"So I say congratulations to Urban Decay, a massive cosmetics brand that recently made a very public U-turn when it realised its plans to start selling in China would have meant unnecessary suffering for hundreds of animals.
Intel recently decided to rethink its offices when it realised that 60% of its cubicles were empty most of the time.
Such ventures have failed in the past — in the 1990s, a Bill Gates-funded company, Teledesic, ran up costs of $9 billion before it realised that its satellite-powered internet was not going to work.
Pfizer, the American drug giant, teamed up with Phytopharm in the late 1990s, but discontinued its investment when it realised that producing large quantities of the plant-derived compound was going to be difficult.
It realised then that its hegemony over the non-Soviet world would be enhanced if it bound itself into international bodies like the UN, the IMF and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the WTO.
It has allowed employees to work past retirement up to the age of 70 since 2001, once it realised many of its customers preferred to discuss their financial arrangements with older people.
But it realised it was losing its best managers, and that some non-member managers were earning more than member managers.
Yet Safeway, a British retailer, eliminated its customer-loyalty card when it realised it was gathering mountains of data without being able to use it.
Aged social network Friendster started to pivot towards Asia around 2008, when it realised that 90percentt of its user base was coming from the region.
Northamptonshire declared itself effectively bankrupt in February after it realised it could not balance its books.
That is partly because it realised lots of children were taking its existing courses but also through partnerships with schools.
