• The 60 Second Leader
  • Seven Secrets of Inspired Leaders
  • The Little Book of Leadership
  • Leadership Hub for Corporates
  • Learning to Live with Huntington's Disease
 

The gorilla and the basketball

I’ve been researching luck and leadership for the 60 Second Leader; specifically, whether you can make your own luck.

The first thing I discovered is that it’s an apocryphal story that, before he appointed a new general, Napoleon used to ask one critical question: “But, is he lucky?” Shame. I liked that story.

Then I was reminded of this experiment on missed opportunity: 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 walks on in the background, beats his chest, then walks 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 you 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.

Serendipity – bumping into something useful – is part of luck. But openness to the new thing – a prepared mind primed to spot and grab opportunity – is the other half. The luck factor is part-external and part-internal. The two halves need to connect or you walk right on by.

There is an obvious, but not consistent, 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, and the more you allow your people to try different things, the luckier you are likely to become.

The psychologist and former magician (!) Richard Wisemanhas done some of the most interesting work on luck and business lately. Wiseman’s work veers towards positive thinking and self-help. But, he insists that lucky thinking patterns create real-world business impact. He experimented with making 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%.

(1) Did You Spot The Gorilla? How to recognize hidden opportunities in your life, Richard WisemanI’ve been researching luck and leadership for the 60 Second Leader; specifically, whether you can make your own luck.

The first thing I discovered is that it’s an apocryphal story that, before he appointed a new general, Napoleon used to ask one critical question: “But, is he lucky?” Shame. I liked that story.

Then I was reminded of this experiment on missed opportunity: 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 walks on in the background, beats his chest, then walks 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 you 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.

Serendipity – bumping into something useful – is part of luck. But openness to the new thing – a prepared mind primed to spot and grab opportunity – is the other half. The luck factor is part-external and part-internal. The two halves need to connect or you walk right on by.

There is an obvious, but not consistent, 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, and the more you allow your people to try different things, the luckier you are likely to become.

The psychologist and former magician (!) Richard Wisemanhas done some of the most interesting work on luck and business lately. Wiseman’s work veers towards positive thinking and self-help. But, he insists that lucky thinking patterns create real-world business impact. He experimented with making 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%.

(1) Did You Spot The Gorilla? How to recognize hidden opportunities in your life, Richard Wiseman


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*