Beyond Golf: Sports That Sharpen Your Business Skills
from
November/December 2007
by James Chitwood
It’s 10 a.m. on a warm June morning in Carmel Valley, a little slice of heaven near the Northern California coast. Buttressed by hills thick with live oak trees, the valley is only a short drive from the shoreline but far enough inland to provide shelter from the coastal winds. It’s an enviable place to visit, let alone live. This is where Clint Eastwood madehis home for many years, where Bay Area executives and board members take long weekends, where busy people come to be less so. Indeed, when business does takes place in the valley, it’s often at local resorts like Carmel Valley Ranch, a historic 1,700-acre spread that is ranked as one of the top 75 tennis resorts in the world. Here the networking and dealmaking happen between serves and volleys.
Since many of the tennis club’s 240 members are current or former executives, the club acts as a de facto referral service. Seeking a director with a specialskill set? A buyer for your company? Sometimes you need look no further than across the net. The ranch hosts corporate tournaments, tennis weekends,and retreats, often with a round-robin competitionas the centerpiece. It is a prime example of how an afternoon on the playing field, or in this case the hardcourt, can do wonders for business connections. “With a round-robin tennis tournament, players can meet 20 or 25 people in the space of three hours,” says Clark Corey, Carmel Valley’s tennis director. “I’ve seen all kinds of connections formed out on the court. It’s an amazing networking opportunity.”
While golf remains the king of business sports (
see “The 10 Best Golf Courses for Doing Business,”
Corporate Board Member
, November/December 2006
), Corey can attest that it’s not the only one. Whether the sport is tennis or basketball, running or the triathlon, it helps those who engage in it work off stress, not to mention those big cholesterol-filled board dinners. The participants are doing more than just exercising, though. They’re using these pastimes as a way to network, find potential hires, improve their performance in the boardroom, boost confidence, learn about the character of their clients and peers, and even, in some cases, form a guiding principle for an entire business.
If you find that last claim hard to believe, meet John W. Rogers Jr., 49, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Chicago-based Ariel Capital Management LLC/Ariel Mutual Funds, which handles nearly $16 billion in assets. Rogers is a director of insurance giant Aon Corp., electricity and gas distributor Exelon Corp., and McDonald’s Corp. and serves on nonprofit boards including the Chicago Urban League and the National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation.
He grew up in Chicago and attended Princeton, where he played basketball under the legendary coach Pete Carril. A captain on the 1980 varsity team, Rogers stays in touch with other Princeton hoops alumni, including Bill Bradley, and plays regularly at the Lakeshore Athletic Club, usually at noontime or on weekends. He remains quite good. In 2003, while attending the Michael Jordan Flight School, a hoops fantasy camp for adults, he became the first camper ever to beat Jordan to three points in a game of one-on-one, a feat Rogers modestly attributes to Jordan’s being “pretty tired.”
The game is now immortalized on DVDs in Ariel conference rooms.
Rogers sees basketball as more than an escape; to him, it’s a prism through which to view business. He invokes Carril’s name almost every day and even nameda conference room at Ariel after thecoach. Says Jason Tyler, Ariel’s seniorVP for research: “John has attended some of the best schools in the country and learned from some of the best economists, and even given that, all the values he exhibits when you work with him came from basketball, from trying to make your teammates look better, being disciplined, being precise, and settingthe bar for success extraordinarily high. Any meeting you’re in with him, ifyou’re talking about a stock he’s going to talk about Warren Buffett, but if you’re talking at all about how to run a business or how to be a good individual, he relates everything back to basketball.”
For example, to Rogers hoops is a good test of character. The journalist Heywood Broun once said, “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.” At Ariel, new hires or interns often find themselves shuttled to a basketball court to play with their boss. “Your personality shows upon the court each and every day,” Rogers explains. “There are people that I’ve gotten to know on the court, and theway they play definitely has a profound impact on how you view them as a person. Some of the people we’ve hired, I’ve had time to get them out at the health club and play one-on-one. I get a real insight into their character through those summer games.”
