HAVAS – SPORTING HEROES TO BUSINESS LEADERS
Competitive sports provide an ideal training for business. Many of the attributes valued and rewarded by success in business are honed on the roads, tracks, fields and swimming pools of the nation.
This is not surprising, when you think about what it takes to win.
A recent study by Cornell University showed that high school sports heroes make better leaders and that “participation in competitive sports spills over into occupationally advantageous traits that persist across a person’s life”.
There are many reasons for this, the most obvious being that sport replicates business, or perhaps it is the other way round, and those that win at one are more likely to win at the other.
All sports are team …show more content…
Politicial interference in his home country meant people were working to a range of different agendas, very few of which related to the job on the field.
It was only when he became England manager, and had a solid team of players and administrators behind him, that Flower accrued the silverware that was undeniably his due. After taking over the reins of the English team, he won The Ashes several times and the the 2010 ICC World Twenty20 tournament and took the team to the number one slot in the Test rankings.
Apart from the realisation that without the team success is impossible, sport makes players plan for victory. No successful team goes out on the field thinking that victory is impossible and without a strategy to make it happen. This is as much about choosing where to compete as it is about competing aggressively.
Successful teams, in business as in sport, don’t take on every challenge, but what they do do they do well. They choose the competition and define what victory means for them in both the short and long term. This is not the same for …show more content…
The sports/business analogy has a tremendous amount of power, probably due in part to the fact that many CEOs participate in competitive sports or are sports fans. Sport appeals to the competitive part of them.
But one should be wary of taking the analogy too far.
Where business requires repeated success over a very long period of time, the cycle of sport, from World Cup to World Cup or Olympics to Olympics, is far shorter. Some of the sacrifices that pay off in the short term may be crippling over time.
Also, when your team loses a match it may feel like the world is crashing down around your ears but the reality is that it doesn’t. When you fail in business this is not necessarily the case – not for you or your suppliers, partners and, in some cases, customers. The consequences of business failure cannot be forgotten over a few beers in the afternoon.
But, the main difference between sport and business is that the former is win-lose and the best of the latter is win-win. Forget this and it won’t matter how talented, strategic, resilient and team focused you are: in the end you will
Competitive sports provide an ideal training for business. Many of the attributes valued and rewarded by success in business are honed on the roads, tracks, fields and swimming pools of the nation.
This is not surprising, when you think about what it takes to win.
A recent study by Cornell University showed that high school sports heroes make better leaders and that “participation in competitive sports spills over into occupationally advantageous traits that persist across a person’s life”.
There are many reasons for this, the most obvious being that sport replicates business, or perhaps it is the other way round, and those that win at one are more likely to win at the other.
All sports are team …show more content…
Politicial interference in his home country meant people were working to a range of different agendas, very few of which related to the job on the field.
It was only when he became England manager, and had a solid team of players and administrators behind him, that Flower accrued the silverware that was undeniably his due. After taking over the reins of the English team, he won The Ashes several times and the the 2010 ICC World Twenty20 tournament and took the team to the number one slot in the Test rankings.
Apart from the realisation that without the team success is impossible, sport makes players plan for victory. No successful team goes out on the field thinking that victory is impossible and without a strategy to make it happen. This is as much about choosing where to compete as it is about competing aggressively.
Successful teams, in business as in sport, don’t take on every challenge, but what they do do they do well. They choose the competition and define what victory means for them in both the short and long term. This is not the same for …show more content…
The sports/business analogy has a tremendous amount of power, probably due in part to the fact that many CEOs participate in competitive sports or are sports fans. Sport appeals to the competitive part of them.
But one should be wary of taking the analogy too far.
Where business requires repeated success over a very long period of time, the cycle of sport, from World Cup to World Cup or Olympics to Olympics, is far shorter. Some of the sacrifices that pay off in the short term may be crippling over time.
Also, when your team loses a match it may feel like the world is crashing down around your ears but the reality is that it doesn’t. When you fail in business this is not necessarily the case – not for you or your suppliers, partners and, in some cases, customers. The consequences of business failure cannot be forgotten over a few beers in the afternoon.
But, the main difference between sport and business is that the former is win-lose and the best of the latter is win-win. Forget this and it won’t matter how talented, strategic, resilient and team focused you are: in the end you will