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The Window and the Mirror
Alan Wurtzel’s plow horse comment is fascinating in light of two other
facts. First, he holds a doctor of jurisprudence degree from Yale-clearly,
his plow horse nature had nothing to do with a lack of intelligence. Sec-
ond, his plow horse approach set the stage for truly best in show results. Let
me put it this way: If you had to choose between $1 invested in Circuit
City or $1 invested in General Electric on the day that the legendary Jack
Welch took over GE in 1981 and held to January 1,2000, you would have
been better off with Circuit City-by six times.46 Not a bad performance,
for a plow horse.
You might expect that extraordinary results like these would lead Alan
Wurtzel to discuss the brilliant decisions he made. But when we asked
him to list the top five factors in his company’s transformation, ranked by
importance, Wurtzel gave a surprising answer: The number one factor
was luck. “We were in a great industry, with the wind at our backs.”
We pushed back, pointing out that we selected the good-to-great com-
panies based on performance that surpassed their industry’s average. Fur-
thermore, the comparison company (Silo) was in the same industry, with
the same wind and probably bigger sails! We debated the point for a few
minutes, with Wurtzel continuing his preference for attributing much of
his success to just being in the right place at the right time. Later, when
asked to discuss the factors behind the enduring…