How? Listen to Camille Jayne, 55, a principal of Irvine, California’s Fertile Ground LLC, which provides business and marketing strategies for small companies. She was formerly chairman and CEO of technology company Universal Electronics Inc. and is now on the boards of Bit Central, a supplier of digital and satellite network systems, and WalkStyles Inc., a manufacturer of clothing and pedometers for walkers. Jayne has been playing tennis since shewas 4 but gave it up as a student at Stanford when a double major sucked up her free time. She didn’t pick up her racket again until she’d finished business school, after which she won the city singles championship in Minneapolis. Now she plays consistently, usually at the Racquet Club of Irvine every Saturday and Sunday morning, devoting herself to singles at eight-thirty and doubles at 10. She also tries to play one evening a week.
Jayne has made important business contacts through tennis, but she also occasionally learns whom she
doesn’t
want to do business with. “Diplomacy on the court is a real indicator,” she says. “You get a real good idea of what they’ll be like in business based on their fairness. Some people are known for calling in balls out and out balls in.
That can directly translate to whether you want to do business with them or even if you want to be friends.” Something as simple as being prompt makes an impression. “If people are consistently 10 to 15 minutes late and you only have an hour and a half on the court, then you know these people will be late to meetings,” says Jayne.
Rogers agrees. “In basketball if you see selfishness, if you see meanness, if you see lack of effort, most of these things carry over,” he says. “You can see the people who are sloppy about their work activities, versus the ones who are tight and buttoned-up. You build some real, permanent impressions of people.”
A positive impression can pay formidable dividends. Charlie Komar, 48, CEO of Charles Komar & Sons Inc., a New York City clothing company, has completed 42 marathons. In 2000 he was training for the New York marathon with a running group at a track near his home in New Jersey. There he met a Georgetown graduate named Harry Gaffney, who was training for the Chicago marathon. Komar liked Gaffney’s dedication and was impressed with his times (3:08 in the marathon). “We started running together and became friends,” says Komar. “I noticed we had a lot of similar traits. To run marathons at that level, you need drive, high intensity, good focus, and to be good at time management.” Two years later Komar acted on his instinct and hired Gaffney as his CFO.
One challenge of sports networking is that you can’t hobnob with other CEOs if you can’t find them. In 2001 Ted Kennedy, vice president of marketing for Ironman North America in Lake Placid, New York, set out to solve this problem by creating a setting where CEOs could compete against one another. His first event was an Ironman race in Lake Placid that attracted 15 competitors. Four years later he set up a company, CEO Challenges, that now runs a dozen events for chief executives exclusively, including racing and fly-fishing competitions and a tennis tournament. Kennedy says he has a 50% repeat rate among participants, in part because executives rarely get to spend time with people who have similar professional lives. “These guys love to compete, and they’re absolutely type-A personalities,” he says. “Everyone they meet at the events has a passion for business and a passion for the sport. Usually they walk away with five or six new friends.”
After the events, some of those CEOs “will copy me on e-mails,” says Kennedy. “I’ll see e-mails that read, ‘I heard you have a business, and I might be looking into that field,’ and the other guy will write, ‘Okay, it’s $200 million. I’ll drop off the papers next week.’”
Has the fraternizing resulted in any board appointments? Not yet, according to Kennedy, but Brian Carroll, 45, head of Carroll Enterprises Inc., a Worcester, Massachusetts, insurance and financial-services company, says, “In the near future, possibly yes. Frequency of contact helps build stronger relationships between us sports competitors.”
Attorney Carri Bennet, CEO of Bennet & Bennet in Bethesda, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., has participated in Kennedy’s events and loved it. “Doing it with other CEOs who you know have a lot of the same challenges you have, it really builds camaraderie, because you know they have the same limited time for training,” says Bennet, who competed in the Ironman race in Florida last winter.
To a certain extent, her business schedule revolves around her training for the full-distance Ironman triathlon, an endurance test of running (26.2 miles), swimming (2.4 miles), and cycling (112 miles). She’s completed three full-distance events (“and attempted five,” she’s quick to point out with a laugh), even though a decade ago she hardly exercised at all. “I was 37 years old and trying to get back in shape after having two kids,” she recalls. “I started working out with a group, and one of the trainers was starting to do triathlons. I thought, ‘Oh my God, who would ever be able to do something like that?’ That distance was so overwhelming. But a trainer talked me into a first step. I finished it and was hooked.”
