Sara Blakely Case Study

2. Does hindsight bias affect the factors to which you might attribute Blakely’s success? Why or why not?

Sara Blakely has always shown a strong character. From her childhood on she exhibited her management skills, for instance by manipulating friends, so they would take care of her household chores or by listening to Wayne Dyer to build up her personality. Showing a good performance appeared to be important for Sara Blakely throughout her whole life. However, giving up seems to be no choice for her at all. Taking this into account it is not remarkable, that she started her first business at age of 19 after receiving two rejections by law school. What would have destroyed other people because of self-doubt, led Blakely to change her objectives.
Later, after coming up with the idea of specific pantyhose, Sara Blakely had not been distracted by the fact of not knowing how to apply for a patent and started to gain certain knowledge to handle this situation. Her effort is not a surprise at all as her previous behaviour already made the reader believe that she will be successful this time as well. After this barrier, Blakely also managed to get financed even she had to suffer several exclusions by potential shareholder. Once more, the feeling occurs that this career was predictable, as it is due to her big courage and ambition. Considering Blakely´s success story, it feels obvious that she has the ability of forming a small business into an international company. The big breakthrough came with Blakely´s idea of involving Oprah Winfrey. It worked out and today her company earns billions of dollars and is ready to grow. At the end the expectations to the reader got measured up. But
But analysing feelings and thoughts after reading this short story, hindsight bias may have affected the reader. The following definition will help to understand the potential perception of someone by reading Sara´s life story: “ [Hinsight bias is the] tendency to believe falsely, after an outcome of an event is actually known, that one would have accurately predicted that outcome.” (Judge/Robbins 2013, p. 181-182) To clarify, that Blakely´s success was hard to forecast, there is a need to look at the factors which Blakely´s success get attributed to: character, work attitude, self-gained expertise, attitude towards life and somehow luck; Looking at the variety of different influencing factors it may be possible to have assumptions, but by reviewing Blakely´s life, her success was not secured at all. Without reading the headline of the story and knowing about the result the tendency of thinking would possibly have led into a totally other direction. Blakely´s attitude seemed to direct to enormous success but looking deeper to the matter there were many interruptions and failures. From this point of view the reader would maybe have had developed a different opinion about the outcome, at least if he would not have known how everything worked out for Blakely at the end. To underline the fact that characteristics, know-how and other personal