Vincent Edward “Bo” Jackson was an incredible athlete of the rarest kind. In 1986, he was picked 1st overall in the National Football League (NFL) Draft and selected in the 4th round of the Major League Baseball (MLB) Draft. He initially opted for a career in baseball, before deciding to wear both hats after completing his rookie season with the Kansas City Royals. To this day he holds the NFL record for running the 40-yard dash, at a jaw-dropping 4.12 seconds. His 1989 season included 32 home runs for the Kansas City Royals and 950 rushing yards for the Los Angeles Raiders in just 11 games. He was the only athlete to ever be selected to both the NFL Pro Bowl and the MLB All-Star Game. He ran over superstar linebackers, covered the outfield by running up walls in Spider-Man like fashion, and broke baseball bats over his head and knee like they were No. 2 pencils.

There’s a reason Bo’s career was so spectacular and his legacy has reached mythological status. It simply doesn’t happen that often. It’s rare like a rainbow unicorn. Nike taught us in the late 1980’s that “Bo Knows” and we learned that there was scarcely anything in the athletic realm that he didn’t know!

As rare as this may be in the world of sports, it may be even rarer in business. This is one of the reasons we believe it is critical to understand the vision and purpose of any company we own. We need to know that a business meets a clear economic need and management is focused on singular objectives. Business is a battleground and success requires this type of focus. The probability of winning is dramatically increased with as few adjacencies or competing interests as possible.

Chris Zook of the Harvard Business Review has done some great work in this area. He estimates that only one in four adjacent business ventures are successful. The chart below shows that each successive move away from the core business further decreases the probability of success: