It's all in the game

Sometimes I am lucky enough to be invited to interesting dinners and this week was one of those happy occasions. The group of about a dozen was a mixture of senior businessmen and women and some elite athletes. They included a wheelchair racer, an Olympic hockey player, a gold medal winning rower and Gianluca Vialli, the ex Chelsea player and manager. What made it an interesting evening and one that went on longer than expected was that we were discussing the lessons to be learned between sports and business and it was very much a two way debate. Over three hours we covered things like:

-creating the time and space for the really important decisions which also needs the ability to step back and reflect. This was from Vialli who had learned the lesson from Sir Alex Ferguson but it reminded me of similar advice I was given as a young CEO.

-the mental attitude of the players in a team; be it sport or business, can make all the difference between good performance and winning performance.

-how do you tackle poor performance. Of course in sport, performance measurement is relentless but what about poor behavioural performance?

-the difference between strategy and tactics, particularly the ability to change tactics in the middle of a game or race depending on the circumstances or the actions of the competition.

-the importance of post performance review. How many businesses would sit down the day after a Board meeting with a video analyst going over every discussion and every decision?

And the evening started off with an interesting aside. One of the other guests was someone I had worked with in the early 1990s and we hadn't seen each other for over twenty years. She recognised me but I had to be given some pretty heavy clues, a sign of a fading memory perhaps!