Why business success often follows sporting victories

Almost half of the chief executives of big British firms have won awards for their sporting prowess, but it has little to do …

Almost half of the chief executives of big British firms have won awards for their sporting prowess, but it has little to do with teamwork, writes Lucy Kellaway.

LAST MONDAY, after three hours and 57 minutes on the centre court at Wimbledon, a victorious Andy Murray flexed his bulging biceps at the crowd and pulled his mouth into an oblong grimace of triumph.

"I can go on and win the title," he said later to a disbelieving press conference, while shovelling sushi into his mouth.

I watched this ugly display with special interest as I had just been reading a survey suggesting that most top businessmen share a successful past as sportsmen.

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Almost half of the chief executives of the biggest British companies have won awards for their sporting prowess - twice as many as have any academic trophies. Most of them were captain of football or rugby teams at school or college.

In the US the picture is probably the same - or even more so judging from the sports-crazy autobiographies of chief executives. Jack Welch manages to mention hockey in the very first line of Straight From the Gut, boasting: "I was lucky to be an okay jock in hockey, as captain and leading scorer of the high-school team."

As someone who was not lucky to be an okay jock in hockey - or in anything involving a ball - I've always found it creepy the way successful businessmen brag about how great they were at sport, especially when dodgy knees and growing waistlines stopped play decades ago.

However, last week's survey suggests that the sports obsession is far more than mere jock boasting. It seems that success at sport and in big corporations may well be linked: the first either causes the second, or is an indicator of it. Most of the 100 chief executives who responded to the survey (organised by the government of the Isle of Man) said their days on the sports field had taught them the importance of teamwork - which, they said, is what business is all about.

I don't believe this for a minute. Instead, there are more compelling and less flattering reasons for the link between sport and business, all of which were in evidence at Wimbledon last Monday. Murray's victory was about a pathological competitiveness, about endurance, and about keeping his nerve when things looked bad. All these traits can come in handy in business too.

But mostly it was about self-belief on a scale not justified by the facts. The facts were that he was bound to lose the next round, as Rafael Nadal was better than him, but he could no more say that than a chief executive could say: "Our rivals are more efficient than us, so they will probably win this contract."

Both businessmen and sportsmen have to talk big, and they have to believe big too.

About half the chief executives admitted they were strangers to self-doubt. Such confidence is interesting because it flies in the face of one of the most popular theories of modern leadership: that successful leaders are emotionally intelligent.

Total self-belief is not only emotionally unintelligent, it is unintelligent in every way as, deep down, every one of us is a duffer. Well-rounded people know this, which makes it harder for them to excel in the boardroom or on the pitch. Sportsmen and businessmen are also united by conformity. Football has zero tolerance of deviance of even the most piffling sort: Graham Le Saux was ridiculed and distrusted by his Chelsea team-mates simply because he read the Guardian newspaper rather than the Sun like the rest of the squad.

In large companies, for all the talk of diversity, most people think and believe the same things. All the stuff about "thinking outside the box" is fanciful: to do well, you need to be just like the next person, only even more ambitious.

The same is not true of entrepreneurs, for whom deviation is a virtue. Their wackier choice of sports reflects this, judging by Alan Sugar and Richard Branson who like to take to the skies solo in, respectively, an aircraft and a balloon.

Sportsmen and chief executives also both make a hash of the queen's English. Each generates their own jargon and then feels compelled to borrow the jargon of the other.

Sport is responsible for some of the most grating phrases in business, including ballparks, level playing fields, stepping up to the plate, bench strength, getting to first base, raising the bar and playing hardball.

Footballers, meanwhile, are starting to talk like management consultants: David Beckham now says "going forward" every time he opens his mouth.

Yet the most ominous thing about the survey is what it suggests for women at work. If succeeding in a big company is like winning at football, this could explain why women aren't getting along terribly well. The testosterone, the locker-room talk, the over-confidence and the irrational competition are all a turn-off.

There isn't a single sport that men and women compete in equally, except for extreme marathons of 100 miles or more. In these, the extra strength of men is balanced by the endurance of women. But this is not terribly heartening as business is not an extreme marathon: it's a sprint.

If the Isle of Man government were to conduct another survey of senior women in business to assess how they fared on the netball court and hockey field, I suspect it would come back with a low score. I can't find much evidence of sporting triumph among women executives. All I can find is that Marjorie Scardino (chief executive of Pearson, which owns the Financial Times) did rodeo barrel races in Texas when she was a teenager, but that's another ball game altogether. - (Financial Times service)