If success is what you're after, new research indicates that you're better off not following leaders like Bill Gates. Researchers at the University of Warwick and the Oxford Said Business School found that those with aspirations to move from good to great should instead focus on emulating individuals a few rungs down the proverbial success ladder. Say what?
It turns out that today's leaders are smart, talented and lucky. That last factor, luck, is what separates successful individuals from everyone else, according to the researchers. It's also why we can't look back on history's winners, follow their path and achieve the same results.
"Humans… often rely on the heuristic of learning from the most successful," said Chengwei Liu, an assistant strategy and behavioral science professor at Warwick Business School. "Our research found that even though observers were given clear feedback and incentives to be accurate in their judgment of performers, 58 percent of them still assumed the most successful were the most skilled when they are clearly not, mistaking luck for skill. This assumption is likely [to] lead to disappointment — even if you can imitate everything Bill Gates did, you will not be able to replicate his initial fortune. This also implies that rewarding the highest performers can be detrimental or even dangerous because imitators are unlikely to achieve exceptional performance without luck unless they take excessive risk or cheat, which may partly explain the recurrent financial crises and scandals."
Who should we study instead? Individuals who are lower in the pecking order, as Adrian Gaskell of the Chartered Management Institute notes. Such individuals' achievements are more closely tied to their actions and efforts, as they didn't have the benefit of luck or supportive circumstances found with the higher-ups.
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While Bill Gates had some luck, he made his luck. He saw a need for software and operating systems for micro computers. Thousands of others saw that need, but Bill acted on it. My father was much smarter than Bill Gates and understood computers from the ground up. If he had presented a operating system like Bill did, he would have looked at the hours involved and charged an appropriate amount. Bill presented a very low amount of manhour project… Read more »