Smart or Lucky?: How Technology Leaders Turn Chance into Success

San Francisco, CA – What are emerging leaders like Google, Amazon.com, salesforce.com and hundreds of others teaching us about the path to success? To be successful in any highly competitive market, you have to be smart, but you also have to be lucky by being at the right place at the right time. The most successful technology entrepreneurs understand the value of the combination of luck and smarts and make it work for them.

Using her insider experiences with hundreds of successful and failed technology companies over three decades, two bubbles and one burst, author Judith Hurwitz demonstrates in her new book, Smart or Lucky?: How Technology Leaders Turn Chance Into Success (Jossey-Bass; 978-0-470-89142-1; May 2011) why the combination of luck and smarts is the key in today's changing tech world.

Smart or Lucky? is for business leaders who are interested in learning what it takes to be successful in emerging markets and how to sustain success over the long term. It shows entrepreneurs how to recognize a lucky break and have the foresight to take advantage of it. The 10 chapters of the book discuss the following themes:

1. Don’t take your luck for granted.
2. Make it easy for customers to get started.
3. Fail often in order to succeed sooner.
4. Strategize to fool complacent competitors.
5. Make customers a part of your success.
6. Have a plan for how you can apply your technology to immediately address customer pain.
7. Create actual business solutions.
8. Don’t be fooled into thinking there is such thing as overnight success.
9. Always stay a few steps ahead of your customers.
10. Don’t be afraid to destroy your cash cow products in order to create a sustainable future.

Informative and highly detailed, Smart of Lucky? is a must-read for all business leaders and emerging entrepreneurs who want to understand how to stay nimble and succeed in complicated, competitive markets.