Garbage survivor bias in business press

In my opinion this HBR article is GARBAGE.

It's the same sort of garbage is "Good to Great" or "Built to Last".

It's the sort of garbage analysis that would say "we took a look at a collection of multimillionaires who started with nothing and found that the best strategy to riches is sporadically playing PowerBall."

It's a classic Bayes problem and it occurs over and over in business press and "research".

TL;DR on the article: With hindsight bias and a healthy survivor bias you can identify 3 traits that fast-to-CEO climbers all exhibited: Risky lateral or backward moves, risky leaps into roles they weren't really ready for, and risky moves into turnaround situations.

I'll be that if you were to start by sampling the population of people who have undertaken these three strategies you will find a landscape littered with failures and with a few success cases.