Using data to make decisions is critical in business and many companies have become very sophisticated about it. They use real time dashboards about supply chain data, sales data, financial data. They look at key ratios and many even use special algorithms that combine superficially unlinked data to review past performance and predict future performance. A performance analysis can be done anytime and anywhere. Surprisingly though, there is one area where so few companies use data to make strategic decisions -  the area of human performance. Sure there are engagement surveys and 360 analysis, but what is the real added value? The data is never real time, it’s often completed with cynicism, and it’s not directly linked to business performance today, tomorrow, next week, and over the next months. Where is the innovation in this area?

I would like to share an example from outside the business world that is considered cutting edge, innovative, world-class, and game-changing. Several years ago, the AC Milan Soccer Club developed a new training facility called the Milan Lab. The heart of the lab is not a modern gym, nor a special training tool - it’s a computer that is fed a lot of different data about the players. They look at on-field performance data such as heart rates, kilometers run, sprints versus walks, shots on goal, etc. Surprisingly, they also collect emotional and psychological data on the players on a weekly basis. Using special algorithms, the computer analyzes all the data and generates a simple traffic light report. Red means this player is not allowed to play today. Orange means this player can play but he is under observation. Green means this player is allowed to play. Finally, blue means this player is at peak performance with resilience. The coach is only allowed to pick the team for a match based on the traffic light report derived from the data they have collected. You may think this is impossible, but the results from using this approach are astonishing:

.01 They reduced the injury rate and severity significantly. In the world of soccer, this is pure capital because it impacts not just the potential performance of the player but also their value to the club.

.02 They realized that age is not a good key criteria for performance. Younger players often were “orange” while several players in their mid 30’s often showed “blue”. Traditionally, players at this age would never get a contract extension but using this innovative approach they did. This added great experience to the team and reduced the cost for new younger, more expensive players.

Let’s transfer this to the business world. Imagine you could do something similar with your key teams.  Not for everybody, but just your critical teams that work on the most critical must-win projects. It may be a transformation team, an innovation team, a key account team, a product launch team, or a crisis team. Imagine you had some insights into the real-time human performance side of these teams and as a leader you would know who to push a bit harder and who to hold back a bit.

Imagine you could make sure that you don’t overload your team and force them to crash. Imagine you could make sure that your team could bring their best talent to the table. Imagine you had some insights on how external performance killers such as travel, meetings, emails, conflicting priorities, deadline pressure, etc., were impacting your key players.  Imagine you had a dashboard and could do a weekly or monthly analysis on how your key players were doing. Not just from the business numbers, but also from the human performance side of energy, resilience, mental agility, and stamina. You would know if they were Swimming, Floating, or Sinking.

Some might say, “This is impossible,” or “Big brother is watching”.  Others may be afraid of this much transparency. We agree and disagree at the same time. While an approach like this could be tricky because within many organizational cultures a person running in “red” may be labeled as “weak” or as a “risk”. In the world of sports, running in “red” is accepted and sometimes part of the deal. They know that the demands are exceptionally high and we are human beings with human limitations based upon our physiology. This may mean that a system such as this would require some trust and guarantee about the usage of personal data. At the same time, we believe that this could be a really valuable approach for critical mission critical teams. After all, what are the consequences of a bad decision during a merger or acquisition? How catastrophic can a bad decision be during a crisis such as an oil spill or a tainted product?

The truth is, these mission critical teams usually consist of highly successful, extremely talented, and well-trained individuals. Does putting them in a pressure cooker and then increasing the temperature without the insights provided by real data really make much sense? Imagine how you could support your critical talent better if you really understood what they needed.

At Tignum, we are fascinated about this topic and have started two research projects to dig deeper. We would love to hear your view on this kind of thinking. Are we crazy? Is this off the chart? Or are we on to something that you would love to explore further. Drop us a note.

