People can do everything right and still lose

Business Recorder · 16/10/2026، 5:39:52 PM

One of the harder things to accept in professional life is that a good decision does not always produce a good result. We know this, but we rarely behave as if we do. When a deal closes, we tend to assume the strategy was right. When a business struggles, it becomes surprisingly easy to explain what the founder should have done differently. Someone gets promoted and we attribute it to performance. Someone else does not and starts wondering what they lacked. The outcome becomes the evidence. That is not always a good way to judge a decision. Over the years, I have seen strong proposals lose for reasons that had very little to do with the proposal itself. The other side already had a relationship. Someone internally preferred another vendor. The budget changed. In some cases, the decision had practically been made before the final meeting took place. I have also seen the opposite. Average preparation, questionable assumptions, fortunate timing, and the result still went in the right direction. Most of us would prefer effort, judgement and outcome to remain closely connected. It makes life easier to understand. Work hard, prepare well, make sensible choices and the result should eventually follow. Except there are too many variables we do not control. Markets move. People change their minds. Organisations restructure. A person you hired carefully does not work out. A role that looked right turns out to be completely wrong. A good product arrives at the wrong time. A company can make several perfectly reasonable decisions and still run out of money. None of this is an argument against accountability. Calling every failure bad luck would be just as foolish as assuming every success proves good judgement. The useful distinction is between the quality of the decision and the quality of the result. Given what I knew at the time, was this a sensible call? Did I ask the right questions? Did I understand what could go wrong? Was I ignoring information because I did not like wh