CHAPTER

14

Sports

In the early 1980s, Herb asked his neighbor, architect Bob Hillier, to design and build offices for Caliper in Princeton on Mt. Lucas Road. Everything was looking up. The consulting firm was growing at levels that afforded Herb opportunities to experiment in ways he never could before.

One of those attempts was to purchase an AM radio station, which was floundering at the bottom of the local marketplace, and try to convert it into a station that would remind him of what radio used to be like when he was a child. He wanted to create a radio station that would eloquently and memorably engage people, the way Edward R. Murrow used to enlighten his audience about politics and Red Barber could make his listeners feel like they were actually at the baseball stadium.

“I was able to identify and bring on talent for the station,” Herb says, “and we were able to produce very good content, including interviews with dignitaries like President Carter on several occasions. But the engineering problems became a royal nightmare. This was something that I knew too little about. We were wasting money left and right trying to fix the signal. We had a lot of fun with the formatting. We had shows on folk music, jazz, and even some old-time radio shows, featuring Jack Benny, Jimmy Durante, and Fanny Brice. We even brought in some of the soap operas, like Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, and Captain Midnight. We had our listeners on the air and very involved. And we had plenty of commercial time, but the only way we were compensated was in gift certificates—for restaurants, hot air balloon rides, even cruises. But very little actual money. So, after a few years, I licked my wounds, cut my losses, and sold the station.” Pausing, he adds, “Radio has always been an important part of my life. It was not just a way to get information, it was like school to me, where I learned the art of storytelling from some of the finest on-air personalities there ever were. So, while the radio station didn’t turn out like I hoped it would, I’m glad I gave it a shot.”

Selling the radio station freed Herb’s imagination to pursue other ventures. As a child, besides radio, one of his most significant passions, of course, was sports. Being in the dugout with the Dodgers was formative in his childhood, if not transformative. He loved listening to and analyzing games. And he was constantly intrigued by why some players made it in the major leagues, while others, who seemed to have all the talent in the world, fizzled out. Then the wheels started to spin. This is where his love of sports and his expertise as a psychologist merged in a dreamlike way.

Herb got the notion that the assessment approach he had developed to hire top-performing leaders, managers, salespeople, and customer service representatives could also be adapted to picking draft choices for professional sports teams.

“I started with the assumption that virtually all players seriously considered by scouts and coaches have a great deal of talent. Yet the vast majority are not able to take their game to the next level,” Herb says. They don’t live up to their scholarships in college or their signing bonuses in the major leagues. So talent alone was not the predictor of success. “The fact that a player dominates in college because of talent simply does not mean that he or she could dominate on the professional level when going up against people of equal and better talent,” he adds.

Herb started experimenting with the Rutgers football team, where he still had some connections. He says, “This was a dream come true. We were learning a lot about why some athletes who were all-stars in high school could not take their talent to the next level. We also learned why some athletes could surpass others with equal talent. Ultimately, what matters is what is in an athlete’s heart and what is in his or her head.”

After refining his theories and seeing them come to fruition at the college level, a few years later, Herb was in Nantucket with Gordon Gund, a co-owner of a professional basketball and hockey team—the Cleveland Cavaliers and the (then) Minnesota North Stars. “We were on his boat, sipping a wonderful white wine while looking for clams. As the conversation unfolded, Gordon asked if I thought I could help him with his draft choices for the North Stars. I told him that I didn’t know the first thing about hockey, but I could help him pick players who were competitive, self-disciplined, and believed in themselves. Gordon said, ‘You’re on.’ And that’s how we started in professional sports.

“After I helped him select some players who went on to be very successful, the team moved from being a doormat to a competitor,” Herb says. “Gordon then asked if I could help with his basketball team, and I was thrilled, because that was a sport I knew. In fact, I graduated from City College the year they won the NCAA and the NIT tournaments—the only team ever to have achieved that success. With Gordon’s confidence and insights from the general manager, Harry Weltman, we worked together to help take the Cavaliers from a losing team into one that became highly competitive. Then, when Harry moved on to manage the New Jersey Nets, we continued to consult with him on his draft choices. That led to us working with several dozen professional basketball, baseball, and football teams, including the Orlando Magic, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Chicago White Sox, and the Chicago Cubs.”

