corporate failure

A two-minute clip from a 1994 interview with Steve Jobs by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. Jobs talks about failure and about how most people never ask for help, recalling that he simply called people to ask.

A Nike commercial in which Michael Jordan lists the shots he missed and games he lost, saying that repeated failure is the reason he succeeds.

Composer Tantacrul explores how corporatism produces soulless background music, and how some companies use such music in propaganda-style campaigns. He composes several corporate styles to show their tropes, with some music theory along the way.

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

Footage of the failed Mercury-Redstone 1 launch, where the engine cut off almost immediately after liftoff. The escape tower and parachutes then deployed because the rocket thought the flight was over.

Together Louisiana asks why Louisiana stays poor despite its natural resources and industry, focusing on industrial tax exemptions and corporate welfare.

Louis Rossmann, a Macbook repair shop owner, goes through a long list of Apple hardware engineering failures, from GPU defects to keyboards and repair practices.

Clay Shirky argues at Web 2.0 Expo NY that the problem online is not information overload but filter failure. He says the real challenge is building better ways to filter and organize what we see.

Bryan Cantrill's talk on corporate open source anti-patterns, first given at FISL 2012 and again at the Liferay Symposium. He lays out the mistakes companies make when open sourcing code, such as announcing future open sourcing, and discusses licenses.

Weird Al's whiteboard-animated music video parodying corporate buzzword culture, from the album Mandatory Fun. The lyrics are packed with business jargon.

Practical Engineering summarizes the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure, explaining the engineering details behind the incident. It also discusses how operators and regulators failed to keep downstream residents safe.

A corporate jingle-style song about KPMG, uploaded to YouTube with a glossy pop and R&B treatment. It is a cheesy corporate theme song.

A short Adam Ruins Everything clip arguing that corporations shift blame for litter and waste onto consumers. It touches on the packaging industry's anti-litter campaigns.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

Cockpit footage of a Swiss Airbus A340 crew dealing with rising oil temperature in one engine on a Zurich to Shanghai flight, ending with a safety landing. It shows the pilots' procedures through the emergency.

SpaceX's own compilation of failed orbital booster landing attempts, set to sound, showing the crashes before landings succeeded.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on Boeing, tracing how it went from a quality engineering company to one tied to crashes and 'quality escapes'. It covers the 737 MAX failures and employee concerns about safety.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

A one-minute clip from South Park in which BP issues a hilariously insincere corporate apology over its oil spill.

A short Flash animation made in 2001 by an IBM employee, set to the company's old 'Ever Onward' rally song, with imagery from IBM history.

Short British Pathe newsreel footage of the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as it twisted and swayed in the wind. The only casualty was a dog left in a stalled car.

A one-minute clip of an Atlas Agena rocket losing pressure on the pad and collapsing. The Atlas relied on tank pressurization for structural integrity, so a simple failure tore it apart.

Richard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.

Peter Thiel is the first guest on Eric Weinstein's The Portal, in a nearly three-hour conversation about technological stagnation, institutional failure and the link between growth and violence. They discuss universities, the economy and the search for a more ambitious future.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.

Journalist Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on the CIA's operational security failures in the 2003 Milan kidnapping. Phone and location metadata exposed the team and led to arrest warrants.

Vox explainer arguing the two Boeing 737 Max crashes were not just a software bug but the result of a company's drive to beat its rival, with a flawed MCAS design.

Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on operational security failures by CIA operatives. It covers the Abu Omar case and how sloppy tradecraft with cell phones exposed officers through call records and metadata.

A long video essay by Kraut arguing that Trump's biggest failure was his handling of China. It spends much of its length on Chinese history, culture, the trade war, and the rise of a communist superpower.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 talk on how AWS limits the blast radius of failures. It covers design techniques such as cell-based architecture and shuffle sharding.

A New Yorker short documentary about the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea, based on the film In the Absence. It examines the failures in the rescue and the political aftermath.

Linus Tech Tips documents a major RAID failure on its Whonnock server and the attempt to recover the lost data with a data recovery firm.

A six-minute clip of the famous speech from the 1976 film Network in which the world is described as a corporation. It portrays a world run by corporate interests.

The shareholder speech by Larry the Liquidator, played by Danny DeVito, from the film Other People's Money. He argues that a dying company should be liquidated rather than kept alive.

Ian Miers' Devcon4 talk on failures in on-chain privacy for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It covers attacks on transparent and decoy-based schemes, including how Monero-style privacy can be eroded over repeated transactions.

A two-minute classroom scene from the film Starship Troopers in which a teacher lectures on why only veterans earn the right to vote, titled Failure of Democracy.

Perun's hour-long analysis of how institutional lying, cover-ups and corruption ("vranyo") undermined the Russian military in Ukraine. It examines how false reporting up the chain degrades readiness and decision-making.

A two-minute clip from the film Fight Club in which the narrator, a former recall coordinator, explains the formula companies use to decide whether a recall costs more than paying out settlements.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.