Bennet finds that her triathlon experience helps her professionally. “You get a huge amount of respect when you talk about it,” she says. “When your peers find out you’ve done the triathlon in Hawaii, the men especially are really impressed by it.” She has another advantage: Because she was written up in the local press and got a brief mention in the
Washington Post
, other lawyers often know about her athletic exploits before meeting her. “I’ve found it to be an asset in the business world,” she says. “I walk into a meeting and a lot of attorneys will spend the first 10 minutes of the meeting talking about the triathlons. Often at conferences, mainly with men, I end up talking about bike components or something for a long time. It’s a great way to connect.”
Training like an elite athlete can have a profound impact upon work performance, according to Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, sports consultants who have worked with Olympic gold-medalist speed skater Dan Jansen and tennis champion Monica Seles, among others. Their article “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” in the December 2000/January 2001 issue of
Harvard Business Review
, argued, “The demands on executives to sustain high performance day in and day out, year in and year out, dwarf the challenges faced by any athlete we have ever trained.” Why? An average professional athlete spends most of his time refining his craft through practice and only rarely actually competes, they said, whereas executives never get to practice and often “compete” for 10, 12, or 14 hours a day or more, with no off-season. An exec who undergoes proper physical and mental training, the authors surmised, can see dramatic results on the job.
To test their theory, Loehr and Schwartz recruited a number of executives and board members and had them adopt an approach similar to top athletes’. Among those participating were Rudolph J. Borneo, now 66, the vice chairman and director of stores at Macy’s West and a director of restaurant chain Grill Concepts Inc., and Jim Connor, 56, the president of FootJoy and board chairman of the National Golf Foundation, a nonprofit trade association that focuses on the business aspects of golf. Loehr and Schwartz emphasized not just physical exercise but also healthy habits. So the executives ate five or six small meals a day instead of one or two big ones, stuck to prescribed dietary ratios, set up consistent sleeping regimens, got ample hydration, and added three or four 20- to 30-minute cardio workouts a week, plus two sessions of “intervals”—short bursts of intense exertion followed by brief recovery periods. Perhaps most important, they paused every 90 to 120 minutes during the workday to let their bodies recoup, an admittedly challenging prospect in a get-it-done-now world. It makes sense, though: Hormone, glucose, and blood-pressure levels naturally drop every 90 minutes or so, and if we don’t allow time to recover, our ability to perform both mentally and physically is stunted. So whether it was stopping to take a walk, eat a snack, or do breathing exercises, the participants gave their systems a chance to recharge, rather than trying to burn through the stress. The result: Loehr and Schwartz found “dramatically improved work performance” and “enhanced health and happiness.” In the end, their guinea-pig execs were working fewer hours and being more productive. Building on these results, Loehr now runs a “corporate athlete” program that has been attended by scores of executives and board members, including Procter & Gamble chairman and CEO A. G. Lafley, who has sent hundreds of his employees to the course.
But you don’t have to change your lifestyle to benefit from thinking like an athlete. Psychologists say that just adopting the mental principles of sports and applying them to business can improve performance. Joel Fish is director of the Center for Sport Psychology in Philadelphia. He has worked with Philadelphia’s National Basketball Association 76ers and National Hockey League Flyers and has spoken at more than 200 universities nationwide. In the last 10 years he’s branched out from purely sports work to give lectures to corporate groups, finding a strong correlation between the two worlds. “The competitive and mental skills in sports are similar to the competitive and mental skills necessary to succeed in business,” he says. “There’s setting goals, teamwork, dealing with an authority figure, whether it’s a coach or a boss; then mental skills related to public speaking and closing a deal that are similar to performing in high-stress sports situations. It’s a rich overlapping.”
