Former Olympic rower now Wesfarmers CEO Rob Scott.spoke to six former Olympians about the most valuable business lessons they learnt from their careers in sport.
Another important lesson revolved around setting standards. Morris says former Hockeyroos coach Ric Charlesworth, who steered the team to gold medals at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, taught her high performers should never use other people’s standards as a benchmark to compete against. Scott has taken endless business lessons from his sporting career, not least was when he and his rowing partner, David Weightman, were woken by police at 4.30am at the Atlanta Olympics due to a bomb scare and told to evacuate.Advertisement
David Weightman, left, and Robert Scott of Australia row to victory in the semifinal of the men’s coxless pairs at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, 1996. “Frankly, it’s less about how hard you row or how hard you try, and more about creating an environment where everyone in your team can be at their best. It’s not about you, it’s about everyone else in the team. That was a good lesson for me.”“International commerce is no less competitive than the Olympic Games. It can be great fun, but you have to be truly world-class to be successful.
Libby and Luke, who traded in his goggles and Olympic dream to become a serial tech entrepreneur, reckon the same formula holds true in business as well.“The biggest was, and is, the need to just get in there and do hard work that’s very unglamorous over and over and over again,” says Luke, a former Wilsons stockbroker who is now chief executive of payments start-up Marmalade.
Everyone has a different threshold for burnout, and people can tolerate working much longer hours when they are passionate about what they do, she says. Her favourite Olympic memory came from winning gold in the 4 x 100m medley relay race at the 2008 Beijing Olympics after turning to her teammates for emotional support, following a disappointing fourth-place finish in the individual 50m freestyle.
“There’s a lot of focus in business on things you can’t control like the global economy and so on, which I really hate,” he says.