Random Management

As if to confirm my last two posts, I randomly came across an article in Skeptical Inquirer on randomness with this passage:

He confesses that he once joined the hunt for the secret of entrepreneurs who became millionaires. He found that success simply depended on taking risks (he called these people crisis hunters). Then he realized that if he had done the same study on bankrupts, he would have come up with the same answer. "The first counter-intuitive point is that a population entirely composed of bad managers will produce a small amount of great track records."

Thus, "if a twenty-five-year-old played Russian roulette, say, once a year, there would be a very slim possibility of him surviving until his fiftieth birthday-but, if there are enough players, say thousands of twenty-five-year-old players, we can expect to see a handful of (extremely rich) survivors (and a very large cemetery)."