Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business

Summary

Get Lucky is a manual for serendipity: what it is, how it works and how to put it to work for you. As the pace of change accelerates around our businesses, and the sheer volume of information explodes, we're under incredible pressure to connect just in time with the people and ideas we need to thrive. We can no longer research, plan or process our way to success, though. No matter how many possibilities we can see, there will always be factors outside our sight and beyond our control. This uncertainty is not a problem, however - in fact, it brings tremendous opportunities, and it fosters one of the most important drivers of success in the modern economy: serendipity. Serendipity is chance interacting with creativity, and it is not an abstract, magical notion, but a practical skill. We can't know when serendipity will strike, but what we can do is foster the conditions for serendipity to occur early and often. There is a skill set of "planned serendipity" common to the world's most admired businesses, which the authors of Get Lucky distill into 8 elements: Preparedness: the skill of linking together seemingly unconnected events, information and people. Motion: the most basic way to increase chance collisions is quite simply to move around a lot. Activation: creating new constraints that release people from their rote behavior. Attraction: how to project a public presence that generates chance encounters. Connection: personal curiosity, professional reputation and accessibility to others. Commitment: not just having a goal, but exposing ourselves widely and publicly in pursuit of that goal. Porosity, or "the semi-permeable membrane": the free exchange of information and relationships between people inside and outside the organization. Divergence: the ability to explore and sometimes take alternative paths spurred by chance encounters, some of which may challenge our current thinking. The authors of Get Lucky capitalized on serendipitous encounters when they founded Get Satisfaction, their online services firm. Today, they help over 100,000 clients drive their own potential for serendipity. The stories of Get Satisfaction and its customers drive the narrative of Get Lucky, and the book includes rich examples from companies in a diverse range of sectors, including Avon (who capitalized on an unexpected use and user base of one of their skin care products), the Acumen Fund (one of the world's largest social investment funds), AirBNB (the popular social network for vacation rentals), Target, Google, Facebook, Walmart, and more. Serendipity is far more than blind luck, and it produces quantifiable results: breakthrough ideas, relationships that matter, effortless cooperation, actionable learning, and synchronized market timing. Serendipity is a direct challenge to business-as-usual, and planned serendipity is the key ingredient to growing a business in this time of accelerating change.