What qualities distinguish top performers?

“If what the scout sees on the field was enough to go with, there would be no mistakes in the draft: every pick would be successful. What they can’t see is what is inside the player. There are three essential qualities needed for an athlete to live up to his or her potential,” Herb says. “That’s what we study. Are they self-disciplined, competitive, and do they have a positive sense of their self? Those three qualities have to be lined up for a player to actualize his or her potential.”

Just as he started off his work on successful salespeople with two, then three essential qualities, Herb had created a model for superior athletes that could be simplified into three indispensable, but interdependent, attributes. With them, in substantial amounts, an athlete might be ready for the next level of competition. Without them, success was highly unlikely.

“We started with competiveness,” Herb says. “Competitiveness is obviously the starting place for anyone who succeeds in sports, and that same competitive drive we have found is one of the distinguishing qualities of a great leader in business. Defined succinctly, competiveness is that burning need to win with all of your heart and soul. It’s not just the desire to win the game, which every athlete has, but it is also having the instinct to compete with every move you make on the field or the court. For instance, if someone comes dribbling the ball down the court, you want to block him or her, stop him or her, get the ball out of his or her hands—whatever you need to do to win that play. Every play is equally important to a top performer.”

We know that competition brings out the best in top performers—in sports and in business. Ultimately, records are only broken in the heat of an important competition. Nobody gives their best performance when he or she is in training. Training just gets athletes ready for the arena.

“If an athlete has a strong competitive drive, it has to be backed with an equally strong sense of self-discipline,” Herb adds. You cannot stay at the top if you are not comfortable in high-stress situations. Succeeding at that level comes from being ready, being prepared. To succeed when the pressure is on, you have to be inner-focused, self-directed, and self-disciplined.

“In essence, self-discipline is that internal taskmaster—that voice inside of a top performer that says, ‘I want to practice because it will make me better.’ It is self-discipline that distinguishes an athlete who comes to camp in better shape than last season from an athlete who arrives overweight. To truly understand the competitive nature of an athlete or a business leader, it is critical to understand the important difference between self-discipline and external discipline. Self-discipline comes from within, who someone is. External discipline is simply understanding what they want you to do—or the ‘should system.’ In Freudian terms, self-discipline is the ego, while external discipline is the superego,” Herb explains.

The third quality shared by top-performing athletes, as well as the best leaders, is resilience. “All top performers must know how to face rejection and even failure if they want to succeed. The ability to move beyond life’s inevitable rejections will determine success much better than talent alone,” Herb says. “In baseball, a Hall of Fame hitter might bat .333 over his career. That means that for every three times he comes up to bat, two of those times he does not get a hit. He fails two out of every three attempts. To keep going, to come up to bat the next time, after not getting on twice in a row, a potential Hall of Fame hitter needs to believe that this time is his time.”

Herb adds, “We often hear about the phenom in baseball—the hot rookie who comes to camp batting .400 or striking out everybody in sight. Everything seems golden. Then he encounters an inevitable slump—and does not know how to get out of it. He starts changing his swing, holding the bat differently, but nothing works, and within a few months, he’s out of the game, never to be heard from again,” Herb pauses, then adds, “From a Freudian perspective, this ties into whether the athlete accepts the slump as a confirmation that he or she is really not good enough, or whether his or her ego is able to bounce back from the slump, and see the next opportunity as a fresh start.”

