Business Luck...

From re:invention blog - for women entrepreneurs:

"In an article titled, 'Lucky or Smart' in this month's edition of Inc. Magazine, Bo Peabody of Village Ventures gives a nod to a similar topic, which he calls 'creating business luck.' The article lifts from Bo's new book of the same name. Admittedly, Bo is reworking Thomas Jefferson's writings. Jefferson once wrote: 'I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.' An excerpt from Bo Peabody's article:

Business luck can be created...you can create a company that gets lucky more often than the average company. Indeed, there is a pseudo-scientific formula for creating business luck. The key element is this: Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies...Serendipity -- the faculty of making fortuitous discoveries by chance -- causes lots of unexpected things to happen to a company. Some of these unexpected things are good. Some are bad. But because no one planned for the good things to happen, they appear as luck. In other words, the best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure that a lot of things happen."

How true. I've been lucky enough (grin) to experience this, more than once. Its amazing how, with a creative eye toward just about any situation, opportunity can be found. So what do you call it when you trip over opportunity over opportunity? Business luck - albeit with a huge amount of prep backing it up.

The challenge for some I've worked with is to craft and mold and CLOSE the opportunity when it presents. For me, way too many otherwise-successful business people either shy away from opportunity - they don't see it, see it and don't understand it, or understand it but won't take reasonable risk to capture it - or they want to analyze it to death. What I'd call business intuition is a very important part of any organization's psyche, not matter how much they plan and analyze and manage and lead.

Food for thought. How are you at creating luck in your business? Remember - the harder you work, the luckier you'll likely be!