With St. Patrick’s Day upon us, we wondered about the idea of luck in business, and how much luck, in its many forms, plays a role in the success of a given businessperson.

In 2007, Marc Andreessen blogged about what Dr. James Austin identified as the four types of luck:

• Pure blind luck
• Good luck + motion (i.e. hustle)
• Good luck + being the first/only person who recognizes the opportunity
• Good luck + taking personal actions that cause “luck” to come your way

So, we asked some Farmer School faculty where they stand on luck and the impact it has on the success of a business or career.

“I think a ton is luck. I'd say more than half. Mark Cuban, he had one really good idea in his life, and he made a fortune off it,” Finance professor Terry Nixon said. “He was a big Indiana basketball fan, and so he came up with a way to be able to follow Indiana basketball down in Texas. And then he sold it (Broadcast.com) to Yahoo, and they gave him Yahoo stock, and then he sold the stock right before Yahoo crashed.”

“I think it's a 50/50 split, because there's so many people that launch businesses, that are in businesses, that know somebody that got them the job or launched because they care about something or a solution they believe in, and then situations just kind of start landing in their lap,” Marketing professor Lisa Kuhn said. “It seems like it's a mixture of both, where they might say ‘I was just in the right project with the right person who invited me to this next project.’ But then, they are also well trained, and they have a lot of experience.”

“Luck is really just the preparation that you do ahead of time for when the moment happens,” First-Year Integrated Core professor Justin McGlothin said. “I would have to say that 25 percent is luck, probably 50 percent preparation, 12.5 percent networking, and 12.5 percent knowing Lisa Kuhn, that is what gets you to success.”

“The way I interpret luck is not just pure luck. When I say luck, I mean the person must be ready, meaning that I don't think anyone could be successful without that solid foundation of business acumen, the knowledge, the skill sets. But I think what matters a lot is there must be a lot of people like they happen to be right on the trend or riding the wave of something,” associate professor of Accountancy Po-Chang Chen explained. “People who studied machine learning many, many years ago probably had this vision that ‘one day this is going to change our life and everything.’ But I don't think they had any control or prediction of when that's going to happen, but they had to have that skill set ready for when the time strikes.”

“I don't think luck has very much effect. I think success is very much based on both a person’s knowledge as well as hard work, grit, work ethic, their ability to network and build relationships so that they can work with other people to get things done. I think probably very little is based on luck,” Supply Chain Management professor Monique Murfield said.

“I'm going to say a great deal, because I don't think that everyone is created equal, and I think that we are a result of our environment, from both nurture and nature. And I think when you add those things together, success in business has a lot to do with how we were raised and then who we fall in line with,” David Eyman, FYIC lecturer, noted. “It's over 50 percent if we consider luck as having been born into an environment conducive to learning how to operate in business before we get there. And then there's another part of it that once we get there, that we're lucky to meet the opportunities and see them as opportunities the minute that they're given to us.”

“I've always been a fan of the quote that luck is preparation meeting opportunity. So, I think there's always a certain amount of luck involved in terms or factors lining up in your favor,” Megan Gerhardt, professor of Management, explained. “I think if you're not prepared, you're not looking for it, and you're not motivated, then no amount of opportunity is probably going to help you. I think that it is a matter of always being proactive, taking advantage of the things that might align for you, and actually recognizing that when those things show up.”

So, do you feel lucky?