Timing and luck

Are successful people right, lucky or both?

In the mid-1980s, I listened to Nobel prize-winning finance professor, William Sharpe, address the Hong Kong Society of Securities Analysts.

Sharpe was one of our heroes, having developed the Capital Asset Pricing Model, or CAPM. (We don’t need to go into that here but for investment geeks CAPM is up there with sex).

Then the professor told us it was impossible to consistently beat the market.

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What I learned at the Olympics

Focus on the now, not the result.

My daughter, an equestrian, rode for Australia at the London Olympics.

Her campaign, however, started long before that. She moved herself and her horse to Germany almost two years before to lift her game. She needed to train and compete at the elite level. Olympians in any sport do much the same.

Performance on the day is the ultimate test, but the preparation is crucial. It requires intense commitment in the right environment.

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Beer Mat Strategy

A few ideas can be better than a lot.

What was Steve Jobs first strategic call when he returned to Apple in 1997?

According to biographer, Walter Isaacson, he slashed 90% of existing product development. On a whiteboard he drew a simple alternative plan.

It was a two-by-two matrix. The columns were Consumer and Pro; the rows were Desktop and Portable. Four market segments; four products. Everything else was eliminated. Apple was reborn.

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Management and regulation

There’s a positive to compliance.

A key part of assessing a business acquisition is the “due diligence” process. Few people will buy a venture without thoroughly kicking the tyres.

Sometimes it’s a modest exercise focusing on obvious concerns. In more sophisticated acquisitions, it involves a prolonged examination of every aspect of the business in question. Buyers don’t just want to know the upside; they also want to check the downside.

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What you are thinking is not what will happen

The problems with planning.

Do businesses turn out exactly like the business plan? None of mine did. Even my most sophisticated spreadsheets never produced anything like the numbers I forecast. Personal plans were not much different.

Some have gone worse, some have gone better, but none mirrored the profile I had so carefully constructed. The late John Lennon was not far off the mark: “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.”

Does that mean planning is a wasted exercise?

I don’t know whether Lennon lived by that quote or was just making an observation.

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