Of Sprints, Marathons, and the Power of Changing the Game

Posted by Bill - April 28th, 2008

These are tough times for investors, what with four airline bankruptcies in the last week alone, and an embarrassing miss on Wall Street by GE and its much-admired CEO Jeff Immelt. But these are great times for sports fans in Boston, what with the Red Sox defending their second World Series title in four years and the Celtics dribbling towards a 17th championship banner. And don’t forget last week’s running of the Boston Marathon, which featured the closest women’s finish in the 112-year history of the race.

Now, I’m not big on using sports metaphors to think about business, but indulge me for just a moment as I use a metaphor that I think is apt for the times in which we work and compete. I just finished a great book by a writer named John Bryant. It is about the quest to break the four-minute mile. We all know that Roger Bannister became the first person ever to run a four-minute mile. It was in a race in Oxford on May 6, 1954. His ran it in three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second.

Bannister was, at the time, a 25-year-old, full-time medical student who devised his own approach to training. He was something of a maverick—both in terms of what made him tick and in his approach to competition.

The quest to break four minutes had been in full force at least since 1886—almost 70 years before Bannister did it—and it involved the most brilliant coaches and the most gifted athletes in North America, Europe, and Australia. It was truly the Holy Grail of athletic achievement. It’s amazing to learn about the pressure, the crowds, the media attention in various races as runners tried to break the mark.

And for 70 years it didn’t happen—and when it did happen, it defied all the experts. The experts believed they knew the precise circumstances under which the record would be broken. It would have to be in perfect weather—68 degrees and no wind. On a particular kind of track—hard, dry clay. And in front of a huge crowd urging the runner on.

But Roger Bannister did it on a cold day, on a wet track, at a meet in Oxford before a crowd of just 3,000 people. He broke the mark, and even his most ardent rivals breathed a sigh of relief. Somebody did it! And once they saw it was possible, they did it too. Just 46 days later, John Landy, an Australian runner, not only broke the barrier but crushed Bannister’s time. Then, a year after Bannister’s impossible achievement, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race! Over the last 50 years, more than one thousand runners have broken a barrier that for the previous 70 years had been considered impossible to break.

Here’s the message: What goes for runners goes for leaders running organizations. Progress in business doesn’t move in a straight line. It’s not incremental. Whether it’s an entrepreneur, a scientist, or an athlete, someone does something that was thought to be impossible—somebody changes the game—and what was unreachable becomes merely a benchmark, something for others to shoot for and surpass.

Wharton Professor Jerry Wind has written about the symbolism for business of the four-minute mile. In his book, The Power of Impossible Thinking, he offered this assessment of Bannister’s feat: “The runners of the past had been held back by a mindset that said they could not surpass the four-minute mile. When that limit was broken, the others saw that they could do something they had previously thought impossible.”

Southwest has run the four-minute mile in the disastrous airline business. Lexus has run the four-minute mile in the brutal automobile business. What does it mean to run the four-minute mile in your business—and how are you going to do it?

PermaLink: Of Sprints, Marathons, and the Power of Changing the Game