Lucky firms

In the latest Harvard Business Review there's an article by a professor from UT Austin and a couple of Deloitte consultants that argues that luck has as much to do as anything with the success of the companies written up in various studies of "great" companies. This seems pretty obvious--I was looking at Jim Collins' Good to Great recently and it really hits you when he's talking about Circuit City after driving past the guy holding the Everything Must Go sign as I drive into Nashville every day.