Using case studies of successful innovators/leaders to establish best practices

There is a trend to document the cases of successful innovators/leaders and distil best practices of innovation/leadership from the way ‘they’ did it. This is the wrong approach because it documents only those few who did something and succeeded but doesn’t take into account those many that did the same thing and went bust.
Nassim Talib, in his book ‘Fooled by Randomness’ calls such successful people ‘lucky fools’. He defines ‘lucky fools’ as ‘persons who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attribute their success to some other, generally very precise, reason.’
In logic, this error is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc i.e. after this, therefore due to this. This can also be called ‘after the fact reasoning’ - whatever precedes the other thing is considered to be its cause. The causality is erroneous and usually gets established only because it suits your purpose. That is rationalization, not reasoning.
Stories about how your Aunt Mary's cancer was cured by watching Marx Brothers’ movies or taking a liver extract from castrated chickens are meaningless. The cancer might have gone into remission on its own, which some cancers do; or it might have been misdiagnosed; or, or, or.… What we need are controlled experiments, not anecdotes. (all in italics taken from Michael Shermer’s book "Why People Believe Weird Things" )
In the leadership field, the fallacy of ideal leadership traits/practices has been laid to rest by the theory of situational leadership. Only that practice is considered right which meets the specific demands of that situation and that group. I suspect the same should apply to innovation too.
Instead of establishing best practices from a study of a few successful people, how about simply installing good think-skills in the innovator/leader?
Back to basics, eh! A little more demanding than copying from case studies but then, it works.