> By 1982 the craze was over and the toy's Hungarian manufacturer was going bust — quite a feat when you consider that probably more than 100 million Cubes were

> By 1982 the craze was over and the toy's Hungarian manufacturer was going bust — quite a feat when you consider that probably more than 100 million Cubes were sold worldwide. But that was precisely the problem: a centrally planned economy isn’t accustomed to dealing with consumer crazes. A Budapest writer, Mezei Andras, has written a book and a play called The Hungarian Cube chronicling the debacle. It started when the officials at the small manufacturing cooperative, Politech nika, insisted on trying to expand their operations to meet the burgeoning demand instead of farming out work to other factories. > “The company took a loan from the government,” Andras told me, “but they had to wait nine or ten months for it to be approved by all the proper committees. Then it took them six months to order and receive the manufacturing equipment they needed. By that time the craze was finished, so the company had a large debt and no popular product, and the state had to save it from going bankrupt.” There's a lesson in that episode, which applies both to government and large corporations — it's a good part of why startups have such an economic advantage: they can pivot at the drop of a hat, relatively speaking.