From complete dud to a dashing knight of the skies …

At 9:28pm tomorrow evening it is 80 years since 19 aircraft from 617 Squadron rolled down the runway at Scampton RAF base in Lincolnshire.

They were the Dambusters.

Their targets were the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the industrial heartlands of the Ruhr Valley.

The aircraft they flew were Roy Chadwick’s superlative Avro Lancaster.

But the plane came into being more by accident than design.

Its predecessor, the Avro Manchester, was a complete disaster of an aircraft.

Dangerously underpowered, it had only two engines which frequently blew up and caught fire.

After 30 crashes the designers went back to the drawing board, fitting four powerful Rolls Royce Merlin 22 engines on longer wings and a redesigned tailplane.

The rest is history …

In a few short months, the design team went from disaster to creating the most successful heavy bomber of World War 2.

From a complete dud to a place in history with a few clever reworks. The past is littered with them.

In 1965 the Beatles released “We Can Work It Out.” Which initially flopped. But after a few artistic adjustments, it became (up until then) the best-selling single ever.

Have you tried something in the past that’s flopped? We all have.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel we’ve all got marketing collateral that’s been discarded and forgotten.

It might be worth spending a little time digging out past material and giving it a check over – there could be a few forgotten gems in there.

Until next week.

Alec

P.S. An interesting and little-told detail is the call sign of Gibson’s Lancaster flown that night was AJ-G. The same initials as his father.