Did you catch the end of the Alabama-Georgia College Football Championship game on Monday? 

It was incredible (unless, of course, you’re a Georgia fan). 

The game provided an awesome wisdom for Business executives and entrepreneurs seeking to progress their organizations from good to championship caliber.

Alabama, the betting favorite, fell behind early, and then at halftime benched their starting quarterback for 18 year old freshman Tua Tagovailoa, who made himself an Alabama and schoolyard legend by leading his team back to tie the game at the end of regulation play, and then winning it in overtime with a 41 yard touchdown bomb. 

In a sudden instant, unbridled joy broke out on the Alabama sidelines, leaving their famously grizzled and dour 66 year old coach Nick Saban, winner of five previous national championships, to say that “'I've never been happier in my life.”  

The sad flip of these emotions were seen and felt on the Georgia sideline, tears of heartbreak and disappointment to have worked so hard, to have come so close, and to have it slip away at the end. 

And in the game’s topsy turvy and quick ending, and then in the vast contrast of experience between that of the winning and losing team, the four letter word that stuck in my mind was luck.

Because the game was as even could be - with the smallest sum of the breaks and bounces and rotations of the ball separating the two teams. 

And with those breaks, heaped upon Alabama was status, brand enhancement, and yes money... 

...while upon Georgia for better or worse fell the opposite - some respect for sure for making it so far but for the most part just that quiet disappearance that is the fate of unlucky losers always.

Business is like this too, is it not?

Some companies have talent, work hard, get lucky, and win big (see Amazon, Facebook, Google, et al). 

So many other companies too have talent and hard-working cultures, but for almost impossible to pinpoint reasons for them that magic ingredient of luck just never gets sprinkled in. 

And those companies don’t win anyway near as big.

This “unfair” reality, just as it will for Georgia fans, has forever flummoxed and frustrated otherwise calm, rational and optimistic entrepreneurs and executives. 

But the paradox of luck is that while of course it greatly influences and determines whether or not a business is a big success, in the end...

...luck doesn’t matter.

Luck doesn't matter because nobody, except perhaps for our mothers, cares whether we have it or not.  

Luck doesn't matter because competitive business and society will never balance the “scales of justice” between those whose luck is good and those whose it isn’t. 

And of course luck doesn't matter because there's nothing we can do about it.

It is, by its nature and definition, random and thus out of our hands and power to effect or influence it. 

So this allows us to focus as businesspeople, just as both the Alabama and Georgia football players and coaches will once they get off their respective highs and lows from their awesome game. 

On the next practice. On the next deal. The next hire. The next new product.  

The next new company. 

And as we do, luck may or may not with us.  

But it's only when we stop in our pursuit of it that we truly lose and fail.

Let's never wish that kind of luck on anyone.

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