Winning Strategies: 8 Lessons Sports Imparted on my Business Playbook

Although I love sports, I learned early on that my success would be through academics not athletics. My victories would be in the lab, not on the field. My future was using my head, not my foot.?

However, I still gained tremendous insight and inspiration from sports—and continue to today.

I was in secondary school when Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Pérez and the “Big Red Machine ” were dominating major league baseball. I studied that team and was invested in the way they played the game. And I learned a lot. I went on to apply a lot of those lessons to business.

Lenovo has proudly sponsored the Carolina Hurricanes for many years.? However,? I will never forget the day when the Canes brought the Stanley Cup to Lenovo after winning it in 2006. Seeing, touching, and listening to the history of the cup,? I felt like a part of the team.??

There is so much we can learn, whether it’s ice hockey, rugby, cricket, golf, swimming, or even motorsports racing. I see important parallels between the principles that guide my approach to business and those that sports teams at the highest levels of competition must follow to achieve success. This is how I learned to coach and develop technical talent.

1. Shared Goals: Defining Success Clearly

In both sports and business, success hinges on a clear, unambiguous goal. Start-ups tend to thrive because of the simplicity of their goal, much like sports teams with their singular objective—winning. There’s no interpretation or difference of opinion on what that means. The crucial aspect for larger business becomes maintaining focus while balancing competing goals: Are we chasing profit? Are we chasing market share? Or are we chasing something else? Here is where a B.H.A.G.—a Big Hairy Audacious Goal—becomes instrumental. It unites the team, be it Google's mission to organize the world's information, Nike’s plans to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world, or Lenovo's commitment to delivering smarter technology for all . So, for us at Lenovo, whether we're developing workstations, XR technologies, or the future of the AI PC, we're all moving the ball toward that one shared goal.

2. Building the Dream Team

Fielding the best team is crucial in both sports and business. One key aspect of building the strongest team is identifying the critical positions, like the quarterback in football or the goalie in hockey. On any given team, you may only have two or three players that go to the Pro Bowl or the All-Star game. And it’s not dissimilar in business. Just as in sports, businesses must be on the lookout for the right complementary skills in those critical people—and those who will step into leadership roles and rally the rest of the team around the shared goal. Recognizing the importance of both specialized leaders and versatile “utility players” ensures a more diverse, well-rounded and effective team.

3. Recognizing and Nurturing Talent

In both sports teams and businesses, understanding individual skills and roles is essential. Honing an individual’s existing talents, rather than forcing them into a different position for which they’re not well suited, will lead to higher levels of performance. You wouldn't take a quarterback and try to make him a kicker or vice versa. Instead, you find someone who has the natural ability for a given role and you drive them hard in that direction. It all starts with seeing their potential. Recognizing this potential, nurturing it through mentorship and training, and bringing team members up to speed all contribute to sustained success. In the technology sector, in particular, if you don’t have the right team, you go out of business.? When technology changes,? it’s time to recruit and make some trades.?

4. KPIs: Making Success Personal

It’s no coincidence that statistics and analytics play a central role in sports and business alike. Ultimately, it’s about making success personal. In baseball, even though you’re playing a team sport, individually, you have your own metrics, whether that’s batting average, errors, etc. This helps each member of a team feel like they’ve got skin in the game. It makes clear what their contribution is and what success looks like for them. Individuals are contributing to the team's success, and these clear metrics align their personal goals with overarching objectives. This ensures that every team member knows the role they play in working toward the team’s B.H.A.G. For instance, Lenovo is pursuing Smarter Technology for All, but my personal focus within that broader goal is to lead in the AI PC , enabling smarter technology for consumers and businesses.?

5. Truly Understanding the Opponent

As important as a shared goal, sound team dynamics, performance metrics and all the rest are to a team’s performance, it’s simply not enough. To really thrive, you need to know your competition as well as you know your own team. In sports, it’s about watching the tapes, studying their strengths (and their weaknesses), and anticipating their playbook. And from all of that, you develop your strategy accordingly. In business, we do the same thing—study their products, their strengths, and, not least of all, their playbook. What is your competition’s next step? You have to know their playbook front and back, and you always have to keep your eye on where the puck is going, not just where it's been.?

6. Embracing Innovation, Technology amp; the Future

To maintain a competitive advantage, you have to look beyond what you're doing today. You have to look ahead, to consider what technologies will enhance the game, or your business success, in the future. Marco Andresen, our COO of the Intelligent Devices Group, put it perfectly: “We can honor our Lenovo history while innovating for new opportunities .” One very clear example of this, which most modern spectators probably take for granted, is the yellow first-down line on televised football games . This may not seem like much to us today, but when it first emerged 25 years ago, it was a pioneering use of augmented reality (AR) on television. Sports from motorsports to swimming to golf are shaped quite significantly by the technologies (be that faster cars, new swimsuits, better irons) that come about to offer competitors an edge. Businesses, too, need to take advantage of technology that can enhance their performance and lead to better outcomes.?

7. Strategic Adaptability Under Pressure

As Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” What Tyson’s talking about is something we might call strategic adaptability. In my view, this has to do with pressure. Time constraints, course correction, and pressures that make a decision even harder to make than they often already are—especially when the stakes are as high as they are in either business or sports. Maybe it’s approaching the line of scrimmage, not liking what you see in the moment, and calling an audible to shift to a different play. Perhaps the best example of this in recent history was the pandemic—and how it forced businesses to make sudden and significant adjustments. Lenovo, for instance, saw the writing on the wall regarding quarantines and remote work, and we made huge investments in Smart Collaboration technology —including PC, monitor, and accessory enhancements for videoconferencing and remote work, cybersecurity tools and more—to help other companies adapt. It comes down to maintaining presence of mind, not being too wed to any one plan from the outset, and, if need be, changing tack to improve your outcome.

8. Customers: The Heart of Success

Most importantly,? there’s the commitment to the fans, the customers, the people who choose you over the competition and, in doing so, give you meaning. Fans, at least true fans (not fair-weather fans), love their team, win or lose. Similarly, many Lenovo customers love what we do and couldn’t imagine a different device on their desk. Without its fans, a team is playing to an empty stadium. And what’s the point in that? Without our customers, we’re not actually helping anyone with the technology that we’re developing. So, at the end of the day, we can never forget those whose support means everything—the reason we step up and aspire to do great things.?

Throughout my career, I’ve found that sports serve as a great parallel to much of what I encounter in business. Teamwork, management, specialization, strategy, execution: all of these could just as easily pertain to the way our teams at Lenovo operate as they could to the Carolina Hurricanes, the “Big Red Machine” of my youth, or any number of other sports teams seeking to accomplish their shared goal. Working at Lenovo is really a team sport at heart, and I hope, in these analogies, I’ve made it abundantly clear just how important, and how attainable when properly understood, these guiding principles can be.