Business Insight Zone

Woods on the eve of his epic 2008 U.S. Open win.

I try to keep my use of sports metaphors to a minimum, both because (a) these metaphors tend to be overused in American business, which can be alienating to non-sports fans and to those who grew up following sports outside the U.S. mainstream, and (b) once you get me started . . . sheesh, next thing you know, I’ll be constructing some overblown metaphor about how today’s worldwide credit crunch is like the Knicks‘ salary-cap problems.

That way lies madness, I think you’ll agree.

All that said, I share the awe expressed by Tom Peters over Tiger Woods’s dramatic win in the U.S. Open playoff a week ago. Because of my travel schedule, I was able to watch a lot of that Monday playoff round, and it was amazing to see Woods play and win despite obvious pain from his badly injured left knee.

Here’s what Peters had to say:

I was reading a David Brooks column (New York Times) on Mr Woods yesterday, and was reminded of what, to me, is the most astonishing part of the Woods story. Namely, that on two occasions Woods no less than “risked his career,” per Brooks, re-tooling his (already amazing!!) swing — and then survived months and months of inconsistent performance to get into his new groove. [. . .]

How do you get the nerve to do such a thing — or even admit that it needs to be done when you are sitting atop the personal or professional or corporate skyscraper?

Good question — we’ll come back to that in just a minute. Meanwhile, the David Brooks column that Peters points to is also well worth reading. Here’s the context for the bit that Peters cites.

And here we’re getting to the nub of what’s so remarkable about the “Be A Tiger” phenomenon: He’s become the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude.

The ancients were familiar with physical courage and the priests with moral courage, but in this over-communicated age when mortals feel perpetually addled, Woods is the symbol of mental willpower. He is, in addition, competitive, ruthless, unsatisfied by success and honest about his own failings. (Twice, he risked his career to retool his swing.)

In the business world, we all know plenty of people who have some of these traits but not all of them. For example, a CEO might have a strong will and be as self-assured, competitive, and ruthless as Woods, yet without the ability to be honest about his or her own failings. And we all know businesspeople who are honest about their own failings and extraordinarily hard-working, yet lack the sort of ruthless drive that characterizes Woods or, say, Steve Jobs.

In his classic book Good to Great, Jim Collins studied more than a dozen companies that “retooled their swings,” transforming themselves from run-of-the-pack competitors to perennial top performers. One of the commonalities Collins identified for this group of companies was the willingness of their CEOs to submerge their own egos as they made the hard choices to “retool their swings.” One example that springs to mind was Darwin Smith, the great leader who sold Kimberly-Clark’s paper mills along the way to making that company a titan in consumer paper goods.

Smith was hardly lacking in self-confidence, and he had a strong will interwoven with a competitive streak. But he was so committed to making himself and his company better that he wasn’t afraid to slaughter any sacred cows. Extracting Kimberly-Clark from the business of running paper mills was definitely one of those, since many insiders regarded the mills as the company’s touchstone to its past.

I’m hardly the first to make the connection between the mindset shared by Woods and Darwin Smith. Right now I’m reading Carol Dweck’s terrific book Mindset. The book’s fundamental theme is that high perfomers across many areas share a “growth mindset,” one that focuses on endless improvement, instead of the “fixed mindset” that leads people to believe that they’re either great or mediocre or terrible — but in any case not subject to improvement. Dweck, who wrote the book based on decades of research as a psychology professor at Columbia, Stanford, and elsewhere, talks specifically about the CEOs from Good to Great, and about sporting legends like Woods and Michael Jordan.

The commonality between all of these people, regardless of field, was that all of them maintained a supple mind and a staunch commitment to ongoing growth. All of them, therefore, were ready to venture in a new direction — to “retool their swings” — when conditions warranted.

This, I think, answers Peters’s question:

How do you get the nerve to do such a thing — or even admit that it needs to be done when you are sitting atop the personal or professional or corporate skyscraper?

You get it by having a mindset that isn’t satisfied with what you already have — a mindset that is committed to the fundamental concept that you can be better tomorrow than you are today by dint of hard work and a focused program of improvement.

~

Related items of interest:

• Ron Sirak of Golf World writes on Tiger Woods’s force of will.
• Guy Kawasaki on Carol Dweck and Mindset: Part 1 and Part 2.
• “Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind” - a New York Times article about methods to increase willpower via practice.

~

(Photo by Jim Epler.)