Page 59 - Executive Warfare

Attitude, Risk, and Luck

they had gotten so deeply into it and were so delighted to be fully
employed that they could no longer see the forest for the trees. The soft-
ware they were developing was actually
going to be obsolete by the time they
finished. For all we were spending, we’d GOOD LUCK OFTEN
wind up behind our competitors. TAKES THE FORM
One of the characters in my world OF HAVING THE
finally saw that this was insanity, and RIGHT SKILLS AT
she shared that insight with me. THE RIGHT MOMENT.
For over a year, I had been extolling
the virtues of this project to my bosses.
Now I had to go to them and say, “Look, we’re going to have to write off
the $75 million we have into this. And we still don’t have a system that
works well because we have to go back to the old system.”
I was chastised for letting the project go on longer than it should have,
but I was also praised for not delaying any longer.
Know when to take your punishment for a bad bet. If I had waited
another year and a half to take mine, it would have been worse. It would
have been, “You, too, will be heading toward Siberia on a hay wagon.”

LUCK: Smarter Than Reaching for the Brass Ring
Is Letting It Slap You in the Nose
There is no such thing in this world as a pure meritocracy. Nobody gets to
the top without being lucky. Luck happens to the most deserving of peo-
ple and some of the most undeserving. It seems to me that George W. Bush
got pretty lucky in 2000. It could just as easily have gone the other way.
When the New York Times asked Time Warner Chairman Richard Par-
sons in 2006 how he wound up running the company, he answered mod-
estly, “Only in America. It’s a society where a certain level of energy, grit,
competence, and a huge dollop of luck enable somebody to go from the
very bottom to the very top, or from the very top to the very bottom.”

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