Five sporty lessons for sustainable business strategy
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In this article
In this article
The pursuit of excellence
We can’t tackle the biggest problems faced by business and society if we are not motivated, passionate, and driven to achieve excellence. The same is true in sports. Resilience and determination are key to this.
Take British diver Tom Daley, who competed at his first Olympics in 2008, aged only 14. It was only in his fourth Olympic Games, in Tokyo in 2020, that Daley won his first gold medal, thanks to his drive and ambition to succeed.
Getting to the top in your sport is often a year-long marathon rather than a sprint. The same applies to our journey toward sustainable business practices.
Innovation and growth mindset parallels
Sports people are among the best examples of the ‘growth mindset’. Carol S. Dweck of Stanford University, who coined the term, points to how basketballer Michael Jordan, athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee and golfer Tiger Woods constantly stretched themselves to evolve, better themselves and grow. Believing in yourself and knowing you can achieve your goals will boost your willingness to train and improve performance and increase growth potential.
In business, similarly, we cannot rest on our laurels. As the following examples show, environmental business strategies are one area where this is most pressing right now.
At the Dutch Open golf course, Bernardus used birdhouses to attract local birds to provide natural pest control instead of using chemicals to fight off pests. At Jaguar TCS racing, innovations from the race circuit regularly make their way into road cars, benefitting sustainable urban mobility.
In sports as well as in business, innovation is often incremental. Sir Dave Brailsford, the former Performance Director of British Cycling, introduced the idea that making a 1% improvement in several small areas could lead to much larger cumulative effects.
Using marginal gains to drive success
In sports as well as in business, innovation is often incremental.
Sir Dave Brailsford, the former performance director of British Cycling, introduced the idea that making a 1% improvement in several small areas could lead to much larger cumulative effects. Dedication to “sweating the small stuff”, you might say, led to 16 gold medals in two Olympics and seven Tour de France wins in eight years.
Businesses can apply the same lesson regarding sustainable business strategies: small changes add up. We increasingly see a departure from the traditional, linear “design-build-test” project lifecycle, where ‘heavy lifting’ is the norm, to an incremental and highly collaborative process that evolves over time.
Takeda’s Digital Innovation Factory is an excellent example of that. TCS worked with the Japanese pharmaceutical company to create a digital innovation hub that works with the entire organisation. Each project is broken down into small, iterative steps based on a standardised framework and processes. Early prototyping ensures that future end users get to trial and shape products from their inception, ensuring that their needs drive development.
Engaging ecosystems
Another meaningful learning is that athletes, even if they ostensibly compete alone, never work in isolation. Take the Tour de France. Each team has individual riders battling their way to Paris. But they all play specific roles — the lead rider, the sprinter, the time trial expert, the ‘domestique’ who backs up the lead rider. Together with a supporting team of coaches, physiotherapists, mechanics and even cooks, they form a robust and inter-reliant ecosystem.
As businesses reach for their sustainability targets, the same applies. No single company has all the answers; we must engage ecosystems to work together.
TCS has long heralded collaborative working as a great source of innovation, and nowhere is this more obvious than our global Innovation Hub network, Pace Port™. Pace Port™ unifies the best of TCS’ innovation with ecosystem capabilities, helping to deliver successful outcomes through collaborative research, experimentation and continuous learning alongside clients, partners, academia, and analysts.
By bringing the best practices and innovations together at intersections around the globe, our businesses and clients get the collaborative tools they need to set themselves up for evolution and innovative growth.
Much like the Tour de France team members, no man is an island, and no business is self-sufficient. We all flourish and succeed through partnership and synergy. There is no one winner when it comes to sustainability; therefore, collaboration is vital for businesses to achieve their sustainability goals.
The importance of evolving our definitions of success
The best motivation, supporting team and mindset will achieve nothing without a structured approach. It involves setting short-term and long-term goals and planning the entire journey in achievable steps. As the athlete progresses, adjustments are also vital – adapting training methods, diets and even the targets themselves.
The same applies in business. Target setting and strategies must evolve to ensure we are always ahead of the game. But we must also adapt to the circumstances. Sustainable business strategies mean developing our transformation goals with the realities of climate change and the technologies available to fight it.
Like sports, sustainability is more than a game of 90 minutes, a 21-stage race or 18 holes. We’re in it for the long haul.
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