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| Sports and Business |
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Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. - Bill Gates Successful leaders and executives have learned that lessons acquired through athletics competition foster achievement and advancement. However, I will argue that businesses that adopt the sports culture miss out on the lessons learned from the road to success and sometimes from failure, and are less likely to sustain their success. The play to win like athletes who desire victory are the successful leaders and executives who rise to a challenge and fight for their company's or organization's goals. They know respect and advancement follow successful results. But what happens when the results are not so successful? What happens when a marketing initiative does not meet the anticipated results and quotas? The main deficiency of sports’ final score card, as I see it is that as being applied in the business world, it is ignoring the possibility of coincidence. We focus on winning and not on the process, what makes a company as an organization successful, and how we cold repeat and duplicate success. How would you know what went wrong? How would you know what needs to be changed and corrected? Is the end result the only thing that matters? We would like to think that if we work hard, we would be on the road to success. However, many of us work hard and do not succeed. Therefore, sometimes it is a matter of working smart, changing the way things are done to achieve better results, and not leave too much room for coincidence. For people who thrive to succeed, learning from failure provides more information, data and experience than learning from success. In many ways, it is not the bottom line results that matter, but the journey that got you there. Failure is important for personal development. The sports’ like score card, and the short cuts in a culture that is swamped with information and data, companies completely miss out on the process as the basis for comparison and analysis. We do not question and analyze success, since it is attributed to hard work and some genius plan that in many cases may or may not work. Understanding the why, how and who and not just the outcome, would provide the necessary improvements and help predict the desired outcomes in the future. Instead of the process, the score card takes the experience out of it, and puts the focus on the present and as the only forecasting tool and information for future results. And let me sum up with Paul Getty’s formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. |