What is the role of luck? Was Bill Gates Lucky?  I recently read the book Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten T.Hansen. At one end only luck determines results such as lotteries and roulette wheels and on the other end skill dominates such as a chess match or a running race. Most of life’s most interesting activities are in the middle of these extremes. Man can do the necessary calculations to land a rover on Mars and still things can go wrong. While there is no shortage of commentators on television telling us where the stock market is headed, experience tells us that their crystal balls are just as cloudy as everyone else’s. So what can we do to be more lucky? Was Bill Gates really lucky or are there some simple rules that he followed (and we can follow) to be lucky?

About the Book

Great by Choice,is book after  9 years of research study from 2002 to 2011, by Jim Collins and Morten T.Hansen of some of the most extreme business successes of modern times.

They asked the question Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? When buffeted by tumultuous events, when hit by big, fast-moving forces that we can neither predict nor control, what distinguishes those who perform exceptionally well from those who under perform or worse?

They examined entrepreneurs who built small enterprises into companies that outperformed their industries by a factor of 10 in highly turbulent environments whom they called 10Xers, for 10 times success. Part of the answer lies in the distinctive behaviors of their leaders. How were 10Xers relative to their less successful comparisons: They’re not more creative. They’re not more visionary. They’re not more charismatic. They’re not more ambitious. They’re not more blessed by luck. They’re not more risk-seeking. They’re not more heroic. And they’re not more prone to making big, bold moves. As they say To be clear, we’re not saying that 10Xers lacked creative intensity, ferocious ambition, or the courage to bet big. They displayed all these traits, but so did their less successful comparisons.

So then, how did the 10Xers distinguish themselves? First, they embrace a paradox of control and noncontrol. On the one hand, 10Xers understand that they face continuous uncertainty and that they cannot control, and cannot accurately predict, significant aspects of the world around them. On the other hand, they reject the idea that forces outside their control or chance events will determine their results; they accept full responsibility for their own fate. 10Xers then bring this idea to life by a triad of core behaviours: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. And they all led their teams with a surprising method of self-control in an out-of-control world. The 10X cases exemplified  20-Mile March concept, hitting stepwise performance markers with great consistency over a long period of time, and the comparison cases did not.

What is 20 mile March? Say You decide that 3,000-mile walk, from San Diego to the tip of Maine. You march 20 miles a day(or around that) whether it is heat of the desert and you want to rest in the cool of your tent or plains or glorious springtime, and you can go 40 or 50 miles in a day. But you don’t. You sustain your pace, marching 20 miles a day.

They explain the concept of 20 Mile March through

• Two teams of adventures who in Oct 1911 went on quest to be the first to reach South Pole. Team led by Roald Amundsen won while team led by Robert Falcon Scott lost not only the quest but also their lives.
• Medical-equipment maker Stryker whose CEO set a performance benchmark to drive consistent progress: Stryker would achieve 20% net income growth every year.
• Southwest Airlines demanded of itself a profit every year, even when the entire industry lost money.  Anyone who said they’d be profitable every year for nearly three decades in the airline business — the airline business! — would be laughed at. No one does that. But Southwest did it.

The 20-Mile March is more than a philosophy. It’s about having concrete, clear, intelligent, and rigorously pursued performance mechanisms that keep you on track. The 20-Mile March creates two types of self-imposed discomfort: (1) the discomfort of unwavering commitment to high performance in difficult conditions, and (2) the discomfort of holding back in good conditions.

Read more about the 20 Mile March at Jim Collins webpage Great by Choice or summary of chapters at this blog

Book Great By Choice by Jim Collins

What is the Role of Luck

The very nature of this study — how some people thrive in uncertainty, lead in chaos, deal with a world full of big, disruptive forces that we cannot predict or control — led them to question, “Just what is the role of luck? Could it be that leaders’ skills account for the difference between just meeting their industry’s average performance (1X success) and doubling it (2X)? But that luck accounts for all the difference between 2X and 10X? Maybe, or maybe not.

But how on Earth could  one quantify something as elusive as luck? They defined a luck event as one that meets three tests. First, some significant aspect of the event occurs largely or entirely independent of the actions of the enterprise’s main actors. Second, the event has a potentially significant consequence — good or bad. And, third, it has some element of unpredictability. They systematically found 230 significant luck events and they found that the 10X cases weren’t generally luckier than the comparison cases.  The 10X cases and the control group both had luck, good and bad, in comparable amounts, so the evidence leads us to conclude that luck doesn’t cause 10X success. The crucial question is not, Are you lucky? but Do you get a high return on luck?