By Jogi Rippel
CEO & Founder

At Tignum, we think a lot about the future. We wonder how the current demands on top talent can continue to grow. We wonder how the human physiology, which was never really designed for our current business demands (time travel, multi-tasking, information overload, shift work, constant unrelenting demand, growing complexity of issues, ambiguous goals, constant change, etc.), will be able to withstand these changes. We realize that the discussion of how to maximize the energy, resilience, mental agility, and stamina to be able to meet the growing demands of business is still in its infancy. It reminds us of the discussions around strength and performance training in sports only 30 years ago. There were those who hung on to the belief that an athlete either had it (the power, the speed, the agility, the focus, the talent, the drive, etc.) or they didn’t.  Today we have well proven and accepted strategies for developing almost all of these elements of success.

There is a lot being written and discussed lately in business about the New Norm.  Much of this focuses on the impact of the global markets, social media, technology, and the collision of a new and old generational version of values. At Tignum, we discuss the New Norm from two perspectives: 1) How will the external performance killers change? and 2) How can we help the critical 1% leaders and their teams exceed these performance killers to deliver great results (for the short, medium, and long term)?  In 2007, Sylvia Ann Hewitt published an article in the Harvard Business Review describing a rare breed of workers that had what she termed “Extreme Jobs”. She described workers who worked long hours, under significant pressure to win, who were available to their clients and co-workers 24/7, and were rarely disengaged from work. These workers ran on pure adrenaline and caffeine and often burned out early in their careers.  In April 2010, Heike Bruch and Jochen I. Menges wrote an article in Harvard Business Review about a new phenomenon they named the “Acceleration Trap”. They described a trend they were seeing where not only did individuals burn out, but companies were burning out as well.  Forced by a global recession, these companies were overloading and multi-tasking their talent at an unsustainable pace of expectations that they called the “Acceleration Trap”.

Today, these aren’t called “Extreme Jobs” anymore - they are the “New Norm”. The speed of the “Acceleration Trap” isn’t a temporary acceleration to meet a crisis - it has become the “New Norm”. This year we are working with some cutting edge companies who won’t accept the “New Norm” of creating short term success by grinding their critical % to the bone. Together we are creating a “New Norm” where leaders support their critical 1% teams like the franchise players that they actually are (top talent is needed everywhere). We are changing the way the work is done. We are changing the work environment to be more conducive to producing great results. Most important, we are changing the way these executives approach and prepare themselves for their work (and their time away from work). Unlike sports, we don’t have 30 years to figure out how to exceed the demands of the “New Norm” of business.  As we develop and implement specific high performance strategies to different critical 1% teams, we will keep you posted.  So keep your eyes on this space. 

At Tignum, 2012 isn’t just another challenging year for business. It isn’t just another year of political grandstanding with theoretical solutions to our economy. To us, this is a quantum leap year where we tackle the external and internal performance killers that destroy the full potential of great leaders. This is the year where we create a “New Norm” where the Sustainable High Human Performance element of business isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a strategic must.

As always, we would love to hear your thoughts and solutions for the “New Norm”.

by Scott Peltin // Founder & Chief Performance Officer

Recently, I was cleaning up some files and I found an essay from entrepreneur and writer Seth Godin that he wrote 9 years ago about the power of opportunity. At the time I originally read the article, we were in the development of Tignum so it really resonated with me. Interestingly enough, as so many people around the world are gazing at their 2012 planners and what they want to achieve, I think it resonates even more now.

Here is a short excerpt: “...stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with. You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment—just one second—to decide.”

As always, we understand that there is a huge gap between knowing and doing, so we asked several leaders to give us the behaviors they want to implement in 2012 to “create excellence”.  We combined their thoughts with some of our own and created a top 10 To-Do list:

.01 Inject energy and fun.
.02 Care about what works.
.03 Say no to boring (meetings, people, and initiatives).
.04 Focus on what’s productive.
.05 Innovate yourself as you go (your resilience, stamina, brain agility)
.06 Don’t be afraid to fail - forget about perfection.
.07 Cut the crap (emails, meetings, projects, processes)
.08 Be prepared - always (travel, meetings, coming home).
.09 Create meaning
.10 Make your personal sustainable high human performance your default.

