Resting on your laurels

In a couple of week’s time I’m working with a sporting organisation who are coming off the back of a fantastic season. Rather than rest on their laurels however, they wish to reset their culture and redefine what success looks like for the coming season, not the one just gone.

Phil Jackson, a man with eleven basketball championship rings was successful because he worked out what many business leaders often don’t and that’s, the surest way to lose is to keep doing the thing that made you win. 

He said in his book Eleven Rings, ‘The mistake that championship teams often make is to try to repeat their winning formula.’

Many boardrooms, however, remain devoted to the encore. ‘We built a model that worked, so let's protect it forever’ is a strategy as sophisticated as laminating your favourite sandwich from Pret-a-Manger. 

The evidence backs this up. Only one in ten S&P 500 firms sustains profitable growth over a decade, largely because leaders stopped imagining (or lacked the curiosity for) anything new. Success, it transpires, teaches the wrong lessons very persuasively.

The fix isn't to throw everything out (indeed at the start of my workshops, we’ always focus on what went well). It's treating last year's win as a moment, not a monument, and building a culture where ‘we've always done it this way’ earns a raised eyebrow rather than a nod. As another noted serial winner John Wooden told Jackson,  ‘winning takes talent; repeating takes character.’

If you rest on your laurels, you'll find they're remarkably uncomfortable to sit on.