Are sports and business the same?

There are a host of great management principles and practices that have come to prominence in the last twenty years, due to the fact that, when applied correctly, they have produced phenomenal results for the companies that have implemented them. The practice of benchmarking to find out how different companies in different industries have improved and then apply their best practices. Sig Sigma, a management methodology developed at Motorola has been phenomenally successful in many industries, as has the Lean method, which was first practiced by Toyota.

The latest fad in management methodology now seems to be comparing running a business to sports. Many consultants now say that positive practices regarding winning in sports can be successfully applied to the corporate world. Positive aspects like having a winning mindset and a positive attitude are said to be ideals inherited from sports. However, there is a question about the chicken and the egg: which came first: the sports or those attitudes? Common sense seems to dictate that attitudes came first. After all, these are essential attitudes for survival and they are with us at our most primal level.

There are also many differences between a professional athlete and a white collar worker. To begin with, the duration of the race. A professional athlete has a much shorter career and tends to have the greatest ability to earn money during the early part of that career. While an office worker tends to have to rise through the ranks and reach peak earnings at a much older age. His priorities and views are therefore very different.

Even more apparent is the fact that in sports, there is only one winner. In business, you don’t always have to be so competitive. In fact, the lines between competitors and teammates are not clearly drawn in business. In a negotiation, for example, the best outcome is a win-win situation. There is no such thing as a “win-win” situation on a sports field, unless you count player trades. Businesses can have multiple winners and adversaries who form mutually beneficial alliances to ensure everyone wins.

Since there is only one winner in sports, it begs the question: does that mean all the losers were wrong? In a Formula 1 race, there are so many factors that need to come together for a team to achieve victory. A great car, a great driver, a great team; each of these elements is influenced by many other variables. External factors also play a part, weather, debris on the track, collisions with other cars, all these can affect the result. So did the winning team necessarily have the best practices overall? It is a difficult question to answer in sport.

Finally, throughout history, how many great athletes have become great businessmen? History lists only a handful, one would be race car driver Niki Lauda who owned and operated two airlines. Max Schmeling, who once knocked out Joe Louis, also had some success in business, but there aren’t many others on the list. If the link is as strong as they say, there should be many others.