Fallacy of Success

Is success predictable? There are many business books that tell you how to achieve success. They give you a list of things you can do to achieve success. According to Phil Rosenzweig, things are not so simple. He says, the situation is more complicated than that. The dynamics of the business environment is very complex. He tells you that business gurus who have built formula for success have based their theories on skewed data. They are basing their theories only on the companies that have succeeded. The data suffers from survivorship bias.
Even if you have a very good strategy future is uncertain. What you think is a very smart strategy might fail miserably. And, an ordinary strategy might make you highly successful. According to Nassim Taleb,it is easy to give explanations for the success after you have succeeded. If you have failed, no one will even listen to you in the first place. Mind you many of these explanations suffer from Texas sharpshooter fallacy. According to him, you can achieve moderate success with a good strategy and hard work. If you have achieved may be there is a high probability that some other subtle forces are at play. Since, people can not understand the entire situation they tend to attribute their success to some of their strategies, values etc. Many times the relationship between the cause and effect is very subtle. There may be a time lag, or other forces at play. This is called ‘dynamic complexity’. This leads to many of the erroneous explanations.

Powered by ScribeFire.