Week 1: Why study the ones that failed

Opening lecture — what a closed restaurant can teach that a surviving one can't, and why this course reads failure instead of success.

28 July 2026

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What this covers#

Survivors get written up in trade press as proof a strategy works; nobody funds a case study of a restaurant that quietly closed in year two. This lecture makes the argument for reading closures instead: they’re better evidence, not worse, because a business only fails for reasons strong enough to overcome everyone inside it who wanted it to succeed.

What it sets up#

The slide deck lays out the four analytical lenses the semester returns to — location, menu, service and narrative — and the discipline of picking one lens at a time rather than reaching for “it was probably everything” on week one. Everything from the specimen-selection rules in week 1’s session onward assumes you’ve sat through this.