Keating et al. [Eur. Man. J., 17 (1999) 120] have described the concept of ''improvement paradox''. They argued that an improvement program is difficult to sustain, and that sometimes a successful improvement program may worsen business performance. We think that there is a need to redefine the success of an improvement program. We should look into the case that a program is applied to instead of the program itself. Also, since cases of improvement failure have seldom been discussed, we feel that it is important to be able to learn from the failure. The objectives of this paper are twofold. First, we redefine the success/failure of an improvement program with examples. Second, we explain how to find and avoid failure factors in those examples.