Both Gladwell and Colvin understand that great talent, by itself, is insufficient.  Both extol the value of sustained practice and discipline, with Colvin describing that sustained effort as “deliberative practice.”  Gladwell goes a step further and identifies environmental and marketplace conditions that enable some individuals and organizations to succeed when others of comparable talent and discipline fail.

The article adds one other dimension: the element of random distribution of environmental factors and circumstances that either lengthen the period of success or end it.  I believe that the combination of the two books and the article are exceptionally insightful in analyzing what enables sustained success.

At the same time, I want to discuss their implications:

•       While it is true that following the approach put together by these three authors is likely to succeed to sustained success, we must be far less confident that the formula always works.  The environmental conditions change in subtle ways over time to make continuation of success unlikely.  For example, almost inevitably, a successful business gains dominant market share and huge profits, which makes it a target for those who either resent the success, want to take what they believe to be their fair share, or want to tax or redistribute the profits. These forces include employees, executives, the government, community organizations, and large customers.  Walmart is a classic example of this. In effect, success contains the seeds of future failure.
•       While there is some degree of randomness to when successful businesses start to fail, there is an inevitability to the fact that, absent an external, artificial force that maintains a monopoly, the concentration of profits invites someone to develop a disruptive business model that captures the potential profit pool.  Thus, for example, Microsoft’s phenomenal success inevitably led to the Linux operation system and its progeny, Google as a web-based knowledge repository, and web-based applications service providers like Salesforce.com.  Therefore, an exceptionally successful has to be consistently vigilant for disruptive forces.
•        A public company that achieves long-term success will inevitably see its stock price reflect an unrealistic expectation of how long that success can last.  Cisco is a great company that has achieved phenomenal success over the last two decades.  However, its stock was bid up to unrealistic levels in the 1990.  While it continues to perform exceptionally well, it clearly will not reach the unrealistically high levels it reached in the late 1990′s for a very long time.  Those who bought shares at $80 are unlikely to recover what they paid, even if the stock market and the economy recover.
•       As business leaders, we must be humble and must never take success for granted.  We must also recognize that, as conditions change, we may find that others are better able to react to the new and randomly-distributed environmental conditions than we are.
•       Finally, nothing good or bad lasts forever, unless organizations or individuals choose to give up and stop fighting and learning.  While talent and deliberative practice and assessing what the environment gives us as opportunity and risk does not guarantee permanent unbroken success, it also gives us the ability to bounce back from failure, if we should choose to keep pursuing a dream.  Understanding that success and failure will both come, and both need to be managed with a realization that they will pass, are critical insights for success and happiness.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under Business Lessons, Personal Observations, Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.