As I sipped my morning cuppa, I wondered what I would share with you this month. But then a sport item caught my attention, and I knew!
The America’s Cup is an international sailing race where the British entry is in the final for the first time in 173 years.
These boats are incredibly sophisticated – our entry is made up of 120,000 individual parts and has five F1 cars-worth of electronics capable of producing more than 3,000 data points for engineers to analyse!
But all that counts for nothing if the captain cannot manage the crew efficiently, in real time, in the face of rapidly changing circumstances.
In order to manage the team, the captain needs to know what the wind and water conditions are like now – and how to make their particular boat go fastest in those conditions.
But that’s not enough. How will conditions change over the course of the race? And how do they prepare their team to be ready to deal with it?
Your business is just the same.
Your business plan is a journey – and it’s up to you to ask for the data you need to understand how things are going now.
And you also need to look ahead and predict how ‘conditions’ may change – and that includes where your competitors are ‘sailing’. Can you do that? If not, what data do you need to help you with those decisions?
And finally, is your team suitably skilled and well-enough informed to manage those future conditions, if and when they occur?
The 13 races of the America’s Cup will be over by the time you read this – and hopefully with a British win! And if you learn from their management, then beating your business competition will also be plain sailing!