Fish lists what he calls the “big five” mental skills in sports psychology that are most applicable to business: confidence, composure, concentration, communication, and cohesion. “Those five are required to succeed in business and required to succeed in competitive sport,” he explains. “There’s healthy competition and there’s unhealthy competition. There are written and unwritten rules. Sports is an arena where most people can relate to those types of concepts.” As for how people connect, he says, we’re drawn to certain “teammates” in business in the same way we are in sports. In the case of people like Rogers, the Ariel chief who plays basketball with potential employees, that forms a valuable connection. “A boss needs to have a comfort level in terms of employees,” says Fish. “In his case, it sounds like that’s how he best communicates, so why not get them out on the court?”
The actor and comedian Martin Mull once said, “The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.” One imagines he wouldn’t make much of a triathlete. But that’s the beauty of sports: One man’s torture is another’s passion. For some, it’s not the physical exertion so much as the mental test. Martin Pazzani, 51, found that out while doing one of the CEO Challenges, an automobile road-racing weekend in rural Virginia. Pazzani is chairman and CEO of Elias Arts, a music and audio company that works with Nike and Infiniti, among others. He spent three days last spring driving and socializing with six fellow CEOs. “I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’m so busy I don’t ever meet anybody,” he says. “These guys, though, it was like meeting a bunch of old friends.”
Tim Wentworth, another competitor in the CEO Driving Challenge, agrees. As CEO of Accredo Health Group, a subsidiary of Medco Health Solutions Inc., the 47-year-old Wentworth has precious little free time—but when he does, he devotes it to cars. “I run a $6 billion health-care company,” he says, “so I’m usually with customers or folks that we do business with. Generally speaking, it’s very much a business transaction. Once in a while, though, I find one who shares a passion about cars.” In Virginia, he found six of them. “After one day together, it felt like we’d known each other for five years,” says Wentworth. The group has been e-mailing steadily ever since and has plans to get together for dinner as well as for other racing weekends.
Wentworth has carried over the experience to Medco. “I decided that the challenge this year for my team is that if we beat business goals, I’ll take all 11 of them to the Porsche driving school,” he says. As for why he thinks business leaders are drawn to racing, he sees a similarity to golf. “Just like being on the course, where every hole is different, in racing every lap is a chance to improve,” he says. “I think CEOs like competing against themselves. It’s self-improvement. Yes, we compete against each other. But we prefer competing against ourselves.”
Some believe you can tell a lot about an exec by what sport he or she chooses to play. Runners, triathletes, and swimmers will often tell you that they enjoy the time alone and are internally driven. Basketball players like Rogers take pleasure in teamwork and the way hoops levels social strata. In any pickup game, you may find yourself paired with a carpenter, a real estate agent, a bartender, a board chairman, or even a celebrated actor. George Clooney, for example, is a famous gym rat who used to play in pickup games around Los Angeles.
Richard D. Fairbank, 56, the chairman and CEO of McLean, Virginia-based Capital One Financial, plays in an adult hockey league. Describing the need to look ahead in business, he recently used a hockey analogy during an interview with the
New York Times
: “If you go to where the puck is going instead of where it is, it is a lot easier.” Stephan Godevais, CEO of Augmentix Corp., an Austin, Texas, technology company, prefers soccer. “I’m a believer that the sport matches the profile of the participant,” writes Godevais in an e-mail. “Golf is mostly individualistic, highly competitive in hidden ways, and you’re never good enough at it. It delivers intense pressure moments, which is why so many CEOs love it.” Soccer, on the other hand, he finds more relaxing—even, he says, “when I played against one of my employees and he slide-tackled me pretty hard on a side run and got himself a yellow card.
But I wasn’t upset. It’s part of the beautiful game.”
Carri Bennet, the Washington lawyer, sees this ethos being transferred to work situations. “I’ve noticed that soccer and baseball players, they tend to like to carry the team aspect over into their business, so they operate their business as a team more,” she says. “You hear people refer to each other as ‘the team,’ not as ‘the staff.’ It’s more of this collegial thing.” Bennet pauses and thinks for a moment. “After all,” she says, “there’s no rule that says you have to play golf to succeed in business.”
Or to quench your competitive thirst.
