Sir Ranulph Fiennes the explorer: “I spent 26 years leading expeditions that looked for a lost city under the desert – I wasn’t out there for the whole 26 years, I just repeatedly went back to try and find it. It was found by sheer good luck. It turned out it was under the base camp I had been using for the previous 26 years to launch expeditions to find it…”

In an experiment, subjects were asked to watch a video clip of two teams passing a basketball between them, and told they had to count the number of passes. Halfway through the clip, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walked on in the background, beat his chest, then walked off again. Eighty per cent of the subjects failed to spot the gorilla.(1)

If you think success looks like all the things that used to make your company successful, but the fast-changing markets out there constantly re-define what success actually looks like, then you will be unlucky. You will be looking for basketballs and missing gorillas.

“But is he lucky?”
- Napoleon’s criterion for appointing a general. Apparently this is an apocryphal saying. Shame. I always liked it.

Luck has become more important to success in recent years, as markets have become less predictable. Product lifecycles have accelerated, for example, so you are having to bet more often during your career on whether a new product will succeed. Non-commercial organizations are equally under pressure from regulators to change drastically to become less bureaucratic and more customer-focussed. Taking decisions in an age of more variables, more uncertainty, obviously increases the risk of getting it wrong. So, can you make your own luck to increase the odds of getting it right more often?

Make your own luck

Luck is generally seen as an external factor, over which you have no control. But there are also those who claim to be born lucky. Somewhere in between these two extremes hovers the truth about luck; that you can, but only to some extent, make your own.

There is an obvious, but not reliable, correlation between hard work and luck, as the oil magnate John Paul Getty noted:

My formula for success is…
Rise early.
Work late.
Strike oil.
- J P Getty

OK, he meant it as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the high risk oil prospecting sector he worked in, but there is also an underlying truth to leadership in this quote; the harder you work and the more opportunities you open up, the luckier you are likely to become. Or, as golfer Gary Player said on being told he had a reputation for being lucky, “It’s funny how the more I practise, the luckier I get.”

The most interesting recent work on luck and organizations was conducted by psychologist Richard Wiseman (1) (2), whose research seems to find there are two aspects to being lucky. The first is being in the right place at the right time. This serendipity may be largely outside your control, though Tom Peters points out that the more you network outside of your conventional circle (“Go to lunch with a freak!” he is fond of shouting), the more chances of encountering opportunity you create for yourself (3).

Serendipity – stumbling across something useful – is, however, useless without the second aspect of luck, which is recognizing the opportunity. Luck comes to a prepared mind. Most of us aren’t awake to unexpected opportunity, says Wiseman, citing the gorilla experiment as evidence. Wiseman identifies four factors in creating your own luck.

• Maximize opportunities. (Be open. Expect the unexpected.)
• Listen to your intuition. We are good at detecting patterns (See Intuition chapter of this book for more on this)
• Be positive
• Put bad experiences into perspective

You can tell from the last two points that, as with others who write on the subject, Wiseman’s work veers towards positive thinking and self-help. But, he insists that lucky thinking patterns create real-world business impact. Wiseman experimented with trying to make an organization more lucky by instilling in managers and employees what he says are the positive thought patterns of lucky people. The business claimed to improve its profits by 20%.

USEFUL DISTINCTION: Luck and Chance. Leaders have no control over chance. But, you may have some control over how lucky you and your organization are.