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Olympic gold medallist shares the secrets of his success at Birkbeck’s Business Week

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender, Communications Manager, Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Adrian Moorhouse MBE, Olympic gold medallist, speaking at Birkbeck's Business Week

Adrian Moorhouse MBE, Olympic gold medallist, speaking at Birkbeck’s Business Week

The phenomenal swimming achievements of Adrian Moorhouse MBE speak for themselves: world number one from 1986 to 1992 for 100m breaststroke, Olympic gold medal winner in 1988, and serial breaker of world records. He has also been incredibly successful in business. The management consultancy he co-founded, called Lane4, boasts 80 staff, works in 30 countries and has been recognised repeatedly by The Sunday Times as one of the best 100 small companies to work for. How did he manage to transfer his success from the pool to the boardroom? That intriguing question was the subject of the Alec Rodger Memorial Lecture, entitled What can business learn from sport?, which Moorhouse delivered on 24 June during Birkbeck’s Business Week.

Moorhouse emphasised the importance of applying sporting practices and insights from organisational psychology to create conditions for success. He explained how this was the philosophy of the University of California, where he trained after winning a sports scholarship at age 18. Often referring to the success of Team GB at the 2012 Olympics, he described how the athletes were assisted throughout in a way that is rarely the case for businesses. This approach helped Team GB to third position in the medal table. He said it is necessary to identify “critical performance moments” and then give people what they need when they need it. He also stressed practising under pressure, learning from failure and setting goals as part of talent development.

Moorhouse continued by focusing on goals, saying: “Sport motivates people well with goals. People [in business] don’t work hard enough on meaning.” He employed a goal framework to show how to divide the ultimate goal into manageable stepping stones en route to the overall prize, and how he had to meet a mind-boggling 400 key performance indicators on his way to winning gold in Seoul during his four-year Olympic campaign.

Building mutual trust within teams was highlighted as an essential component of success. He explained how leaders have to believe in people and work together on goals, and how individuals need to be “team-fit”.  He said: “My goal is to create an environment where people can be brilliant. My job is to release their talent.”

Aside from the role of the team, Moorhouse did refer to the personal resilience, self-esteem, self-belief, discipline and rigour required to succeed. He shared a headline from The Daily Telegraph, which declared “Moorhouse is a failure”, after he came fourth in the 1984 100m breaststroke final. At the next Olympics he was to prove the journalist wrong when he won gold.

Moorhouse did explain that not all sporting skills and approaches can be transferred to the world of business, but it is clear that his sporting background and “entrepreneurial nature” are enabling him to succeed.

Land Rush

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This post was contributed by Sonia Rothwell, an alumna of Birkbeck’s MSc International Security and Global Governance. This event was part of a series of film-screenings leading up to Surplus: A Sypmosium on Wealth, Waste and Excess, which takes place on 21 June.

There is sometimes a danger when discussing Africa and big business in the same sentence to see commerce as the hawkish outsider taking advantage of fragile or indeed non-existent governance. Hugo Berkley’s film, “Land Rush”, about agribusiness, produced for the Why Poverty? strand on BBC Four last year, has a more ambiguous, cautiously optimistic slant. Could big business bring big bucks to Mali and turn some of its smallholders into sugar cane growing specialists?

In the fascinating Q and A session after the film screening, with Birkbeck’s Isobel Tomlinson, Berkley admitted he had a whole raft more material and this already hot topic would certainly bear more airings. The thrust of the story is that land poor rich nations such as Saudi Arabia are leasing fertile tracts from countries such as Mali to feed their own populations.  The case studies Hugo Berkley has found represent the dilemma facing subsistence farmers whose own livelihoods and needs appear to be at odds with the ambitions and financial needs of their state. Some farmers appeared to back the project which was being developed by SOSUMAR (the Markala Sugar Company) while others complained of a land-grab. The balance of the film was fine: can development increase at the pace which Mali arguably needs without the involvement of the global private sector?

Tantalisingly, there was no conclusion to the story, the project which was to have brought sugar cane farming to Mali’s central region was delayed by bureaucracy and the outbreak of serious civil unrest: the investors moved elsewhere. And it is that same unrest which has exacerbated the food security situation recently with some NGOs estimating that one in five households in the North of the country is facing severe food shortages there. Could the food shortages trigger more long-term unrest, forcing families to migrate elsewhere, with all of the potentially unsettling consequences that suggests?

One has to question however, the decision to grow sugar cane. What is motivating nations like Ukraine to invest in these crops, is it to satisfy the appetites of domestic markets or is it to satisfy quotas on the production of bio-fuels (of which sugar cane is a source)? Another question which the film does not answer but which merits further discussion, is whether land in the world’s poorest countries ultimately is being used to help prop up global commodities corporations and if so, what can or should be done to regulate such trade?

The film is a curtain-raiser to Birkbeck’s upcoming event, Surplus: a Symposium on Wealth, Waste and Excess, a debate which promises to be as compelling as it is timely.