What business leaders can learn from elite Olympics athletes

So—four business lessons from the Olympics:

The 98^th percentile isn’t good enough. Companies love to claim their products, services, and competencies are world class, but are they really? The Paris Olympics demonstrate how staggeringly difficult it is to be among the world’s very best. Consider swimming. In the men’s 400-meter freestyle, Germany’s Lukas Martens won the gold with a time of 3:41.78. South Korea’s Kim Woo-Min took the bronze with 3:42.50. The difference between gold medal and no medal was 0.3%.

Or consider the women’s quadruple sculls final—four-rower boats racing for 2,000 meters. The U.K. team trailed the Netherlands team for 1,999 meters, then pulled ahead on the final meter, winning by 0.15 seconds. Germany got the bronze. The difference between gold medal and no medal was 0.9%.        

Many business leaders are claiming their companies will “bring home the gold” this year. That’s great, but remember that many excellent competitors went to the Paris Olympics and were 98% or 99% as good as the best—and brought home nothing. By all means try to bring home the gold, but don’t delude yourself about how hard it is.

Standards keep rising In 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 that would be a ho-hum time at a high school track meet; the current high school record is 2:22:51.

After the 1908 Olympics, “officials almost prohibited the double somersault in dives because they believed 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’s too easy.

In Paris the preeminent standard-raiser now is Simone Biles, who led the U.S. women’s gymnastics team to a gold medal and won the individual all-around gold in part by doing moves that no one else in the world can do. There’s no telling how long it will take competitors to catch up.

The analogy to business is obvious, but that doesn’t stop business leaders from ignoring it. Microsoft ridiculed Apple’s iPhone because it introduced a touchscreen rather than a keyboard; Microsoft’s own phone business crashed and burned. MySpace predated Facebook but didn’t keep up with Facebook’s innovations. Kodak pioneered digital photography but couldn’t foresee its eventual dominance.

Myopic companies can hang on for years. Olympic athletes can’t. Those who fall behind even a little are eliminated ruthlessly—a reminder for business leaders, if they dare to see it.

Teams have stars Exhibit A in Paris is of course Biles and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team. In the Olympics, the stars are visible to everyone, and she will be famous and lauded for years to come. In companies, stars aren’t always treated like stars. A manager once told me, “It disrupts the team. How can you have one guy next to another guy who’s making 50% more?” But that reasoning is a big problem.

To see why, look at professional sports teams. The dominant team in Major League Baseball over the past decade is the Los Angeles Dodgers. One of its highest paid players, Tyler Glasnow, is a pitcher whose average annual pay is $27.3 million. Another pitcher, Gavin Stone, is one of the lowest paid Dodgers, with average annual pay of $742,500. Two guys with the same job, and one gets paid 37 times more than the other. Somehow the Dodgers’ team unity is not destroyed—quite 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 past Olympics, U.S. baseball and basketball teams humiliated themselves by getting trampled in sports that America invented. In the six Olympics that have included baseball (1992 – 2008 plus 2020), teams of U.S. all-stars won exactly once (2000). The 2004 U.S. Olympic basketball team, consisting 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 U.S. basketball team in Paris looks strong so far, with playoffs ahead.

Dream teams can fail in business just as in sports. Think of Long-Term Capital Management, a firm that included Wall Street legends and Nobel Prize-winning financial economists but still failed spectacularly.

For team-building wisdom, recall the most inspiring U.S. Olympic team ever, the 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviets at Lake Placid. Professional players weren’t eligible back then, though the Soviet players, in their 20s and 30s, were the equivalent of pros. Forced to choose from college players, coach Herb Brooks wanted to build a team on personal chemistry combined with extremely intensive practice. In the story’s movie version, Brooks’s assistant looks at the coach’s roster and objects that he has left out many of the country’s best college players. To which Brooks responds with the essential anti-Dream-Team philosophy: “I’m not lookin’ for the best players, Craig. I’m lookin’ for the right players.”

Amid all the excitement of the Olympics, don’t be surprised if you stumble upon a bit of profundity as well.