Was Bill Gates Lucky?

SO why did Bill Gates become a 10Xer, building a great software company in the personal computer revolution? Through one lens, you might see Mr. Gates as incredibly lucky. (Book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell in about Timing is everything talks about Bill Gates being at right place at right time)

He just happened to have been born into an upper-middle-class American family that had the resources to send him to a private school. His family happened to enroll him at Lakeside School in Seattle, which had a Teletype connection to a computer upon which he could learn to program — something that was unusual for schools in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

He also just happened to have been born at the right time, coming of age as the advancement of microelectronics made the PC inevitable. Had he been born 10 years later, or even just five years later, he would have missed the moment.

Mr. Gates’s friend Paul Allen just happened to see a cover article in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, titled World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models. It was about the Altair, designed by a small company in Albuquerque. Mr. Gates and Mr. Allen had the idea to convert the programming language Basic into a product that could be used on the Altair, which would put them in position to be the first to sell such a product for a personal computer. Mr. Gates went to college at Harvard, which just happened to have a PDP-10 computer upon which he could develop and test his ideas.

Wow, Bill Gates was really lucky, right? Yes, he was. But luck is not why Bill Gates became a 10Xer. Consider these questions:

• Was Bill Gates the only person of his era who grew up in an upper middle-class American family?
• Was he the only person born in the mid-1950s who attended a secondary school with access to computing?
• Was he the only person who went to a college with computer resources in the mid-’70s? The only one who read the Popular Electronics article? The only one who knew how to program in Basic?

No, no, no, no and no.

• Lakeside may have been one of the first schools to have a computer that students could use during those years, but it wasn’t the only such school.
• Mr. Gates may have been a math and computer whiz kid at a top college that had computers in 1975, but he wasn’t the only maths and computer whiz kid at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, M.I.T., Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, U.C.L.A., the University of Chicago, Georgia Tech, Cornell, Dartmouth, Southern Cal, Columbia, Northwestern, Penn, Michigan or any number of other top colleges with comparable or even better computer resources.
• Mr. Gates wasn’t the only person who knew how to program in Basic; the language was developed a decade earlier by Dartmouth professors, and it was widely known by 1975, used in academics and industry. And what about all the master’s and Ph.D. students in electrical engineering and computer science who had even more computer expertise than Mr. Gates on the day the Popular Electronics article appeared? Any could have decided to abandon their studies and start a personal computer software company. And computer experts already working in industry and academia could have done the same.

But how many of them changed their life plans — and cut their sleep to near zero, essentially inhaling food so as not to let eating interfere with work — to throw themselves into writing Basic for the Altair? How many defied their parents, dropped out of college and moved to Albuquerque to work with the Altair? How many had Basic for the Altair written, debugged and ready to ship before anyone else?Imagine if Mr. Gates had said to Paul Allen after seeing the Popular Electronics article: “Well, Paul, I’m kind of focused on my studies here at Harvard right now. Let’s wait a few years, and then I’ll be ready to start.”

Thousands of people could have done the same thing that Mr. Gates did, at the same time. But they didn’t. The difference between Mr. Gates and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Mr. Gates went further, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. And this is the important difference. Luck, good and bad, happens to everyone, whether we like it or not. But when we look at the 10Xers, we see people like Mr. Gates who recognize luck and seize it, leaders who grab luck events and make much more of them. Getting a high ROL requires throwing yourself at the luck event with ferocious intensity, disrupting your life and not letting up. Bill Gates didn’t just get a lucky break and cash in his chips. He kept pushing, driving, working — and sustained that effort for more than two decades. That’s not luck — that’s return on luck.

After finishing our luck analysis for Great by Choice, we realized that getting a high ROL required a new mental muscle. There are smart decisions and wise decisions. And one form of wisdom is the ability to judge when to let luck disrupt our plans. Not all time in life is equal. The question is, when the unequal moment comes, do we recognize it, or just let it slip? But, just as important, do we have the fanatic, obsessive discipline to keep marching, to push the opportunity to the extreme, to make the most of the chances we’re given?

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So do you believe in luck? Or  do you believe in hard work? Or do you believe in  I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. Or  Luck is, When Preparedness meets opportunity. I was taught by my parents karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadachana ma karma-phala-hetur bhur ma te sango ’stv akarmani (Bhagwat Gita: Chapter Two verse 47) which means: You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty ( Sri Krishna said to Arjuna). Do you think Bill Gates was Lucky?