[TheOtherHobbes]

And yet 1 - those people were also there when the disaster happened.

And yet 2 - good luck getting the business back up to a reasonable operating volume with just those people.

And yet 3 - in many failures the people at that level are directly responsible for the failure.

Force majeure lightning-strike failures are very much a minority. Many businesses fail because of avoidable mistakes made by poor management. Please explain why management should be rewarded for that.

[darkerside]

Luck plays into business so much now than people assume. Incomplete information and unpredictable black swan events mean you're not making decisions with certainty. You make the best decision with the information you have, try not to spend more time once you get to diminishing returns, and you hope things work out. Executive talent will not ensure success, but it can raise the odds. But on the other side, a dearth of executive talent can still ensure defeat.

[gbacon]

This idea that success is all about, mostly about, or largely about luck is intellectually lazy, is extremely misleading, and stokes envy. None of that benefits society.

To benefit from luck, you have to put yourself in position to get lucky, which does not happen by accident. There is all the difference in the world between good timing and dumb luck. Yes, we can all think of anecdotes where someone did buffoonishly stumble into good fortune, but insisting that this is a fair representative of all cases is the fallacy of composition.

[darkerside]

I feel like you only read the first half of my comment...