Sports illuminate the truths—especially the competitive truths—of being human. This is why the Olympics are irresistible. In microcosm, within limited space and time, people do what we do at work, teaming up with peers to achieve goals while powerful adversaries try to thwart us. Even better, all the people at the Olympics are practically superhuman. Who wouldn’t want to study the lessons we can learn from this spectacle?
So, four business lessons from the Olympics:
98th the percentage is not good enough. Companies like to claim that their products, services and competencies are world-class, but are they really? The Paris Olympics show how incredibly difficult it is to be among the best in the world. Consider swimming. In the men’s 400m freestyle, Germany’s Lukas Martens won gold with a time of 3:41.78. South Korea’s Kim Woo-Min won bronze in 3:42.50. The difference between gold medal and no medal was 0.3%.
Or consider the women’s quadruple sculls – four-row boats racing over 2,000 metres. The UK team trailed the Netherlands team for 1,999 meters, then pulled ahead in the final hurdle, winning by 0.15 seconds. Germany took the bronze medal. The difference between gold medal and no medal was 0.9%.
Many business leaders are claiming that their companies will “bring in the gold” this year. That’s great, but remember that many great competitors went to the Paris Olympics and were 98% or 99% as good as the best—and brought nothing home. Try by all means to bring the gold home, but don’t kid yourself about how difficult it is.
Standards continue to rise At the 1896 Olympics, a Greek runner named Spyridon Louis won the marathon with a time of 2:58:50 (two hours 58 minutes 50 seconds). Today would be a good time at a high school track meet; the current high school record is 2:22:51.
After the 1908 Olympics, “officials almost banned double somersaults in diving because they believed that these dives were dangerous and no human would ever be able to control them,” said human performance authority Anders Ericsson. Today, Olympic divers rarely do a double somersault because it is too easy.
In Paris, the preeminent standard-setter right now is Simone Biles, who led the U.S. women’s gymnastics team to a gold medal and won the individual gold medal, in part by doing moves no one else in the world can do. . It is not known how long it will take the competitors to catch up.
The business analogy is obvious, but that doesn’t stop business leaders from ignoring it. Microsoft mocked Apple’s iPhone for introducing a touchscreen rather than a keyboard; Microsoft’s phone business crashed and burned. MySpace predates Facebook, but has not kept up with Facebook’s innovations. Kodak pioneered digital photography, but could not foresee its eventual dominance.
Myopic companies can hang around for years. Olympic athletes cannot. Those who fall even a little behind are mercilessly eliminated—a reminder to business leaders, if they dare to see it.
Teams have stars Exhibit A in Paris is of course Biles and the USA women’s gymnastics team. At the Olympics, the stars are visible to all, and she will be famous and praised for years to come. In the company, stars are not always treated as stars. A manager once told me: “It breaks the team. How can you have a guy next to another guy who is making 50% more?” But this reasoning is a big problem.
To understand why, look at professional sports teams. The dominant team in Major League Baseball over the last decade is the Los Angeles Dodgers. One of its highest-paid players, Tyler Glasnow, is a pitcher whose average annual salary is $27.3 million. Another pitcher, Gavin Stone, is one of the lowest paid Dodgers, with an average annual salary of $742,500. Two guys with the same job and one is paid 37 TIMES more than the other. Somehow the team unity of the Dodgers has not been destroyed – on the contrary.
Every team has stars and everyone on the team knows who they are. Many corporate teams try to suppress that reality. Winning athletic teams—whether professional or in the Olympics—embrace it.
A great team is not the same as a group of great performers. In the last Olympics, the American baseball and basketball teams humiliated themselves by trampling the sports that America invented. In the six Olympics that have included baseball (1992 – 2008 plus 2020), USA All-Star teams won exactly once (2000). The 2004 USA Olympic basketball team, made up entirely of NBA millionaires, finished third behind Argentina and Italy, and along the way lost to Puerto Rico and—wait for it—Lithuania. Today’s USA Basketball team in Paris looks strong so far, with the playoffs ahead.
Dream teams can fail in business just like in sports. Consider Long Term Capital Management, a firm that included Wall Street legends and Nobel Prize-winning financial economists, yet failed spectacularly.
For team-building wisdom, remember the most inspiring US Olympic team ever, the 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviets in Lake Placid. Professional players were not eligible at the time, although Soviet players, in their 20s and 30s, were the equivalent of professionals. Forced to choose from college players, coach Herb Brooks wanted to build a team on personal chemistry combined with extremely intense practice. In the movie version of the story, Brooks’ assistant looks at the coach’s roster and notes that he has left out many of the nation’s top college players. To which Brooks responds with the quintessential anti-Dream-Team philosophy: “I’m not looking for the best players, Craig. I’m looking for the right players.”
Amidst all the excitement of the Olympics, don’t be surprised if you encounter a little depth.