Observed in the Wild: A web entrepreneur reported his startup company failed after a manufactured product entered the marketplace with defects. He blamed the vendors who had produced the flawed products and sent them to the fulfillment warehouse.

How could this happen?

He explained that the design was good. He had used several vendors for various parts of the product, all in the USA. Management wanted to ensure higher quality than he had witnessed with a previous product they had manufactured in China.

He explained that the pre-production product was tested and inspected, and was good. Since the manufacturer was to then send the production run product directly to the drop shipper for fulfillment, management didn’t know about the faulty product until it was already sold to customers. But by then it was too late, and the company folded in the face of shipped faulty product and a warehouse full of similarly faulty product.

So where is the dysphoria and blindness? Looking back at what went wrong, this is the comment about the vendors:

“…only one of the 5 supplier companies did what anyone should have expected. “

The entrepreneur goes on to say that this experience confirmed for him the following core beliefs:

• Most people are stupid/ignorant.
• Most people suck at what they do.

which he followed with “…it’s just hard to find people who really know what they are doing, care enough to do it well, and actually do it well.”

Dysphoriana… a world where things just suck, and those “things” are to blame when things go wrong.

No consideration of the failure of company management to institute Quality Control or Quality Assurance programs, to evaluate product coming off the production line before it was shipped for distribution.

No thought that the manufacturers would need specifications for testing methods, inspection points, or check lists in order to detect problems and prevent shipping flawed product, if that was even contracted or included in the bid/pricing process.

An underlying belief that people are stupid and people suck, which enables him to explain away failures and relieves him (and the rest of business management) of blame. This is the blindness.

There seems to be an assumption here that hiring contractors to do parts of the process and then testing the initial product before a production run should be enough to ensure success, as long as no one screws up. When has that ever been true in business?

If business was that easy, we’d all be rich and hardly any of us would have to work. But in Dysphoriana, it’s because other people suck at their jobs, no one (else) cares enough about the success of the project. The deck is stacked against us!

If it weren’t for those other people screwing up, we’d have been successful, because we work hard and care and do great work.