What Novo Nordisk, OpenAI and Pop Mart have in common

EVERY chief executive dreams of it: a product so successful that it propels their company from obscurity to superstardom seemingly overnight.

Among the lessons from 2025, however, is that runaway success is not all upside. As the experience of whizzy chatbots, weight-loss jabs and wacky dolls illustrates, it brings problems, too.

The first pitfall is that bosses face the vexed task of scaling up their business to satisfy a level of demand that is impossible to predict.