While writing this, I felt that I was being a hypocrite. Despite my refusal to accept the magic of luck as a success factor, I expend such excruciating thoughts towards providing a logical explanation of luck! Maybe my denial emanates from my firm belief that luck without right grind yields nothing, which is far more common than you perceive, while the vice versa culminates in mediocrity or disappointment.
Being a consultant offered me the privilege to understand numerous businesses and their managers at great depth through various situations. While being an avid reader helped me learn from the brains of most successful entrepreneurs as well as the minds of the greatest thinkers. This made me notice a common pattern of simple actions that have significant positive impact; however, actions that lack any natural explanation unless enforced or mistakenly correlated.
Over the period of time, I coined a phrase to refer to such situational or incidental successes. Although success requires so many things to go right, failure or mediocrity just requires one factor to misbehave. Of course, there are other factors such as the inherent limitations of businesses and the mindset barriers of managers, the combination of the right factors make their impact pale or just as out sun amidst the supernovas.
Combination of too many rights & zero wrongs!
Despite being paid to unravel patterns and provide logical explanations for past events or future strategy, I feel that many great business moves were mere improvisations amidst the combination of too many rights. At this point I will make it clear that I am not trying to undermine the logic or soundness of such strategic moves; however, the point that I am trying to convey is that such strategic moves in absence of the right context will not result in any phenomenal success.
Personal experience:
In India, post COVID – a start-up Dukaan secured sizeable venture fund. In simple terms, the company is the Indian Shopify, helping layman build e-commerce website in minutes. In 2019, we worked with Ecomnation, a company that built a similar tool in 2018! The explanation for such varying levels of success can be attributed to context (Ecomnation is based in Ahmedabad while Dukan is in Bangalore) and timing.
Although strategy conveyed through beautifully designed decks may seem nothing less than magic to a naive entrepreneurs or MBA candidates, most consultants well aware that most strategy is common and generally known to the industry. Also, the dirty secret of consulting business is that strategy is recycled, or perhaps up-cycled, with adjustments to merely account for the contextual variations.
More than the strategy itself, success depends on its execution, the most challenging part often excluded from the scope of consultants, where the perfection of strategy collides with the imperfections of reality. Imagine an asteroid bombardment when a planet passes through an asteroid belt. That is the level of intensity and the odds of getting right or favorable outcomes are too thin. The wrong asteroids hitting at all the metropolitan centers can wipe out an entire species while the right asteroids hitting the oceans will be considered as god’s grace.
In simple words, the odds are too slim to be calculated. But since I have recently read the Black Swan, I am convinced that not only are they too slim but also too complicated to be conceived as calculable. First of all, analysts lack the historical data of such events and even if we manage to procure historical data from aliens or time travel, the data may be irrelevant to the highly volatile context. The only manner in which analysts can forecast the impact of asteroids is through information collected as the event begins to unfold, whether the telescopic images 90 days prior to impact or variation in orbit velocities during the impact.
The book ‘Zero to One’ lucidly explains the importance of context through the concept that successes and phenomenon occur only once and any attempt to replicate will result in either failure or mediocrity. As by the time one replicates the strategy, the context has already evolved making it too late to catch up; whether it is IBM trying to catch up on Microsoft Windows or BlackBerry trying to catch up on Android and iPhone. Moreover, most venture capitalists and hedge fund managers emphasize the upon the significance of timing for start-up concepts and market bets.
Although many successful icons have put forth this concept in various forms, they fall short of explicitly calling it luck. And of course, I do NOT blame them as attribution to luck often undermines the intelligence, effort and sacrifices of the team behind the phenomenal success. But I believe that we should instead decode and measure luck through academic research, and I wish the researchers ‘best of luck’ in this pursuit.
In our primitive attempt, we can break the context in to the following: right talent, right market maturity, right product, right support system and right financing mechanisms. And we can also dig the significance of support system with the example of iPhone and 3G, or market maturity with digital payments and consumer mindset, or venture funds and startup successes. However, the only reason that makes such elaboration possible is that these are events from the past accompanied by not only data but also facts. Despite identification, it is difficult to attribute significance to these factors, unless speculative or judgemental, unless the event unfolds.
As technology gains prominence, we should emphasize upon the impact of technological breakthroughs and resulting idea multipliers. In simple terms, an idea multiplier is the number of new ideas that succeed an initial idea. For instance, iOS enabled at least a thousand ideas, which were realized through the app store. Moreover, they form an ecosystem that helps other ideas for flourish while evolving the initial idea. This decade, processor revolution will enable blockchain while blockchain itself will enable numerous solutions unimaginable with current technology.
But blockchain seems to await its power plug, the support system.
To sum it up,
Skills of a surfer are indispensable; however, it is the high tide that makes those skills relevant. Whereas, friendly tides even make amateurs surf like the Pros. And the earth is lucky to have oceans of water and a single moon making tides and ebbs predictable, at least the timings if not the heights. Try to predict the tides occurring in the Jupiter oceans.
Header Image Photo by Brandon Compagne on Unsplash
Savvy Munshi 