The Little Blue Reasoning Book - Brandon Royal [11]
• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor of the Kansas City Star newspaper because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” Years later, the Disney company bought ABC which owned the Kansas City Star.
• Although Vincent van Gogh produced some 800 paintings, he was able to sell only one painting during his lifetime. The Red Vineyard at Aries was sold to the sister of one of his friends for 400 francs (approximately $50).
• In 1921, Newton Baker, U.S. Secretary of War, reacted to Brigadier General Billy Mitchell’s claim that airplanes could sink battleships by dropping bombs on them: “That idea is so damned nonsensical and impossible that I’m willing to stand on the bridge of a battleship while that nitwit tries to hit it from the air.”
• “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Can dance a little.” MGM summary of a screen test of some guy named Fred Astaire, 1928.
• A Paris art dealer refused Pablo Picasso shelter when he asked if he could bring in his paintings from out of the rain.
• “Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1.5 tons.” Popular Mechanics, March 1949.
• “I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.
• “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” Decca Recording Co. on rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
• “But what … is it good for?” Engineer at IBM’s Advanced Computing Systems Division, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
• Madonna, the best-selling female rock artist of the 20th century, was rejected by several music labels in the early 1980s. One talent agent is reputed to have said that her voice wasn’t unique enough to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
• In the early 1990s, J.K, Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by more than a dozen UK publishers, the majority of which believed that the story wasn’t mainstream enough.
The process of making mistakes in judgment and/or missing opportunities can be further illustrated within the framework of Type I and Type II errors. These two types of errors also are discussed within the topic of Hypothesis Testing in chapter 3.
Type I errors are really errors of commission, while Type II errors are errors of omission. Type I errors result in failure. Type II errors result in missed opportunities. A Type I error occurs when we take an action and it turns out to be a mistake. For example, whenever a top movie executive “green-lights” (okays) a movie project that turns out to be a failure, a Type I error is committed. The executive’s career could suffer in a very public way, as these kinds of errors are very visible.
A Type II error occurs when we don’t take an action, and the mistake comes from missing an opportunity. If one movie executive passes on a decision to make a movie, and another movie house later produces it, turning it into a blockbuster, a Type II error is committed.
Type II errors are often hard to see, even if they are common. The problem is that most Type II errors are never discovered. This is because many opportunities never immediately resurface. Projects or ideas, once killed or shelved, seldom get a second opinion. They are stopped without being shown to other people or organizations to see if someone else wants to take on the risk to pursue them.
Because Type II errors are mostly invisible, they come at less cost to people and organizations than do Type I errors. It’s often easier to say no to something that might be a huge success than it is to say yes, because most of the time, no one will ever know what the outcome might have been.