Open Leadership model. Remember to be humble
Back in 2011, a good friend of mine had the opportunity to buy out the boutique professional services office he had been running on a salary for many years. Though highly skilled and bright, they had no experience assessing and valuing businesses to make deals, so they asked me to review the opportunity for them. They then chose to proceed and closed on the deal in August 2001.
We all know what then happened on September 11th that year.
As it turns out, the specific industry and niche they were in hugely benefitted for years to come due to the knock-on impact on the economy of that disaster (and all events create economic winners and losers, that is the way of the world). If they had agreed on the price to buy their business literally just one month later, the price would have been far higher, hence the chance to build capital value in their investment much reduced. My friend was and is very good at their speciality and had made a good deal to buy out their business. However, sometimes you need to be not just good, but also lucky, whether with timing or other factors. The luck they had with timing set them up for the next two decades.
Another example in the other direction was an investment I made in the late 90s in the early days of the internet, an angel investment in a start-up selling wifi hotspots to retailers. I would not have invested in this as could see it would become a crowded space, but the idea was that this would generate cash for a couple of years to fund related IP development that was the real potential asset. However, within a year or so a big telecommunications company started giving away hotspots and hotspot use to customers, wiping out the opportunity for us. I then had the uncomfortable experience of flying to a board meeting to deliver the message that it was time to wind things up as we were losing cash each month with no path out of that and therefore no longer a “going concern”. This was a great company with great IP under development and a great entrepreneur leading it, backed by a terrific group of enthusiastic angel investors. The thing is, sometimes events happen and you get unlucky. This was one such case.
I titled today’s post “humility, luck and timing” as a recurring theme in conversations of late is whether or not leaders are humble enough to acknowledge that good fortune can play a part in their success.
We are now entering a high interest environment and recessions are around the corner in many countries. There will be winners and there will be losers as always.
For the winners, my encouragement is for you to have the humility to recognise that to win “you must be good and you must be lucky”.
For the losers, please try to recognise that sometimes you can also be unlucky. The more you are able to self-assess what part of your failure was down to you and what part down to luck and timing, the sooner you can move on to the next opportunity!
As the model above notes, leaders of today and tomorrow need not only to be Brave and Hungry, but also Open and Humble