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Life Acumen at Work. Podcast.

The Story We Tell About Career Success

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Think for a moment about one achievement in your corporate career that you are genuinely proud of. Maybe it was building a business, turning around a difficult situation, getting that corner office role, making a call that everyone questioned at the time, which eventually turned out to be right. Or perhaps simply reaching a place professionally that 20 years ago you were not entirely sure you would reach. Now imagine someone asks you a very simple question. What made that happen? Most of us would probably begin with things we did. I worked hard, I was not risk averse, I made a few good decisions, I stayed when others left, I built the right team, I saw an opportunity, I persisted, and all of that may be completely true. But there's another question that we ask much less often. What had to be true around me for those qualities to produce the result they did? Who had to believe in me? Which market had to open? Which competitor had to stumble? Which technology had to arrive? Which boss had to take a chance on me? Which opportunity happened to appear at roughly the moment I was ready for it? And perhaps most interestingly, which of those things have slowly disappeared from the story I now tell myself about my success? Welcome to Life Acumen at work. Today I want to explore a question that I think becomes more interesting the more successful you've been. What actually shaped your corporate success? And I don't mean this as an exercise in false modesty. This isn't one of those conversations where we pretend that achievement is somehow embarrassing. Capability matters, judgment matters, hard work matters, courage matters, persistence matters. There are leaders who repeatedly create good outcomes because they are very good at what they do. The interesting question is whether those things are the whole explanation. Because success does something slightly strange to memory. Once we know how the story ended, the journey begins to look more inevitable than it actually was. We remember the decisions that worked. We remember the convictions we held. We remember the obstacles we overcame. What becomes harder to remember is just how uncertain everything felt when we were actually living through it. The promotion now looks like the obvious recognition of your potential. But perhaps there were three other people who could easily have been selected. The business now looks like a brilliant strategic move. But perhaps the market became favorable six months after you entered it. A career can slowly become a beautifully edited documentary in which the scenes that didn't fit the eventual storyline have been left on the cutting room floor. And the central character naturally is us. There is some interesting research behind this. Some years ago, researchers Matthew Hayward and Donald Hambrick examined 106 large corporate acquisitions. They were interested in what they called CEO hubris. Essentially, what happens when confidence in one's ability becomes exaggerated? What they found was pretty striking. The more signs of CEO hubris they saw, glowing media coverage of the CEO, strong recent company performance, and a heightened sense of self-importance, the larger the premium the company tended to pay. And on average, those deals were followed by losses in shareholder value correlating to CEO hubris. Put simply, the greater the hubris and the higher the premium, the greater the eventual loss. Now, I wouldn't hear that and conclude success makes leaders arrogant. That's too simplistic. The more interesting possibility is this. Success becomes evidence in our minds. You make a difficult call, it works. You make another one, that works too. People begin asking how you do it. You get invited to speak about your leadership philosophy. Maybe a magazine puts you on a list. And very gradually, a perfectly reasonable belief. I contributed significantly to those outcomes can become a much bigger belief. I understand why these outcomes happened. And eventually, that belief gets consolidated as I can make them happen again. That's where success can become slightly dangerous. Not because confidence is bad, but because the lesson we extract from success may be less reliable than the success itself.

When Capability Meets the Right Moment

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Michael Mauboussin explores this beautifully in his book The Success Equation. His argument is that many important outcomes sit somewhere on a continuum between skill and luck. And the difficult part is not recognizing that both exist. We all know that intellectually. The difficult part is working out how much of each was operating in a particular outcome. Because skill and luck don't arrive wearing name badges, they arrive together. Consider Netflix. Today its move into streaming looks almost inevitable. An example of leadership seeing the future before others did. And there was real foresight. No one is questioning that. When Netflix introduced streaming in 2007, Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, said the company had believed for years that internet delivery was the future. But there was another part of the story. Broadband speeds were improving, connected devices were spreading, consumer behavior was beginning to shift. Imagine the same strategic insight 10 years earlier. Same leader, same ambition, same conviction. Maybe very different outcome. That doesn't take anything away from Netflix's leadership. The company still had to make difficult choices, build the product, license content, and disrupt its own successful DVD business. So the story isn't Netflix was brilliant or Netflix was lucky. The story is Netflix was brilliant and Netflix also happened to be lucky. So it reminds us of something important. Capability often becomes visible when it meets the right moment. And careers can work the same way. Sometimes we succeed because we became better. And sometimes the environment changed in a way that made what we were already good at suddenly much more valuable. But most often it's both. The difficulty is that years later we tend to remember the capability and forget the conditions that allowed it to matter. TCS, an Indian IT major, offers a similar example. By the late 1990s, it had already spent years building IT expertise and serving global clients. Then Y2K arrived. Suddenly, companies around the world urgently needed help preparing the systems for the year 2000. TCS was ready. It had the experience, the people, and the capability to respond at scale. But the timing mattered too. Y2K did not create TCS strengths. It created a moment in which those strengths became unusually valuable. And that's often how success works. The capability is real, so is the context that suddenly makes that capability matter much more. That's a very different interpretation of success. The capability was real, the timing was also real. And one does not invalidate the other. Economist Robert Frank makes a similar argument in his book Success and Luck. His point is that successful people are not secretly undeserving. In fact, they are almost always talented and hardworking. But very few would have succeeded if they hadn't been lucky too. His argument is that very large outcomes often occur when talent and effort intersect with opportunities and circumstances that are not entirely under our control. The difficulty is that effort is easy to remember, circumstance is easy to

