In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell pointed to a study showing Canadian ice hockey players lucky enough to be born in the first half of the year thrived, because of a January 1 age cut-off for the league. But Jim Collins and Morten Hansen countered in Great by Choice that the Boston Bruins’ Ray Bourque turned into one of the all-time greats despite being born in December. He used the bad luck to make himself stronger, they wrote.

The hockey example crops up again in a new study of six decades of management research, which says misperceptions about luck are rife when assessing business, where there are few Bourques and success is often down to circumstance.

Chengwei Liu and Mark de Rond write that people persist in acclaiming lucky chief executives — and rewarding them excessively. CEOs who are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time are dismissed as losers.