Posts Tagged ‘cycling’
Why is cycling like business?
July 27th, 2009For those of you who know me, July is an important month for me. The Tour de France runs from the first week to the third week, 21 days of cycling around France, over 2200 miles with some mountains so steep cars can barely get up them. But one of the things that has always stuck with me, is how cycling is such a team sport. When one of your teammates is in the lead of the race, everyone else kicks into protection mode to help out the leader of the race. In big stage races like the Tour and the Giro d Italia (Tour of Italy), there’s a strategy going in. How far do you want to get in front of the others, how many people do you send to the front of the pack, do you help other teams who are trying to catch the leaders – lots of strategy questions that need to get answered at 30 or 40 mph while you legs are pumping at 100 rpm on your pedals. One of the most prolific moments in any major race is when a team decides they don’t want to be the leader of the race, and they give away the leader’s jersey ON PURPOSE. Seemingly a crazy idea to people who are used to sports where you get in the lead and stay in the lead as long as possible. But in cycling, you want to save your energy and defending the leader’s jersey is an exhausting process – you want to wait until the last possible moment to grab the lead and then push forward to the end.
This reminds me of running a business – at what point in a project do your resources all fall in line because of the strategy you’ve laid out and planned for. Sometimes it seems like you are veering away from the end-goal, but the reality is you’ve carefully planned out your strategy and the leader’s jersey is yours when you want to take it. Taking this lesson from cycling is extremely hard – it’s about how do you work smarter not harder, and proper planning is the key.
One of the things we’ve been doing for a few years, is better and better information about clients, environments, process and procedures. It seems simple enough, but when you get down to it – it’s a ton of work. When the activity is not revenue generating, how do you justify spending all that time, resources and money on something that may never be needed? Every time we go to a client or get a tech support call, we make sure we have their folder in front of us. Coupled with our helpdesk system, this provides a comprehensive set of systems for us to ensure we have everything ready for the next time a client needs something.
So what do you do for customers to defend the leader’s jersey, or at what point do you have everything aligned to grab that jersey when you want it?
