Jim Collins Says He Got Lucky With Good to Great. He's Wrong. Here's Why.
The more accurate read: the breakthrough was inevitable, and a function of math not luck.
Good to Great didn't happen because lightning struck where it was unlikely to strike. It happened because Collins put lightning rod after lightning rod in a place where lightning storms would occur often for him because of what he was and is encoded to do.
The point: he was operating in a domain where a breakthrough was structurally inevitable, as long as he kept working.
If it hadn't been Good to Great, it would have been the next at-bat, as long as he took it.
The variable that turns a small chance into a near-certainty isn't insight, selectivity, or timing. It's volume of exposure, in the right domain, over time. You could stop reading now. That's all you need to know.
Ironically, Collins introduced two ideas that cut against the grain of his "I got lucky" comment.
The first is Return on Luck. What separates great companies isn't how much luck they get. It's how much they capitalize on the luck they receive. Everyone gets lucky sometimes. Not everyone capitalizes.
The second is what he calls "NATALIE" Moments. Certain windows in life return outsized results on invested effort. The same decision, the same connection, the same hour of work compounds into something significant in some seasons, and doesn't in others. The windows are not equal.
The mistake is thinking you have to line up the shot in advance so you see how it becomes a breakthrough. You can't. Instead, you have to be in a position where luck is likely to occur and then take a bunch of at-bats.
Don't assume the luck event or the Natalie Moment arrives, and you then respond. You place yourself where luck is likely to show up so it's only a matter of time.
Nassim Taleb adds to this with the inverse of his time versus ensemble risk concept.
Ensemble risk: a hundred people each take a small-probability gamble once. The average outcome across the group reflects the probability. Almost nobody has a bad outcome. We look at this and say the risks are small.
Time risk: one person takes the same gamble a hundred times. The small probability doesn't stay small when it's multiplied for the same person over a bunch of time. Point being, if there's a small probability of ruin, repeat exposure makes ruin inevitable.
Taleb's argument: if the downside is catastrophic, avoid repeat exposure. A 1% chance of ruin taken 100 times is a near certainty.
The inverse holds.
A small probability of breakthrough, in a repeat-exposure situation in the right domain, becomes a near-certainty of breakthrough over time. Same math applied to the upside.
Time is the infinite variable. As long as it's multiplying something greater than zero, it solves for the result through size alone.
So, take your shots. Don't take a shot. Take a pattern of them in a target-rich environment.
That's what Collins actually did. He wasn't trying to identify the breakthrough book and execute it. He was in the business of rigorous research, written accessibly, and published continuously. Good to Great was a rep. A great one, obviously. But a rep. If it hadn't been the home run, it would have been another because he was in a domain where the lightning was going to strike, and he kept depositing lightning rods.
Now ask this. How many Jim Collinses are out there unknown to us because they are trying to line up their Good to Great before they take the shot?
Waiting for the bolt to leave the sky before they run to the spot where it strikes.
Our job is to put a regular stream of non-zero multipliers in the right spots. "Right spot" is defined via negativa: a place where it isn't dumb for us to take a bunch of at-bats.
Gretzky said it simply: You miss 100% of the shots you never take.
The calibration isn't zero versus spray. It isn't stop caring about quality. It's this: take likely and available shots well, without slowing down to audit whether this particular one is "the one."
You can't ask a fit person which is the one push-up that changed everything. Because the answer is, they all did.
Ask yourself this. Where will lightning invariably strike for you over the next three years, and how can you put a lightning rod there every day until you have a field full of them?
Sets and reps.
— C
Finding your pattern and its downstream effects is hard to do alone. I work with groups of 7–12 CEOs, Founders and Owners who do it together. See my contact info if you're interested.