Herb says, “The athlete who personifies resilience for me is Muggsy Bogues, whom we both got to meet and write about in our book Succeed on Your Own Terms. Everything about him just resonates resilience.” To this day, Muggsy remains the shortest NBA player of all time. All five feet, three inches of him. Muggsy saw basketball as his way out of the ghetto, where he said, “The difference between Muggsy Bogues, NBA player, and Muggsy Bogues, dead body, is so small. It scares me just to think about it.” He saw basketball as his ticket out, his way of getting a scholarship to play college ball, then to get to the pros. So when his name got called as a first-round draft pick, he said, “I heard them say that the Washington Bullets had selected Tyrone Muggsy Bogues. That was it. All the naysayers telling me I would never make it. All the folks saying, ‘He’s too small.’ And here it is. I’m walking up there to accept my hat and shake Mr. Stern’s hand. You know. Five feet, three inches. I’ll tell you, that was just amazing. The whole universe was just lifted off my shoulders. It was like, ‘Hey, you finally made it. You’re here! Your time has come!’ “

Herb reflects, “Muggsy is a guy who knows where rejection belongs,” and that attitude helped him overcome the most unbelievable odds. From the time he started playing basketball on lots in Baltimore’s projects through high school, college, and the NBA, Muggsy said what drove him was that he always wanted to prove that the people saying he was too small were wrong. In one sense, Muggsy said, “It was in one ear and out the other. But it hurt. So in another sense it was just another measuring stick as far as proving them wrong. And then it gets to the point where it’s even more important than just proving them wrong.”

One of the keys to his success was that, as Muggsy said, he could “use negative emotions as internal motivation.”

When Muggsy meets young people, he likes to tell them, “We all encounter a lot of negativity through life. But my life proves that anyone can overcome negativity. You can do anything you want to do in life if you have a fierce belief in yourself, a strong will, a big heart, and some role models to inspire you.”

Herb adds, “As with athletes, leaders in business are bound to experience slumps and rejections, no matter how determined they are. There are going to be times when they are not going to want to face another possibility of rejection. To move beyond those feelings of vulnerability and rejection, athletes and leaders need a solid sense of self-esteem.”

Depending on the position, Herb notes, he will also look for other attributes in an athlete, contingent upon the team and the position for which an athlete is being considered. But the starting (and in some cases, the stopping) place is whether an athlete possesses competitiveness, self-discipline, and resilience.

With that model, Herb got the introduction for which he had been longing. Here is how Joe McIlvaine, who was then the general manager of the New York Mets, describes it. “I always have questions,” he says. “And one of my favorites is to ask athletes who are successful at the major league level, ‘What percentage of your success do you attribute to pure talent, and what percentage is psychological?’ And I’ve never had a top player say that less than 75 percent is psychological. More often than not, they say, it is closer to 90 percent. That question to me is so important because I’ve seen so many players who ended up being flashes in the pan, they just wash out once the competition gets better, and they suddenly retreat, go home, and they’re done.”

Joe adds, “So I was looking for someone like Herb to open the door to what was going on inside the heart and mind of each of these players. When Herb told me he could tell me about their self-confidence, their mental toughness, and their ability to control their emotions on and off the field, I was interested, but skeptical. While he was recommended to me, I still needed to see how deep the insights were that he could provide.”

Herb recalls, “I agreed to assess five of players on the team, whom Joe said he was having some problems with. I shared with him what I believed to be going on with four of the players, including one who I said might be a bit explosive at times, even have a tendency toward violence. Joe said, ‘You’re right. He actually attacked another player last week.’ But then I told him that I couldn’t find anything unsettling about the fifth player. In fact, he seems like someone who will give it his all and play up to every ounce of his potential. Joe just laughed and said, ‘You’re right on that one also. I just threw him in to test you.’ That player, unbeknownst to me, was Tim Bogar, who played for the Mets for three years, then the Astros, then the Dodgers before going on to be a coach and manager at the professional level.”

So Herb was brought on to advise the Mets on their draft choices. The Mets, who came as close to the Brooklyn Dodgers as a team possibly could. While it was not quite like revenge, the Mets, at least, were the crosstown rivals to the New York Yankees. And that’s all that mattered.