After working with over 8,000 high performing executives all over the world, one thing we have learned - the true Sustainable High Performers (Swimmers) don’t count on luck. They design every single day to make it happen. We hope this list provides you some inspiration. Print it. Copy/paste it. Share it. Live it. And let us know what you would add.

A happy and successful 2012 to you.

by Jogi Rippel
CEO // Founder

In business, we often underestimate the impact that small things can make. This too often leads to missed opportunities and eventually to too many excuses for all the things you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. The fact is, in as little as 15 minutes you can achieve significant benefits to your energy, stamina, mental agility, and resilience. During a recent trip, while walking through Heathrow airport, Patti (our director of nutrition) and I saw a diving watch that had an illuminated 15 minute marker. Immediately we both were overcome with a huge “aha” moment that this could be a Tignum watch because there are so many powerful things that only need 15 minutes.

Some of our thoughts include:

_Reducing meetings to 45 minutes will create frequent 15 minute interludes where you can properly prepare for your next meeting and also recover from your previous meeting. This allows you to be in the proper emotional state and also be focused for the business at hand. Incidentally, our clients who have adopted this strategy report that their meetings are more focused, more productive, and more fun. They get more done in less time.

_15 minutes of Daily Prep movements in the morning can significantly improve your mobility, stability, and balance. This can reduce pain, improve efficiency, create more energy, and improve brain function.

_15 minutes spent preparing for your day (mental visualization) can make you more organized, more focused, more productive, more agile, and more efficient.

_A 15 minute walk will increase your lymph flow (immune function), deliver more oxygen to all of your vital organs (including your brain), improve your creativity, and reduce pain. All of these can lead to higher performance.

_By eating slowly, while in a relaxed state, you will provide your digestive tract with the 15 minutes it needs to release the digestive enzymes necessary to break down your food. Taking 15 minutes to prepare your own food can also accomplish this.

_A 15 minute power nap can increase your energy, resilience, and productivity (up to 35%). This beats an afternoon of feeling tired and lacking focus.

_A 15 minute resistance training circuit can increase your functional strength, rev up your metabolic engine, and increase the strength of your bones. Most important, it will increase your energy, improve your brain function, and help you sleep better. We call our circuit the no excuse workout and you don’t even need a gym or weights.

_A 15 minute mental preparation to go home from work can help you powerfully wrap up your work day and enter your home fully present for those you care about the most. This not only pays huge dividends at home, it also creates momentum to start your next day.

_A 15 minute oscillation break in the morning and afternoon to clear your head, do some breathing, and reset your autonomic nervous system will help you be more productive, alleviate the imbalance of stress hormones, improve your brain function (memory, mental agility, creativity, focus), and have more fun.

_Becoming aware of your 15 minute blood glucose alarm will help you prevent brain fog and the wave of stress hormones. Once you begin to feel hungry, you have 15 minutes to feed the brain. The more prepared you are, the better those meals and snacks will be.

_A 15 minute wind down at the end of the day to tell your brain and body that it’s time to shift into the quality sleep mode can help you improve your physical and psychological regeneration. This will not only improve your mood, your immune function, and your performance - it will probably change your life.

In today’s busy world it’s easy to miss the huge benefits that a strategic 15 minutes may have to offer. Think about the Formula One pit stop - in less than 10 seconds they can refuel the car, change the tires, rehydrate the driver, and create a short (but powerful) chance for the driver to recover. Swimming is about quality of time not quantity of time. Even more important, it’s about designing your life not leaving it to luck.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

Scott Peltin
Founder//Chief Performance Officer

One of the great things about our job is that we get to travel around the world and work with some of the highest performing executives in the business world. Because of the demands of our personal travel, as well as the demands of having to be our best in front of our clients, we also get to experience the demands of today’s business world. This has made every day a lab experiment where we are constantly interviewing our clients to discover their latest challenges and trying new Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, Recovery, and Preparation for Key Event strategies to see what works, when it works, and how it works. With that said, we wanted to share an observation that we’ve made at Tignum.

