The Usain Bolt Guide to Business Excellence: Acceleration

The room got quiet. It was 4:49PM on Sunday, August 5th, and Usain Bolt was about to compete the 100m Final. The starting gun fired, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Bolt hadn’t started as strong as I imagined he would. Even more unbelievably, he finished quite a respectable distance ahead in a relatively short race. How was this possible?

If you want to excel, accelerate, and make sure your goals lead to your destination @HerbertLui

Acceleration. Essentially, the only option in a hundred metre dash is to somehow obtain a head start (since this race is won through milliseconds, a quicker reaction time or predictive mind can get a racer that “head start”), or to move faster than everyone else. Pretty straightforward.

In business, that can also be your competitive edge. How do you move faster, as an organization? As a salesperson? As a leader?

Accelerating Business

There are quite a few resources (books, seminars, conferences, etc.) that can be very helpful in acceleration: namely, improving productivity and achieving peak performance.

For instance, David Allen’s Getting Things Done system is a tried and true method of staying on top of work, and making sure that every task in your Inbox gets cleared out, delegated, or taken care of in some other way before your day is over. Here’s Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani’s simplified variant for those of you curious about it.

There’s also the method of improving effectiveness through Quiet, as The Art of Leadership speaker Susan Cain suggests in her speech and book Quiet:The Power of Introverts. By implementing rules where people can do work for uninterrupted amounts of time in peace, organizations have found instances of innovation and creativity on the rise.

One final example would be simply focusing on the important things, and avoiding the unimportant ones, as Seth Godin suggests. While I have no doubt Usain Bolt is a great runner, even he needed to focus on honing his raw speed and improving his start when moving from 200m to 100m back when he was preparing for the 2008 Olympics.

It’s Not as Comfortable...

Speed is the reason that startups like Canada’s own eBook reader Kobo are able to keep up with larger organizations that have more resources, like Amazon.

Speed comes with an inherently greater difficulty in maneuvering. Usain Bolt’s pursuit of speed led to his false start a year ago. There will be occasional roadblocks and obstacles along the way, but they serve to refine our performances.

More importantly, unlike the hundred metre dash, there are certain aspects of business that resemble a marathon. Although time is still finite, we have the luxury of choosing to draw time from other activities to commit more of it to executing in business. For example, Yahoo!’s new CEO Marissa Mayer was reputed to have worked 130hours per week in the earlier days of Google.

If you want to excel, accelerate, use time wisely, and make sure your goals lead to your destination. 

Image courtesy of http://www.birminghammail.co.uk