Play Your Own Game: How to Use Sports Analogies in Business
It’s no accident that we’ve come to call the fundamental units of business collaboration “teams,” or that leaders have found insight and inspiration in sports stories and quotes. But while some comparisons are helpful, others can harm. How to tell the difference?
“Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” Vince Lombardi
A Cautionary Tale
In my first term as a competitive rower, my crew — the Jesus College Boat Club Men’s 1st Novice VIII — finished as the second fastest out of fifty intramural competitors.
Emboldened by our success, five of us — who couldn’t (or refused to) meet the demanding schedule of our elite boats — reassembled the following spring as the JCBC Men’s 6th VIII.
We were excited by the prospect of achieving glory in the May Bumps— a distinctive Cambridge race where boats line up along the River Cam a length apart in the previous year’s finishing order, and win by by catching up to, or “bumping,” the boat ahead (thus taking its place). Bump in all three days of the competition and we would win our “blades”— the greatest achievement outside of becoming head of the river.
Our hopes were further raised by the athletic prowess of our new members. Most promising was an ex-Olympian Nordic skier I’ll call “Anders,” who demonstrated Herculean strength in land trials.
With this secret weapon on our team, we had all the makings of an upset winner.
With this secret weapon in our power section, we had all the makings of a competitive stealth boat. Our coach felt that we might even overbump — move up multiple places in a single race— on all days, sealing our place in (at least a small part of) May Bumps history.
Alas, we did not even come close. “Jesus 6” bumped twice, barely, but missed on our third outing, never drawing nearer than half a boat.
As we gathered that evening to celebrate what was still technically a winning record, it was hard to contain our disappointment. What had gone wrong?
“It was Anders,” our coach declared, bolstered by a half-pint of port. “He might be the strongest rower I’ve ever seen, but he didn’t pull with the boat. He slowed us down.”
“He was the strongest I’ve ever seen, but he slowed us down.”
The chagrined Anders was quick to offer his insight. As a skier, he’d only ever competed alone: this was his first time on a “real” team. Applying his full power, which in past led him to the podium, had left him sufficiently out of sync to cost us our victory.
In my career as a management consultant, I’ve told this story more than once. The takeaway’s not rocket science. Business is a team sport: a singular talent cannot add value — and might even detract — when they don’t align.
But is the insight really that simple?
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” Wayne Gretzky
As-One!
Forward-thinking business leaders have recently been encouraging their teams to see George Clooney’s The Boys In The Boat (2023): the Cinderella story of a junior varsity crew from the University of Washington that took gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
It’s not hard to see why. A group of young men, reeling from the ravages of the Great Depression, initially sign up for the stipend that comes with a place on a novice crew. Ninety minutes later, they’ve internalized their motivation and raised their sights to global glory. Most importantly, they are no longer an ad-hoc group, but a unit with a fitting rallying cry: “As-One!”
How can we know when a sports analogy is constructive?
I had the privilege of seeing the film at a private screening for the staff and clients of a management consultancy that serves high growth firms. The conversation after the credits rolled quickly turned from the story’s artistic merits to its business application.
Are corporate teams really like rowing crews, best when they do exactly the same thing at the same time? Or would another kind of sports team analogy be more appropriate? How can we know?
The Three Magic Drivers of Team Performance
While parallels between business and sports teams are often drawn, the analogy with rowing has a peculiar twist.
Winning organizations leverage the “Magic Three” drivers of team performance:
- Fit (sharing the same values)
- Alignment (working together to pursue shared priorities), and
- Engagement (inspiring discretionary effort)
Rowing draws our attention to their interplay of these in a way other sports don’t.
In goal-scoring sports, an outstanding talent can model peak performance and inspire the rest to elevate their game: think Jordan in basketball, Gretzky in hockey, Messi in soccer. Engagement thus drives alignment and fit. One person can turn a middling club satisfied to make the playoffs into a dynasty.
Rowing draws our attention to the interplay of the “Magic Three” drivers of team performance: Fit, Engagement, and Alignment.
