Naked Strategy 2 - Facebook, Fortune and Fate

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Are super-rich CEOs smart or lucky? Is being lucky a skill? Can sleeping in late make you more money than getting in early? Is being in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing something you can learn?

Join Max McKeown and Laurence Haughton as they make each other laugh while discovering the secrets of Facebook, Fortune, & Fate.

So here's the question. Has Facebook become the phenomenon it is thanks to founder Mark Zuckerberg's brilliant strategy or thanks to his knack for landing lucky breaks – and his unwillingness to get up in the morning, even for a meeting with Microsoft. And was it by accident or design that Yahoo's share price topped $400 in its heyday under founder Jerry Yang?

Max argues that luck is a hugely under-estimated force in the business world and that many enterprises owe much of their success to good luck rather than good strategy.

Of course, this begs the question, is it just luck that makes somebody lucky? Or are lucky people really different? Can luck actually be "taught" – as one psychologist believes it can. What are the things we can do to make ourselves more lucky - and what type of people can be guaranteed to have no luck at all.

All of which illustrates the way that luck can be made (self-fulfilling prophecy) through attitude, expectation, and reframing catastrophe.

Laurence Haughton is a writer, speaker, and a management consultant specializing in strategic execution.

He is the author of "It's Not What You Say... It's What You Do – How Following Through at Every Level Can Make or Break Your Company" and co-authored "It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow", the bestselling book on making speed a competitive advantage in business.

Max McKeown is Europe's unorthodox answer to Tom Peters. He works as a strategic adviser for four of the five most admired companies in the world and is a well-known speaker on subjects including innovation, engagement, human potential, customer experience, marketing, team building, and competitive advantage.

Max has written six books, including "E-Customer, an insight into evolving customer behavior", "Why They Don't Buy", an end to end guide to building profitable customer relationships across multiple channels, and "Unshrink, featuring the myths that stop our people doing their best work and a set of new principles to engage their interest and ability

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Show synopsis

Naked Strategy is a monthly x-ray for business leaders. Presented by Laurence Haughton and Max McKeown, the show shines the spotlight on the strategic issues that lurk behind the business news headlines.

If you think that it is irreverent and perverse - that's great! Naked Strategy's mission is to illuminate, to connect the dots that link what we read and are told with what is really going on at work and in the world.