Joe says, “As the manager, you’re always trying to put the odds in your favor. And my feeling was with Herb, the odds were certainly in our favor. He was a psychological advisor, just as our scouts were talent advisors. Then, by putting all that information together, my job was to predict what a 17- or 18-year-old kid would be like five years from now. So, we are trying to predict the future.”

Studies showed that the athletes Herb was able to recommend for the Mets (and other baseball teams) were getting twice as many hits as those he was not recommending. The ones he recommended also had at least twice as many home runs, scores, and stolen bases. In basketball, the results were similar. The players Herb recommended had almost three times as many points per season, with at least twice as many rebounds, blocked shots, assists, and steals.

One of the main lessons for leaders is that if you want to surround yourself with top performers, you need to create a culture that encourages and rewards top performance. Many leaders mistakenly believe that top performers will inspire and raise the level of performance of everyone else around them. “But we have found this is not what happens. And it is, in fact, the opposite of what top performers are looking for. One thing we’ve learned about top performers, in sports and in business, is that they want to be connected with other top performers,” Herb says. “They do not want to be working side by side with someone who will fumble their pass or not complete their part of an important project on time.” Your top performers do not want to be working with people from the junior varsity team. They want to be surrounded with people who will make them stretch and be their best.

Herb adds, “Some of the most innovative companies we are working with are creating situations in which their elite performers push one another to levels they would never reach if they were working with less-accomplished colleagues. We are working with these innovative companies to have their star performers working side by side on major initiatives. That’s what engages top performers. They want to be part of a winning team and make a real difference.”

That is why learning about what drives champion athletes and the best leaders is so vital. Competitiveness, self-discipline, and resilience. These three characteristics are essential to succeeding in sports and in business.

“Where do these qualities come from?” Herb asks. “Deep inside.” What really happens psychologically to a professional athlete is that their competitiveness, self-discipline, and resilience kick into high gear so that they can succeed when it is game time. On a psychological level, they know that they need to dig in and turn up the volume on those three qualities in order to succeed. And, like all of us, they have an inner need to succeed—because in that success, they feel that they are being themselves at their very best.

As a leader, the only thing we can tell you for certain is that if you surround yourself with people who do not possess these three qualities—then the top of your game will be somewhere in the middle.

Knowing Where Competition Belongs

Herb and I learned a lot about competition when we interviewed Geoff Bodine, who is one of NASCAR’s 50 greatest drivers of all time. Together, he and Dale Earnhardt Sr. made NASCAR a contact sport in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They had characters loosely based on their antics in the film Days of Thunder, starring Tom Cruise.

If you google the name Geoff Bodine, among the top hits will be YouTube videos of a major crash he was involved in at the Daytona Speedway. It is considered the worst crash in NASCAR history. That’s quite a thing to be known for. It occurred on February 18, 2000. Geoff’s vehicle hit the wall going nearly 200 miles an hour. Cartwheeling down the track in flames, his vehicle disintegrated into a fiery heap. The top of his vehicle was sheared off, as the engine rolled down the straightaway, and pieces flew into the stands. The vehicle’s metal disintegrated until all that was left was a roll cage—before it was hit again. And again. And again. Even in slow motion, you cannot tell how many times his vehicle flips over and over and over.

Two months after that accident, Geoff was behind the wheel, driving 200 miles an hour again. He says the NASCAR officials wouldn’t allow it now, but he was able to fake them back then. If he moved his head too quickly up and down or to the right or left, things got blurry. (And if you’ve ever driven in one of those simulators, you know that driving at that speed is all about your peripheral vision. What is coming behind you and next to you can mean the difference between winning and crashing.)

What was driving him?

He says, “I’m just competitive.”

There was something else. What was it?

He paused, then says, “I didn’t want to be replaced.”

That was his fear. That’s what drove him. That was an essential part of what made him so competitive.

