In the article "To Diversify or Not to Diversify" the author describes multiple examples of firms both successful and unsuccessful at diversifying. Would you please elaborate on one of these stories? Here are a couple to choose from or pick another one from the article - Coca Cola going into the wine business, United Kingdom's Boddington moving from beer to retailing or Blue Circle moving into lawn mower building business.

To diversify or not to diversify One of the most challenging decisions a company can confront is whether to diversify: the rewards and risks can be extraordinary. Success stories abound-think of General Electric, Disney, and 3M-but so do stories of such infamous and costly failures as Quaker Oats' entry into (and exit from the fruit juice business with Snapple, and RCA's forays into computers, carpets, and rental cars. > What makes diversification such an unpredictable, high-stakes game? First, companies usually face the decision in an atmosphere not conducive to thoughtful deliberation. For example, an attractive company comes into play, and a competitor is interested in buying it. Or the board of directors strongly urges expanding into new markets. Suddenly, senior managers must synthesize mountains of data-including internal-rate-of-return calculations, market forecasts, and competitive assessments-under intense time pressure. To complicate matters, diversification as a corporate strategy goes in and out of vogue on a regular basis. In other words, there is little conventional wisdom to guide managers as they consider a move that could greatly increase shareholder value or seriously damage it. But diversification doesn't need to be quite such a roll of the dice. Yes, it always will involve uncertainty; all major business decisions do. And indeed, there is a wealth of good advice about how to approach diversification. But my research suggests that if managers consider the following six questions, they can push their thinking still further to reduce the gamble of diversification. Answering the questions will not lead to an easy go-no-go decision, but the exercise can help managers assess the likelihood of success. The issues the questions raise, and the discussion they provoke, are meant to be coupled with the detailed financial analysis typical of the diversification decision-making process. Together, these tools can turn a complex and often pressured decision into a more structured and well-reasoned one. To diversify, a company must have all the necessary strategic assets, not just some of them. The diversification misadventures of a number of oil companies in the late 1970s highlight how dangerous it is to go up against a royal flush when all you have is a pair of jacks. Companies such as British Petroleum and Exxon broke into the mineral business they could exploit their competencies in exploration, extraction, and management of large-scale projects. Ten years later, the companies had dropped out of the game. The reason: in addition to the oil companies' capabilities, the mineral business required low-cost extraction capabilities and access to deposits, which the oil companies lacked. Consider as well the experience of the Coca-Cola Company, long heralded for its intimate knowledge of consumers, its marketing and branding expertise, and its superior distribution capabilities. Based on those strategic assets, Coca-Cola decided in the early 1980s to acquire its way into the wine business, in which such strengths were imperative. The company quickly learned, however, that it lacked a critical competence: knowledge of the wine business. Having 90% of what it took to succeed in the new industry was not enough for Coke, because the 10% it did not have-the ability to make quality wine-was the most critical component of success. As in poker, the lesson for companies considering diversification is the same: you have to know when to hold them and when to fold them. If a company is holding only a pair of strategic assets in an industry in which most players have a better hand, there's no point in putting money on the table-unless, that is, the next question can be answered in the affirmative. Will we be simply a player in the new market or will we emerge a winner? Even if companies storm into new markets with all the required competencies-put together in the right combination--they still can fail to gain a foothold. Why? To achieve a sustainable advantage, diversifying companies need to create something unique. A company's competitive advantage will be short-lived, and diversification will fail, if competitors in the new industry can imitate the company's moves quickly and the company's moves quickly and cheaply, purchase the necessary strategic assets in the open market, or find an effective substitute for them. In other words, there is no point rushing into a new market unless you have a way to beat the existing players at their own game. Take the experience of Japanese consumer-goods giant Kao. Kao's chemical division had developed a technology that enabled the company to alter or smooth the surfaces of products such as clothes and magnetic tapes. In the late 1980s, Kao introduced the technology into its detergent division, where it quickly was a major success, allowing the company to create a new kind of laundry detergent. (The detergent, called Attack, was protected by 91 patents.) Within two years, Kao's market share in the laundry detergent business increased from 30% to 56%. Hoping to build on that success, Kao then transferred the same technology to its floppy disk division. The effort was not as successful. Simply put, the technology changed and improved the laundry detergent business, but it was old news in the floppy-disk business: competitors either had something similar to it already or had another technology that did the job. Kao had tried to enter a market with a strategic asset that didn't buy it a competitive advantage. The company could play in the floppy-disk industry, but it couldn't win