On certain business teams, a similar dynamic applies. A great salesperson can show others what is possible and share better practices. A visionary designer, like Apple’s legendary Jony Ive, can redefine a brand.
They can also cause devastation.
The Business Lessons of Rowing
As the story above shows, rowing draws attention to a dynamic that business teams often need to contend with: situations where the well-meaning engagement of an outstanding talent can hurt alignment and performance.
Consider the world of professional services, where sales is typically the responsibility of the whole partnership. What can easily happen — a phenomenon I’ve seen in law firms and advisory firms—is that one or two partners can easily become responsible for most sales. They are typically celebrated as “rainmakers,” and receive due compensation.
The problem? For starters, their proficiency can become an excuse for their peers, now downgraded to being “service partners,” to cease developing their own sales skills and relationships.
In turn, rainmakers themselves can become so focused on business development they become detached from the business itself, thus weaker at service—and even sales, as they lose sight of what they’re selling.
Individual strengths can prove to be collective weaknesses.
Taken together, such concentration leaves the enterprise overly dependent on stars who can leave it high and dry when they move on, or simply experience a personal health crisis, as happened at one of my clients.
In short, individual strengths can turn out to be collectively debilitating, much as Jesus 6 discovered.
Similar dynamics can play out in firms that manufacture or deliver goods, in areas such product development or operations. To a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail. Managers whose talents lie in a particular area naturally want to play to their strengths.
This can become a problem, however, when the strategic imperatives of an organization require a move in another direction.
In most sectors, the essence of strategy is not execution, but differentiation. I worked with a specialized construction materials company that so profoundly changed the game in its market — specifically by doing as much customization work as possible in its own facilities rather than onsite — that competitors began to copy its playbook. The challenge? Some of these competitors had scale advantages and began undercutting them on price.
What “MatCo” needed to do to survive long term was to narrow its offering to a few high-end materials for which it had exclusive distribution rights. Its head of fabrication, however, was so good at managing all the complexity an extensive line demanded of her — and so enjoyed the outsized role this gave her — that she resisted the change. This unbalanced the boat, and the CEO found himself torn between his star and his strategy. Inspired in part by the Anders story, he chose the latter — and had to contend with the aftermath of having let one strong performer distort the priorities, even the values, of the whole.
Fit and alignment had suffered. And given how some parts of the organization had started to ride on fabrication’s coattails, so had engagement.
The Takeaway: Do Your Homework, Play Your Game
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Mike Tyson
The perpetual problem with any business analogy is that it’s not always clear which should apply.
Are outliers necessarily a problem? Apple built its strategy around a legendary CEO as well as its star designer. That strategy has clearly survived their departures (Steve Jobs passed in 2011; Ive left in 2019; investors haven’t missed them). However, the company also had other sources of advantage that didn’t depend on individuals: notably a product ecosystem that has inspired unparalleled customer loyalty.
MatCo’s superstar’s talents proved both more central and more replicable by competitors.
When using sports analogies, it’s easy to overlook key details. In goal sports, for example, not all stars elevate their clubs to the same degree, or even at all. Lionel Messi has posted over 50 percent more assists per game than his longstanding rival Cristiano Ronaldo, plus an 16–11–9 record head-to-head matchups. And it’s not always on them: Kawhi Leonard led the Toronto Raptors to their first championship, but hasn’t done much for the LA Clippers.
The takeaway is this: as powerful as sports comparisons might seem, leaders must be careful to treat them as starting points—tools for reflection—never “The Answer.”
Analogies provide starting points, not answers.
This is not to say there isn’t an Answer out there for your company and the challenges you face, or an inspiring tale of a turnaround or upset that will rally your players.
But the only way to find the right one and use it well is to follow the dictum of Golf Hall of Famer Harvey Pennick: play your own game.
Stephen Butler is a management consultant with Framework, a growth consultancy. Many thanks to Jeff Tetz and his team at Results for the screening and inspiration for this piece.
