The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing

I've just finished reading The Success Equation. Wow ! Professor Mauboussin has done it again, that is, providing an interesting, relevant and fun to read book that is highly instructive. This may be my favorite of his books. Mauboussin defines and dissects Skill and Luck and the roles of both in our lives with a particular emphasis on business, sports and investing. By no means though is this merely an "investment " or "business" book as the concepts apply to just about all aspects of life. How often do you hear someone say "good luck" , or "you're gonna need a lot of luck" with an almost cavalier or frivolous tone ? After reading The Success Equation I have a much greater respect for the role of LUCK in one's life. This, of course, is not meant to disparage SKILL but understanding and appreciating the relative roles each play (skill vs luck) can be instrumental in your decision process. The skill-luck "continuum" is described and depending where on the continuum a particular activity falls determines how one should deal with it. If you can better understand the relative role of skill and luck you are more likely to reach valid conclusions and make better decisions. Importantly, there is thoughtful discussion as to why luck is often underappreciated as a factor. Anyone who has read Mauboussin's work understands his prowess in unearthing and questioning so called "conventional wisdom" and generally thinking outside the box. This book continues on this path with each chapter providing real world examples from sports, business, and investing. Examples range from an analysis of Ted Williams batting average and the role of luck in superior performance of companies. The book is highly educational with numerous principles and concepts introduced in each chapter including the de Moivre equation (variation of the mean is inversely proportional to sample size) and discussions on bias, randomness, reversion to the mean, and many, many more. Even ideas very familiar to me such as the prominent role of luck in investing- especially in the short run - are described with new vigor with the Playboy Playmate example. You cannot avoid coming away from this read without learning something meaningful. As I mentioned there are many examples from the world of sports, business and investing and I started thinking about Luck and Skill in politics ! Like most of the author's work The Success Equation is comprehensive citing the work and studies of many luminaries with robust notes and bibliography for the curious to explore. Not everyone enjoys Statistics, ( I must admit being strange as I thoroughly enjoyed Stats in college and often attended two sections of the same class) but Mauboussin provides a good dose of education and understanding of Statistics in an easy to comprehend fashion like those rare college professors you wish were more plentiful. The final chapters put the ideas from the rest of the book to work with specific methods such as the use of checklists and a framework for "untangling" skill and luck which will lead to better decision making. This book is unlikely to collect dust on the shelf as its thought provoking nature will lead me back to well often.

I bought this book because it showed up more often than any other on some year-end lists of books that investment professionals recommended. It also deals with topics I spend a lot of time thinking about - the untangling of skill and luck, and what are the keys to success that a person has control over. It was well done if somewhat different from my expectations. The first 2/3 of the book are essentially a gentle introduction to statistics using examples from sports (sabermetrics), business strategy and investing, on the apparent assumption that most readers will be familiar with at least some of these contexts. I was not expecting this amount of the book to consist of explaining statistical analysis. I did not object as it was exceptionally lucidly written and he does an exceptional job of weaving the statistical points into the three fields he is using for context. The research he references is recent and there is quite a lot of it cited. The last third was more of the traditional "business book", making specific recommendations about how to use what you've just learned to become more intelligent about pursuing success. There are, however, no ground-breaking insights in here, the potential buyer should note. The book was shorter than I thought. About 20% of the pages are appendices, etc. As it is lucidly written, it was easy to plow through the roughly 220 pages of actual text. There were several really memorable anecdotes he inserts to illustrate points. I did, however, feel that several points were not well made. It is, I think, a common problem when writing about statistics - certainly journalists prove that nearly every time they write about a study in some field. It is really hard to keep the discipline of being precise and correct about what are always estimates and tendencies. The last example of this in the book is fresh in my mind so I will use it as the example - he says that "reversion to the mean" means that if you give a test on each of two consecutive weeks, the highest scorers on the first test will tend to get lower grades on the second, and conversely for the lowest scorers. I think this is clearly not true, except where the class is at a fairly even skill level to begin with, which is rare. In my experience, in any more diversified class, students tend to repeat their performance level fairly often and don't revert to the mean. 4.0 students tend to score highly most of the time! Also, he gets very sloppy discussing the "Matthew effect", which is a name for the phenomenon that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". He says this is all attributable to "luck" but does not use any of the statistical methods he discusses earlier to identify luck separately from skill to demonstrate his claim. His examples were poor as well: he cites the victory of VHS over Betamax and Windows OS over unspecific competition which I assume was Apple. He says the competing products were substantially similar and the resulting market share was "out of all proportion" to the cost of producing the marginal product. Obviously those examples are poor because in both cases the winning product was itself superseded or its market share cut into within a few years. Neither is a case of "the rich get richer" or "winner take all" unless you stopped measuring wins in the 90's. It was "winner wins for a while" - until it didn't. And I would disagree that the only relevant distinction is product quality and everything else is "luck". That is what business strategy is all about. MS had a better strategy initially than Apple. Apple was all about making clear it was the anti-IBM and going it alone. Unfortunately the marketplace was not as anti-IBM as Apple thought, and also MS's decision to stick with software turned out to create opportunities for lots of other businesses to step in and share and bear costs of constructing the marginal product while Apple had to fund and build a whole new computer to sell one additional copy of its software. So I don't see that as just plain "luck" at all. But, having got that off my chest, I thought it was a pretty well written book, although like most business books, it is far better explaining the past than solving for the future.

No problems

Great book

Complements Taleb's ideas about luck and it's rule in success in a very technical way.

Ein wirklich intelligentes Buch über Glück und Können und deren Unterscheidung. Das Buch verliert sich nicht in technischen Details, sondern stellt die Grundkonzepte zur Entwirrung von Können und Glück bei der Beurteilung von Erfolgen anschaulich dar. Wer wissen will, warum Fußball viel mehr ein Glücksspiel ist als Basketball, warum der Anteil von Glück in fast allen Sportarten ständig zunimmt, warum die intelligentesten Frauen Männer heiraten, die weniger intelligent sind als sie selbst und die kleinsten Söhne Väter haben, die größer sind, als sie selbst und wie das alles zusammenhängt, der findet in diesem Buch viel Futter fürs Hirn.

Great book with good information, some of it a bit baffling to me, but will probably read a few more times to get my head around it