BookWorm: The Success Equation

In the last fifty years, Warren Buffett has recommended quite a few books in his lectures and writings. But there is one book that can boldly claim to have found its way to Warren Buffett’s reading desk. And that book is The Success Equation, authored by Michael Mauboussin.

Michael belongs to the breed of those rare investment strategists who have spent their life puzzling over the really crucial questions in the world of decision making. He is an expert in one of the most debatable topic in the field of business strategy i.e., role of luck in defining the success for an individual as well as an organization.

Apart from being a successful investor, Michael also teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Business. He has authored three other books out of which I have read two and found both of them equally insightful.

Let’s dive straight into the book first.

Many of us have heard the biblical story of David and Goliath. It tells how David, a young shepherd was pitted against a ferocious warrior named Goliath. David accepted the challenge when Goliath invited him for one to one fight. David was clearly an underdog. However, everybody was stunned when David killed the giant Goliath with a slingshot.

The truth is that it’s not easy to recognize the remarkable war strategy hidden inside the story. What strategy?

I’ll let you live with the curiosity for few more minutes and reveal the secret little later in this article.

The world we live in today has become terribly interconnected. This introduces a high degree of complexity which in turn leads to lot of randomness and unpredictability in the outcomes of events. When this randomness operates at an individual level, it translates to either good or bad luck.

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