Business management theories often use knowledge and
experiences from sports. I have always enjoyed these parallels (see also http://www.bouman.net/2010/06/what-we-can-learn-from-football.html). But now I see
that sport also has started to use theories and knowledge from business
management.
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| Photo by Dick Aalders |
I had the privilege to experience briefly Tjalling van den
Berg life in action with young football
players. Tjalling contributed as coach and educator of coaches to the success of the Dutch gymnast Epke Zonderland. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm_mQXr6JL0)
Epke won a gold medal at the 2012 Olympic Games. I was impressed with what Tjalling did, though as an observer he came across
rather funny strange man. Don’t know if the players saw it that way.
Tjalling wrote with Ruben Bakema a book called “Coachen” in
which they present the concept of “eco-coaching” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHgVeH2YRD0
) in which they see the coach to take a more holistic approach to coaching. Not
only focus on the technical aspect but place the sportsperson, his personality
and his development in the centre. In addition to look at yourself as a coach
how you can develop yourself. And they recommend to work with the environment of
the sportsperson including family and new technologies. To be an innovator.
The book has three parts. The first part revolves around
finding yourself as coach and finding the right talent to coach. The second
part revolves around binding with the sportsperson and building team. The third
part is about scoring, to achieve results in a sustainable way and to motivate
the sportsperson.
Particularly in the first two parts we recognise elements
such as characteristics of a good coach (not much different of those of a good
manager), the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), communication sciences and ego-state
from Transaction Analysis of Eric Berne. The book goes quickly and briefly
through a wide variety of theories. In the third part contains more specific sports
theories.
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| Us Abe |
The book goes quickly and briefly through a wide variety of
theories and is full of on-liners and that is done on purpose so concepts can
easily be remembered.
For example “The
eco-coach does not let you train harder, but differently, together, smarter and
sustainable”.
This reminds me of a project manager who challenged me to
work smarter instead of harder when I said that the time to deliver something was
insufficient.
Some other one-liners are:
Even when all coaches
agree, it does not mean they are right.
What he is trying to say that it is very important to listen
to the sportsperson (there is also a section on listening and trying not to talk; http://www.bouman.net/2011/06/are-you-in-it-for-ride.html). In business this not much different and you need to listen
to your employees since they often know how to come to a successful outcome.
To be successful over
a longer period of time, performance is more important than winning.
We too often aim at short term success which will negatively
impact the long term success. I find
this too often the risk with politicians. If they are elected as minister, this
is for a short period and in that short period they need to score. That does
not always lead to the best decisions.
Without change no
innovation and without innovation no progress.
Another angle to this, is not to try to be a strategic
partner of the business if the business is not ready for it yet. See Lou
Ehrlich in my blog post http://www.bouman.net/2011/02/it-does-not-always-need-to-be-partner.html
Perform first before
you start innovating.
We read so much about CIO’s and the IT department that need
to drive business improvement. However in so many cases, the internal processes
are rather immature. First provide a good optimal service and control what you
have before you want to change the business. I don’t say here that you should
avoid initiatives that improve the business but more on where you focus on.
Another angle would be to say that before you automate
something, you need to have mastered the manual process. I ran in the past in
many occasions where we were asked for some smart IT solution. It turned out
that the business did not understand actually what was required because they
were not able to perform the task via manual processes.
Just as my comments, the one-liners do not always apply.
They are guides that help in certain circumstances.