“Look, if you’re off the circuit for two months, they’ll find somebody to take your place,” Geoff quickly adds. “So, yeah, you’re in a hurry to get back in that seat so nobody else gets in it. That’s the real fear for race drivers. That’s why we’ll drive even when we’re hurt. We do that a lot. I’ve done it throughout my whole career. Just about every race driver can tell you, ‘Yeah, I’ve driven with a broken this or a torn that.’ We drive hurt all the time.”

Geoff, who says he is now able to look inside himself more honestly, told us that the same competitive spirit that made him one of NASCAR’s top drivers of all time also ruined many of his personal relationships—because he didn’t know how to keep his competitive drive where it belonged. He didn’t know how to keep it on the track.

How Self-Discipline Can Transform
an Outcome

“As you reflect on self-discipline,” Herb says, “ask yourself if the people you surround yourself with have willpower and strength of mind.”

When you make important decisions together, do they drive those ideas and those projects to completion? Or are you constantly monitoring progress? Do too many things somehow fall through the cracks?

If you find yourself checking up on progress too much—and being disappointed with the results—then you’re not leading, you’re pushing.

Do the key players in your organization drive themselves? Or are you pushing them?

If you’re pushing too much, well, you know the story about the guy who pushes the rock up the hill all day long, then starts his next day pushing the same rock up the same hill.

Are you spending too much time looking back to make sure that what you thought was supposed to get done is completed?

“If so, the people you’re surrounding yourself with are not providing you with the support and the freedom you need to look forward,” Herb says.

As a leader, you have to make sure that those key individuals you surround yourself with have the self-motivation, the willpower, the strength of mind, and the drive to come through. That quality starts with an inner need to come through for themselves. Make sure you are surrounding yourself with people who are self-disciplined. Otherwise, your job will be less about leading and more about cleaning up.

The Difference Between Competing
in Sports and in Business

Many executives are drawn to watching professional sports. Part of the reason is undoubtedly because they thrive on competition. Which sport you prefer can also say a lot about you. Do you follow rugby or tennis? Are you into aggressive team sports with few rules or individual sports that test an athlete’s endurance?

That is probably why so many sports analogies find their way into business settings: “The deal was a slam dunk.” “We need a new game plan.” “That was a home run.” “We need to put on a full court press.” “We’d better punt.” “We really need a Hail Mary pass here.”

The legendary quarterback Roger Staubach led the Dallas Cowboys to two Super Bowl victories and became a client of Caliper’s after he founded The Staubach Company, an enormously successful real estate enterprise. Roger has a clear perspective on sports analogies. When we asked him which sports analogies make the most sense to him in the corporate world, Roger told us, “Competition is certainly important. Being clear about your goals is crucial. But for me, the key to developing successful organizations is all about team building. It’s all about the people you surround yourself with. Succeeding in business, in sports, and in your life is a matter of pulling together people you can trust, who are honest, who have their priorities in line, who have the talent, ambition, and desire to reach beyond themselves and make something really big happen—particularly when the pressure is on.”

Roger’s thoughts are profound in their straightforward simplicity. This, after all, is from the guy who personified grace under pressure, and who every Minnesota Vikings fan can tell you threw the “Hail Mary pass,” then coined the phrase.

In many ways, though, winning in professional sports can be a lot easier than winning in business.

For starters, in sports, you can see who you are competing with. You are eye to eye with them on the same playing field. You are there together, and you have a chance to physically confront them.

You can also watch tapes of how they played against other teams, and rewind the tapes as you analyze the team’s strengths and weaknesses and strategize your game plan. Professional sporting events also last for a specific duration—for example, four quarters or nine innings. There are time-outs. There are clearly defined and agreed-upon rules and boundaries. And there are referees or umpires to take care of disputes.

The competition in business, however, does not play that way. In business, all bets are off. Your competition is no longer in your neighborhood. Your competitors can be on the other side of the world. They can be awake when you are asleep. They can come from anywhere, at any time, and from any direction, when you least expect it.

Questions to Ask Yourself About Being Competitive