The Advice That Survived
There’s an HBR conversation with a title I can’t stop turning over: Are great leaders truly great — or just lucky? It’s a good question to ask about other people. It’s a much harder one to ask about the advice you personally take.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re stretched thin and hungry for a shortcut: almost all the business advice you inhale comes from the people it worked for. By definition. The founder who bet the company on a bold repositioning and won writes the LinkedIn post, does the podcast, gets the book deal. The founder who made the identical bet and sank quietly does not.
You are getting your strategy from the planes that came back.
The bullet holes you can’t see
In the Second World War, the U.S. military had a problem: bombers kept getting shot down, and they wanted to add armor. They studied the planes returning from missions and mapped where the bullet holes clustered — the wings, the fuselage, the tail. The obvious move was to armor the spots taking the most fire.
A statistician named Abraham Wald, working with the Statistical Research Group at Columbia, told them they had it exactly backwards. The holes showed where a plane could get hit and still make it home. The armor belonged where the returning planes had no holes — the engines, the cockpit — because the planes hit there never came back to be counted.
The whole insight is in the missing data.
Your advice feed is a room full of survivors
Sit with that the next time a wildly successful founder tells you the one thing that made the difference. Maybe it did. Or maybe it was the bullet hole in the wing, and the actual reason they made it home is something they can’t see: timing, a competitor’s unforced error, a hire who happened to be brilliant, six weeks of luck stacked at the right moment. They’re not lying to you. Survivors always believe the story. The narrative arrives after the survival and gets to sound like the cause.
The hundred founders who did the same brave thing and didn’t make it aren’t in your feed. The failures don’t do press. So the advice that reaches you isn’t the advice that works — it’s the advice that survived.
What to do with this, lightly
Hold their certainty a little more loosely than they hold it themselves — and get greedy about the missing data. When someone tells you what worked, ask the quieter question: how many people did this exact thing and it didn’t work? Go find one person the same bet failed for, and listen just as hard. The failures are where the armor goes.
Mostly, though, it’s a relief. If the winners are partly lucky, your own rough patches aren’t the verdict the survivor stories imply. There was never one trick. There were a lot of planes in the air, and some plain luck about where the holes landed.
Do the unglamorous things well, long enough to stay in the sample. Staying in the air is most of it.
Sources: Mangel, M., & Samaniego, F. J. (1984), “Abraham Wald’s Work on Aircraft Survivability,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 79(386), documenting Wald’s 1943 work for the Statistical Research Group, Columbia University.
