It's systems, not smarts

I should say it's systems, more than smarts, because smarts matter - alot. But, smarts alone won't get you there because smart people stuck in bad systems create lousy results. Good systems + Smart people = SUCCESS Good systems + Dumb people = Struggle Bad systems + Smart people = Struggle Bad systems + Dumb people = Catastrophe I don't mean 'Dumb' pejoratively, but simply as a person who does not know alot about something in the problem domain. I've spent 10 years on a team of very smart people. When the good systems aren't in place, things don't go well. People wonder why. I'm telling you now why. The systems are not in place. What is a successful business? A system. Big companies and some smaller make alot of money. They have each created a system and that system creates money. You can have the most brilliant people in the world in-house, you still lose if you have the wrong systems. LTCM. Being an inspiring leader and all the other things all you aspiring billionaires are told are important. Many of them, not so important. You need a system that works and scales. It should be very easy to understand that. Finding the system is hard. It has to be. If it wasn't hard, finding it would have no value - and no reward. Money being a scarce commodity (and necessarily so), your big system is guaranteed to be difficult to find. When they say 'there is no free lunch', that is the reason why.