I’ve never been Alan Sugar’s biggest fan, but I at least saw him as having some form of authority with respect to his prospective employees in The Apprentice. This opinion is changing very quickly now. Hearing him opine, “Sometimes there’s no smoke without fire and sometimes there’s not” is one thing, but it’s this week’s “there’s no luck in business” that really irritated me.
Firstly, it’s false. There’s plenty of luck in business, if what you mean by luck is chance that happens to work out in your favour or against you. In fact there are many statistical analyses of business success and failure which demonstrate that there’s far more attributable to random chance than there is to having particular skills (for more on that I highly recommend The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow).
Secondly, it’s arrogant. One has to think awfully highly of oneself in order to say such a thing. After all, he’s basically saying that everything that he ever achieved in business was down to hard work or skill, never to something that just happened to go his way in the vast pool of variables that can influence any one business outcome.
Finally, it’s obviously false. After all, he is saying this on a show where hundreds, possibly thousands of applicants are whittled down to a mere twelve, who very likely could easily have been switched with another applicant. After they were selected, one of these people had to drop out early on because of a family crisis. Then the rest go through a series of tasks where often the difference between success or failure is so narrow that it may as well have gone the other way if, say, a particular customer had decided to stay at home instead of go out shopping that day. Finally, it gets down to two people and the winner out of those lands a very nice job in Alan’s business. Are we really so dull as to believe that luck has nothing to do with this process?
It’s not as if I put much stock in his opinions before, but from now on I treat Alan Sugar the same as any of his potential employees on The Apprentice: frequently wrong, fit for ridicule, and with a high probability of being a bit of a cock. Then again, there’s always the chance he meant “Sometimes there’s no luck in business, and sometimes there’s not.”
