Tips for business success from the world of sports
Losers can be winners too!
Imagine that you are participating in a knock-out tennis tournament. If you are a tennis player this would sound rather a routine event, but wait...thereâ??s a catch. The tournament rule of progression is inverted. In every match the loser (yes, the loser!) progresses to the next round and the winner is knocked out.
Imagine also that you are the local tennis champ and entered the tournament before knowing the changed rule. You have been told about this new rule a short while before your match and you are now contemplating the best strategy to employ.
On the one hand you need to win to maintain your standing as the best player and on the other hand you realize that winning the match would knock you out of the tournament. What would be your strategy for the match? Equally what is your opponentâ??s strategy as he is also playing by the same rule?
You have the choice of playing badly to ensure that you lose. It is possible that your opponent would also choose the same strategy and the match would end up as a series of intentional mistakes and, while you might progress to the next round(s), you are unlikely to obtain any satisfaction from your playing performance. Or, you might decide to win, maintain your standing as the champion player and not progress further in the tournament. But, the fact your performance was not rewarded in the conventional sense would likely make you unhappy.
Effectively, therefore, you lose whichever strategy you select?
Busy high performing executives in the business world face similar decisions many times in a working day. The problem is that most often they do not realize that the decision-situation is as simple (or complex depending on how you view it!) as the one described earlier. And at the end of a busy day, if they were to take stock of their decisions they would recall that many times the end result was distributed between â??lossesâ?? and â??wins.â??
But, corporate executives are measured on the quality of their decision making and it is necessary to have greater wins than losses. To resolve this dilemma, let us return to our tennis champion and assist him in selecting a match strategy.
Imagine, that you â?? the tennis champion â?? decide to change your mind-set and no longer look upon the match as a lose-lose situation. Instead you decide to go out, play your natural game and irrespective of the real outcome consider that you have won. What is the likely outcome? Once the pressure of winning in the conventional sense is removed you will discover that you are actually enjoying the game.
In his early twentieth century masterpiece, â??As a Man Thinkethâ??, the novelist James Allen captures this situation aptly in this couplet:
Defeats are steps by which we climb
With purer aim to nobler ends;
Loss leads to gain, and joy attends
True footsteps up the hills of time.
In actual fact, when players were placed in this tournament situation many of them claimed that they had played the best games of their life. In some respects the description of their feelings during the game coming close to a state that athletes describe as â??playing in the zone.â??
In technical terms this state is also known as the Flow state â?? a state where the person is totally absorbed in his task, where distractions are excluded from the consciousness and the joy of undertaking the activity is its own reward.
We may now ask ourselves, what can the busy corporate executive learn from the experience of our tennis champ?
He can learn to cultivate his thought process so that he believes himself to be in a win-win position, whatever the decision-situation. In the process he will find himself gradually working in a state of flow. A state where there is no difference between work or play, defeat or victory. A situation best summed in this short poem attributed to the Zen Masters.
The Master simply pursues excellence,
in whatever he does.
He makes little distinction between,
his work and his play,
His labour and his leisure,
his mind and his body,
His education and his recreation,
his love and his religion,
He hardly knows which is which,
for he is always doing both.
The Zen Masters
Krishna Kumar is the founder of IntradConsult
and Brefi Group's partner in ISEC –
The Indian School of Executive Coaching
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