In early February, Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced that it was abandoning its effort to build a commercial jetliner that could compete with the aircraft built by global aerospace giants Airbus and The Boeing Company. The project, originally known as the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, was started in 2008, with the first aircraft scheduled for delivery in 2013. It never happened.

While this obviously was a painful decision for the company’s leaders, it raises an important question: What took them so long?

The answer, most likely, is that admitting you’re wrong—admitting failure—can be difficult. That’s why many leading business thinkers preach a strategy known as “fail fast.”