The People Hidden Inside Our Career Success

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forget. And there's another element we forget. Surprisingly easily, other people. Think about your career for a moment. There are probably people you can immediately identify as mentors, people who gave you advice, people who taught you something. But sponsorship is often less visible than mentorship. Somebody mentioned your name after you left the room. Somebody said, I think she can handle this. Somebody said, give him the assignment. Somebody persuaded another executive that you are ready before you are entirely certain yourself. Someone protected you after an early mistake. Someone gave you access to a customer. Someone moved to another role and suddenly there was an opening. Somebody resigned. A hundred small human events change the probability of what happened next. And you are not present from many of them. McKinsey has written about what it calls experience capital. The capabilities we accumulate through the work we actually get the opportunity to do. Their work emphasizes something very important. Access to those career-building experiences is not distributed evenly, and sponsorship can materially affect who gets these opportunities. That means part of what we eventually call capability was itself shaped by opportunity. I became capable partly because somebody let me do something that made me more capable. And this isn't only about careers, it applies at the very top of organizations. We love the phrase CEO-led transformation, and sometimes that's appropriate. But no CEO has personally transformed an organization of 50,000 people. Thousands of people translated intention into reality. Some of them made choices the CEO never knew about. Some solved problems that never reached the executive committee. Some prevented failures that never became visible. And yet, when the turnaround story gets written, there's usually one photograph on the cover. There's actually a body of research around something called CEO celebrity that captures this rather well. In a strategic management journal article, researchers Matthew Hayward, Violina Rindova, and Timothy Pollock examined the way successful companies get explained. Their argument was that when a company performs exceptionally well, journalists have a tendency to attribute the firm's actions and its performance to the CEO. And here's the part I find particularly interesting. The researchers found that when a company does very well, people often give most of the credit to the CEO while overlooking the role of timing, circumstances, and the many other people who contributed. In other words, a complex organizational achievement gradually becomes personalized. Thousands of contributions become one leadership story. The team doesn't necessarily disappear from reality, it disappears from the explanation. And perhaps that's one reason successful leaders themselves can begin to misremember what produced the success. Because after hearing some version of she transformed the company, he built the business, she created the culture, he turned the organization around, repeated often enough. It's remarkably easy to forget just how many people and circumstances are hidden inside that sentence. Leadership may have mattered enormously, but it is still different from sole authorship. And perhaps the more successful the organization becomes, the more important it is for the person whose photograph appears on the cover to remember all the people who don't appear in that

What Your Success Is Telling You Now

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photograph. There's a Buddhist idea that I've always found interesting in this context. It's the idea of dependent arising or dependent origination. I'm simplifying a much richer spiritual idea here, but the basic intuition is that phenomena do not arise independently. They arise through multiple causes and conditions coming together. I wouldn't turn that into a management philosophy. But as a way of looking at success, I think it's surprisingly useful. Your achievement can be completely real without being independently caused by you. Your contribution can be substantial without being the entire explanation. That feels like a much more mature way to hold success. Not, I did not deserve this, and not I made this happen. But I played an important part in something that many conditions made possible. There is a freedom in seeing your career that way. It means you can be proud without needing to make yourself the sole author. And perhaps it changes the way you judge other people too. Because if we are inclined to overattribute our own good outcomes to skill, we can easily make the opposite mistake with someone else's failure. They didn't get the promotion, so perhaps they were not strong enough. Their business struggled, so perhaps they were not strategic enough. Their startup failed, so perhaps they were not good entrepreneurs. Their transformation stalled, so perhaps they were not decisive enough. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes it isn't. Context doesn't only help people succeed, context also makes very capable people look ordinary. So here's something you might try over the next day or two. Choose one achievement you're particularly proud of. Not your whole career, just one. And retell the story to yourself. But for the first few minutes, remove the word I. What had the organization already built before you arrived? Who gave you the opportunity? Who made your performance possible? What changed in the market? What changed in technology? Which relationship mattered? Which mistake did you make that did not become expensive? And only after you've reconstructed that landscape, put yourself back into the story. Not smaller, but just more accurately. Then perhaps ask one more question. Which of those favorable conditions am I now in a position to create for somebody else? Maybe that's giving someone an assignment slightly before they are completely ready. Maybe it's mentioning someone's name in a room that they are not yet invited into. Maybe it's sharing credit more precisely. Maybe it's looking again at somebody whose performance seems average and asking whether the environment is allowing their strengths to become visible. Because there's an interesting responsibility that comes with recognizing the role of context in our own success. Eventually we become part of somebody else's context. We become the boss who gives the opportunity, the colleague who makes the introduction, the board member who creates space, the customer who takes the chance, the person who says, I think she is ready. And perhaps that's where this reflection ultimately leads. Not toward modesty, toward stewardship. You don't have to think less of what you have achieved. You might simply see more of what made it possible. Your judgment mattered, your work mattered, your courage mattered, and so did timing and relationships and institutions and opportunities. And people whose names may never appear in the story. Success is rarely one thing. Perhaps wisdom is being able to hold all of those things together without canceling any of them out. So I will leave you with this. When you think about everything that has brought you where you are today, what shaped your corporate success that your success story no longer remembers? If this question brought someone to mind, a colleague, a former boss, a mentor, perhaps someone you haven't thought about for years, maybe send this episode to them. Or perhaps simply send them a note. Thank you for joining me on Life Acumen at Work. If this episode gave you a reason to look back at your own journey a little differently, stay with that reflection. Not just with what you did well, but with what became possible because of the people, timing, opportunities, and circumstances around you. And if you enjoy these reflections on leadership, work and the choices that shape us, you can follow Life Acumen at Work and join me for the next conversation. Until then, stay generous in how you remember your own success. And as you move forward, notice not only the opportunities you were given, but the ones you now have the chance to create for someone else.