smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Our success in the Beijing Olympics has produced a large number of articles analysing why we produced so many winners. In the light of such analysis, how many of the qualities needed to win gold can be applied to business?

Talent

Let’s start with the obvious.  Ben Ainslie has now won four consecutive gold medals and clearly has an extraordinary sailing talent. But that is ‘only’ equivalent to having great craft skills in a business – and we know you need much more than that to be an outstanding winner, particularly financially.  But talent definitely helps!

Focus 

All of the winners are extraordinarily focussed. Absolutely nothing distracts them from the single goal of winning gold. This focus often includes ruthlessness and relationships are frequently sacrificed for ‘the cause’.

Set the bar high

Bill Sweetenham, the controversial performance director of swimming until a year before the Olympics, has been accused of shouting and bullying his squad.  He abhors the ordinary and expects his squad to have nothing but contempt for ordinariness.  I don’t know about the bullying part, but you certainly can’t have any time for ‘average’. It’s not necessary to have contempt either for the average, because you then have contempt for the human race.  But ‘average’ is for others and emphatically not for you: the winners must set the bar high all the time.

Nothing is impossible

We heard a lot about Team GB’s sports psychologists and the way they persuade athletes to ‘visualise themselves’ with the gold medal or on the rostrum.  These are motivational experts and their techniques are well-known in business already, but not accepted by all. Although I’ve never seen the need for professional motivating techniques, I’ve always believed hugely in the power of positive thinking and I’ve been at my most effective when I’ve been able to persuade my whole team that nothing is impossible. 

Clear goals

Instilling this ‘can do’ attitude into your team is always more effective if you have a clear goal.  It’s difficult to think of a target in business as clear-cut as an Olympic Gold, but motivating, uniting goals can be found eg: - Reaching £1 million turnover - Floating the company - Becoming the biggest - Expanding overseas -  Even selling the company Sometimes this can be achieved by encouraging people’s competitiveness – reaching targets; beating other departments or divisions; maximising bonuses.

Casting

This may not seem to be relevant in individual sports, but the reality is that gold medal winning athletes are rarely the loners they seem and increasingly they need a large team behind them who must not just support, but complement – and compensate sometimes, for any gaps in the athlete’s armoury.

Pushing yourself

The capacity for hard work is a constant and it’s at a level that ordinary people (that word again) do not understand.  Rebecca Adlington trains a minimum of 50 hours a week and most of the athletes are training twice a day. Having tried this as a teenager, I know that it is mentally as well as physically challenging – you’re tired, your muscles ache and a little voice is asking: “Why are you doing this?  You don’t need to, you’ve done enough already!”  Exactly the same temptations – and distractions – apply in business.

Overcoming adversity

A key reason for an extraordinary work ethic is that many have had to overcome adversity in some way. It may be that they came from unhappy childhoods or they may have had a serious set-back in their sporting career. Without a doubt, the banned 400m runner Christine Ohuruogu has spent the last 12 months determined to set the record straight once she was clear to run again.  The value of needing to overcome adversity is clearly hugely rated in some sports circles: Bob Bowman, Michael Phelps’s coach says: “I’ve always given him adversity in either meets or practice and have him overcome it.”   This guy is seriously perverse – ensuring Phelps missed his dinner or not telling him where his goggles are. There’s method in the madness: if he can go through that, he shouldn’t be phased or stressed by anything.

Luck

If you’ve worked incredibly hard for something, you don’t like being told too often that you’ve been lucky. The Olympics demonstrate very clearly the importance of chance.  To win you have to not just maintain focus and dedication, you have to peak at the right time and stay uninjured.  If your horse injures itself in the week before the Olympics or someone else crashes their bike – or boat – into you during a final, then we would all agree that was bad luck. Well it happens in business too, even though we don’t want to admit to it. I remember when we started my media agency CIA, we had trouble winning new business in the first nine months. Then came the chance to pitch for BMW: we were favourites – and blew it.  By sheer chance the winning media agency was told by an existing car client that BMW was a conflict and they had to resign from the contract.  We were ‘gifted’ the BMW account and were able to do great work and build a raft of blue chip business on the back of it.  Luck is a factor!

Hubris 

I’d like to end on something I didn’t discover when studying our winners.  There were incredibly few signs of arrogance or complacency.  Yes, there was plenty of quiet self-confidence, but perhaps because there was even more fear of losing, there was no place for hubris. Many successful businessmen would do well to remember that.

Chris Ingram is widely regarded as the inventor of the modern media agency. He started CIA in 1976 with three people and £10,000. It grew into Tempus Group and was sold to WPP for more than £430 million in 2001. In 2002, he launched Genesis Investments, a private equity business and, in 2003, The Ingram Partnership, a strategic brand building and communication consultancy.

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