If statistician and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right in this Forbes article, we tend to underrate the power of random tinkering and events that are outside of our control with respect to business failure and success:

Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it–thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.

[thanks to WebGuild commenter Atolley for the heads up on this author]

Randomness is a major component of biological evolution and I would suggest that business and evolution have a lot in common, most importantly the notion that both biological and business entities work *away from failure* rather than *towards success*. Events both random and controlled continue to change the playing field, making it difficult to find consistent formulas for success, let alone even predict which among a dozen companies will survive into profitability and business success.