist fantasies that may in fact be real, for high-speed chases and automotive acrobatics that defy the laws of physics, and for vignettes of an ‘outsider’ way of life that was already beginning to perish.

Hands in the cookie jar: Exploiting loan loss provisions under bank financial distress

We investigate earnings management (EM) behaviour at failed banks by examining the intensity and direction of EM around FDIC-insured commercial bank failures. Our empirical analysis indicates that failing banks engage in EM to a significantly greater extent than non-failing banks. Our results show that failing banks’ discretion over loan loss provisions ranges from aggressive (upwards EM) to conservative (downwards EM).

Residential House Prices, Commercial Real Estate Lending and Bank Failures

We investigate factors leading to bank failures during and after the Great Recession and banking crisis (2008–2015). The FHFA residential real estate house price index (HPI) for each of the 9 Census regions is used to interact with bank mortgage loans and bank financial statement variables. We find that these variables isolate different regional effects on the likelihood of a bank failing. Since we use changes from region to region, we find that regional location and HPI changes have an effect on banks’ commercial lending activity. Other more traditional and associated factors, like construction and land development lending or multifamily real estate lending, similarly explain bank failures during the main period of the banking crisis. By using this approach we better isolate the relationship between residential house prices and builders’ and land developers’ desire to borrow and the willingness of banks to concentrate portfolio lending in commercial real estate.

Forecasting Bank Failure with Machine Learning Models: A study on Turkish Banks

Forecasting bank failures has been an essential study in the literature due to their significant impact on the economic prosperity of a country. Acting as an intermediary player, banks channel funds from those with surplus capital to those who require capital to carry out their economic activities. Therefore, it is essential to generate early warning systems that could warn banks and stakeholders in case of financial turbulence. In this paper, three machine learning models named as GLMBoost, XGBoost, and SMO were used to forecast bank failures. We used commercial bank failure data of Turkey between 1997 and 2001, where we have 17 failed and 20 healthy banks. Our results show that the Sequential Minimal Optimization and GLMBoost provide the same performance when classifying failed banks, while GLMBoost performs better in AUC and SMO when considering total classification success. Lastly, XGBoost, one of the most recent and robust classification models, surprisingly underperformed in all three metrics we used in research.

ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May ed. by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum

Reviewed by: ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May ed. by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum Martha Shearer (bio) ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May. Edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 264 pp., ISBN 9781474440189 (pb), US $24.95. Elaine May is a notoriously elusive figure. She has had a lengthy and rich career, first in improv with her comedy partner Mike Nichols in the late 1950s and early 1960s, then later as an actor, film director, and screenwriter, with her most recent stage work winning her a Tony in 2019. Yet she has also been marginalized and demonized, especially in the wake of the spectacular commercial and critical failure of Ishtar (1986), and she is herself reclusive and oblique in her public statements. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes in her introduction to this new collection of essays on May, she has been at best overlooked and at worst actively derided in scholarship on both New Hollywood and women’s filmmaking. This book, however, comes at a time of increasing public and academic attention to women filmmakers in Hollywood cinema’s auteurist 1970s, when May made three of the four feature films she directed, including film seasons at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2017 and The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 2018, the 2020 season of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This podcast on the producer, screenwriter, and production designer Polly Platt, and recent academic publications, most notably Maya Montañez Smukler’s Liberating Hollywood.1 That has also included a resurgence of interest [End Page 236] in May specifically, from “written and directed by Elaine May” t-shirts to film seasons such as Painfully Funny: The Complete Directorial Works of Elaine May, programmed by the Badlands Collective at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2018. She has become, in short, something of a cinephile cult figure. Refocus: The Films of Elaine May has two broad projects: first, to understand the reasons behind and resonances of May’s prickly reputation and negative press; and second, to resituate her as, for Heller-Nicholas, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest comic writers, performers, and screenwriters” (1). The broader May revival has largely focused on the four feature films she directed: A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976), and Ishtar (1986). This collection grants them prominence, with a chapter devoted to each individual film as well as their discussion throughout. But it also draws valuable attention to the breadth of May’s career as a performer and writer, from her early success in sketch improv with Nichols to her work as a screenwriter and script doctor and her recent return to filmmaking with her 2016 PBS documentary American Masters: Mike Nichols. The collection is structured in four sections: the first on her early career, the second on broader critical contexts (Smukler’s chapter on her career in 1970s Hollywood, Jake Wilson’s on the centrality of improvisation to her practice), the third on each of the films she directed, and the final on “Collaborations/Revelations,” with chapters addressing her performance style, her screenwriting work on Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971), and her late-career collaborations with Nichols, including her screenplays for The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998). The chapters on her early work usefully situate Nichols and May’s improvisational work in a broader cultural context. Mark Freeman’s chapter, for example, foregrounds the relationship between their Method training (Nichols having studied with Lee Strasberg and May with Stanislavsky acolyte Maria Ouspenskaya) and improv practice. In one of the collection’s highlights, Wilson argues that Nichols and May turned the Method against itself, using satire to forestall self-reflection and keeping the audience at arm’s length, and teases out the significance of improvisation for May’s craft as both a performer and a director. May’s combination of an interest in improvisation with critical distance extends to her public persona. May rarely grants interviews, and Wilson suggests that she has treated the ones she has given as yet another improvisational game. Yet it is not just her own personal style...

The myth of the flat start‐up: Reconsidering the organizational structure of start‐ups

Research summaryThere has been an ongoing debate over whether start‐ups should be “flat” with minimal hierarchical layers. To reconcile this debate, this article distinguishes between creative and commercial success (i.e., novelty vs. profitability), and examines how these outcomes are variously influenced by a start‐up's hierarchy. This study suggests that while a flatter hierarchy can improve ideation and creative success, it can result in haphazard execution and commercial failure by overwhelming managers with the burden of direction and causing subordinates to drift into power struggles and aimless idea explorations. I find empirical support for this trade‐off using a large sample of game development start‐ups. These findings offer one resolution to the debate by sorting out the conditions under which hierarchy can be conducive or detrimental to start‐ups.Managerial summaryAcademics, management gurus, and popular media outlets have argued that “authoritarian,” tall hierarchies are outmoded and will be supplanted by “egalitarian,” flat structures. In recent years, this argument has been largely substantiated by a few “successful” flat start‐ups, such as Valve, Zappos, Github, Medium, and Buffer. As these nascent firms constantly garner much attention for their egalitarian ideal—which itself is a signal of their rarity—the myth that start‐ups should be flat (often referred to as “flat organization,” “holacracy,” or “boss‐less firm”) has become widespread among entrepreneurs. My study cautions against this myth, suggesting that adding a few hierarchical levels of managers can substantially help start‐ups achieve commercial success and survive in their hostile environments, albeit at a potentially marginal cost of creativity.