“Good, or Got Lucky?”
“To the victor belongs the spoils” is the famous quote by New York Senator William Learned Marcy (1786-1857), recited in the U. S. Senate, 25 January 1832. This one sure gets lots of traffic. It brings with it a lot of imagery of the uglier side of politics, graft and an all or nothing perspective. I can recall, as I read world history in high school, images of conquerors doing all the pillaging and other stuff. Certainly, the principle still has legs today, ugly legs at that.
An interesting cousin to that principle is the one, “To the survivor belongs the story.” We have to always apply it as a warning when reading accounts of witnesses, history, and especially pundits. We should reflect on whether the advice or point of view we’re getting is supportable beyond the sole attribute of survivorship, since survivorship can be due to chance, accident, or many other possibilities. Survivor bias provides a limited retrospective (backward looking view) image, one that does not include participants that did not survive. I can’t truthfully tell you about what I did not see, because I did not see it, so I may just fill in some of the gaps with what must have happened. How often might that be happening?
When we combine the victor-spoils and survivor-story couplings we end up with the perfect formula for revisionism (cooking the history books). This bias is not limited to a particular discipline and can affect our judgments and subsequent actions across our businesses, health, investments, purchases, sales, insurance coverage, and even misplaced confidence or fear. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and other indices continually replace the defunct companies with survivor companies, so it’s less industrial than it used to be.
Survivorship bias is, interestingly, pervasive, be it entertainment and entertainers, sports and commentary, fashion and trends, lots more, and often, management principles. It’s the last one, management principles that deserves more of our attention. Given the experience of the last year, particularly some of the devastation and shifts between winners and losers, survivors will be the ones telling the story about winning on the back end of this mess. Does the condition of survival extend to the validity of the stories? Are there more or fewer heroes that did not survive military battles than the ones that did?
It is important to study survival. It’s important because often there is critical knowledge to be gained and real learning and improvement to be harvested. Survival by accident or random chance is no crime as long as we don’t invent a cause, or create new rules, or lucky charms. Understanding why is the real gain and skepticism is an essential lens.
So, which is it better, to be good or to be lucky? The obvious answer is Yes!
