{"id":1253,"date":"2012-11-28T17:54:35","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T12:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=1253"},"modified":"2012-11-28T17:54:35","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T12:24:35","slug":"1253","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2012\/11\/28\/1253\/","title":{"rendered":"Luck vs Pluck: The man who could have been Bill Gates"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Michael J. Mauboussin\u00a0is Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management in the United States. He is also the author of bestselling books on investing like \u00a0Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition\u00a0and\u00a0More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places. His latest book\u00a0The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and … <\/p>\n Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,43],"tags":[484,1391,1641,2146,2290,3370],"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"Vivek Kaul","author_link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/author\/vivekkaul\/"},"qubely_comment":0,"qubely_category":"Firstpost<\/a> Interview<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Michael J. Mauboussin\u00a0is Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management in the United States. He is also the author of bestselling books on investing like \u00a0Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition\u00a0and\u00a0More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places. His latest book\u00a0The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and…","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/b>When I was a senior in college, I didn\u2019t really know what I wanted to do with my career, but I knew I needed a job. Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment bank that was very successful at the time, came on campus to interview and I did well enough to be invited to New York City for a final round. So I put on my best suit and made the trip.
\nThe day of the interviews, we candidates were told that we would have six long interviews and just 10 minutes with the executive who ran the division. My interviews went fine, and then it was my turn to meet with the executive. Upon walking into his office, I noticed that he had a trash can that carried the emblem of the Washington Redskins, a professional American football team. Being a sports fan and having spent my last four years in Washington, D.C., I complimented him on the trash can. That comment hit in an emotional spot, and he launched into a discussion of his time in D.C., the virtues of sports, and the link between athletics and business. I sat and nodded, as 10 minutes stretched to 15.
\nYou got the job?
\n<\/b>I got the job, and accepted it. Indeed, my time at Drexel Burnham was extremely formative. After about six months into the program, one of the leaders pulled me aside. \u201cYou\u2019re doing fine in the programme,\u201d he started, \u201cbut I have to tell you something. The six interviewers voted against hiring you. But the top guy came down and insisted that we bring you in. I don\u2019t know what you said, but it sure worked.\u201d So I like to say that my career was launched by a trash can, and that was pure luck.
\nWhat was the broader point that you were trying to make through that example?
\n<\/b>The broader point is that luck permeates many aspects of our lives and we\u2019re frequently unaware of its role. So this book is about skill and luck, and includes the definition of each term, tools and methods to quantify the role of each, and what to do about it.
\n\u201cMost of the successes and failures we see are a combination of skill and luck that can prove maddeningly difficult to tease apart,\u201d you write. Can you explain that in detail?
\n<\/b>I open a chapter with the story of an entrepreneur who was born near Seattle who was a brilliant programmer and wrote code that effectively launched the personal computer revolution. He started a company that by 1980 had a dominant market share in the software that ran on the Intel chip. But the company\u2019s fate was sealed in 1981 when IBM came calling and sealed a deal. \u00a0Now if you know a little about Bill Gates, you can see how that series of facts fits him pretty well. But then I share the end of the story: this tech pioneer walked into a bar in California in 1994 and hit his head bluntly as a result of a fight or a fall\u2014the details were never clear. He died three days later. His name was Gary Kildall, and he has a floppy disk etched on his tombstone.\u00a0Chances are you\u2019ve never heard of Gary Kildall but you have heard of Bill Gates.
\nThat’s very interesting…
\n<\/b>When IBM executives first approached Microsoft about supplying an operating system for company’s new PC, Gates actually referred them to Digital Research (Kildall’s company). There are conflicting accounts of what happened at the meeting, but it’s fairly clear that Kildall didn’t see the significance of the IBM deal in the way that Gates did.
\nAnd what happened then?
\n<\/b>IBM struck a deal with Gates for a lookalike of Kildall’s product, CP\/M-86, that Gates had acquired. Once it was tweaked for the IBM PC, Microsoft renamed it PC-DOS and shipped it. After some wrangling by Kildall, IBM did agree to ship CP\/M-86 as an alternative operating system. IBM also set the prices for products. No operating system was included with the IBM PC, and everyone who bought a PC had to purchase an operating system. PC-DOS cost $40. CP\/M-86 cost $240. Guess which won. But IBM wasn’t the direct source of Microsoft’s fortune. Gates did cut a deal with IBM. But he also kept the right to licence PC-DOS to other companies. When the market for IBM PC clones took off, Microsoft rocketed away from competition.
\nSo what is the point?
\n<\/b>The fact is,\u00a0Kildall played his cards much differently than Gates did, and hence did well but enjoyed financial success vastly more modest than Gates. But it\u2019s tantalizing to consider the possibility that with a few tweaks, Kildall could have been Gates.Now the book acknowledges that untangling skill and luck can be imperfect, but even some sense of the relative contributions of the two can really help you understand history and, more importantly, make better predictions of the future.<\/div>\n
\nAny examples?<\/b><\/div>\n
\n(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at\u00a0vivek.kaul@gmail.com<\/a>)\n<\/div>\n