By the nature of the clients Tignum partners with, almost everyone we work with is extremely talented, very driven to succeed, and in many ways swimming. To us, this is the business executive equivalent to getting to work with Roger Federer, Phil Mickelson, or Jenson Button to help them get just a little bit better for just a little bit longer. Just like top athletes quickly learn that they can’t always win, they can’t always be on top of their game, their coaches support them to try to help them get a little closer to their full potential.

At Tignum, we realize that the list and intensity of the external performance killers (i.e. travel, media, email overload, multi-tasking, long hours, shareholder/owner pressure, etc.) is growing. Because of this, even highly talented and skilled executives are constantly sliding up and down the continuum of sinking, floating, and swimming. In fact, without the best sustainable high performance strategies, our clients tell us that they are spending more and more time struggling to swim. It’s as if the waters are getting rougher, the tides are stronger, and the under current is more deadly. We are seeing the result of this when the CEO of Lloyds Banking Group has to step down, when US Presidential candidates have 57 second brain fogs, and when top leaders make poor decisions.

Sustainable High Performance isn’t a finish line; it’s a constant challenge. It requires a new level of awareness, a new level of preparation for key events (personal preparation vs. content preparation), a new level of support, and new strategies (Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, and Recovery) designed for today’s business world. There is no better feeling than being a swimmer, and all of our clients have experienced it. Swimmers are energized by the thought that there is untapped potential within them and when they develop it they maximize their reach in ways they never thought possible. True high performers live to impact others and this is why they are often so frustrated when they feel like they are floating or sinking. The good news is, we are all in the same seas, and you are always just one choice away from moving towards swimming again.

Imagine the payoff when Roger Federer wins two more tournaments, climbs one spot up the ladder, or gets into the zone against one of his top rivals. Now imagine when you are swimming (at work and at home), full of energy, executional stamina, mental agility, and resilience. What’s your payoff?

As always, we would love to hear what you think.

Jogi Rippel & Scott Peltin

It may seem like a deviation from our normal approach to Sustainable High Performance in business to talk about a high performance approach to cancer, but it’s really not. From the early roots of Tignum, it was Jogi’s experience with coaching his own father’s battle with cancer, and Scott’s experience of losing his father at the young age of 53, that inspired the passion behind the Tignum OS (operating system). This Tignum OS of Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, and Recovery strategies has been applied successfully to so many business challenges but also to many other life challenges. At Tignum, much like the world in general, cancer has touched almost all of our lives in some way.  Therefore, we want to share this personal story from one of our High Performance specialists Duncan Coombe, as he and his wife take a high performance approach to their very personal challenge.

My Story
My wife has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. This has obviously been a deeply shocking time for us as a family and we have a massive journey ahead. The last few weeks have been full of learning, reflection, and awareness-raising. While this is something very personal, it is also something relevant to everyone. And so with my wife’s permission, I want to share with you two things we have learned these past few weeks that are relevant to world of Tignum.

The Power of Mindset
This experience has really brought home the power of Mindset. Quite simply, the way that she and I choose to frame this experience has a massive impact on the experience itself. And most importantly, we have a choice. We have a choice about how we respond and the way in which we make sense of this. We also realize that we have the choice of how we define ourselves - and we will not let cancer do this for us.

She has decided on two key Mindset anchors:
- “Love over fear”, which means to approach this journey from a perspective of kindness, compassion, understanding, and love, rather than focusing on blame, judgement, anxiety, and fear.
- To treat it as an “Inquiry”, which means she is choosing to see this as an invitation to consider all aspects of her life - nutritionally, physically, spiritually, and in terms of her work. It is an opportunity to ask a lot of questions about life and lifestyle and daily habits. It is an opportunity to create a new To Be Goal. Who does she want to be as she goes through her treatment, and more importantly, who does she want to be when she is done with cancer?

Now, while we have a long way to go, and of course there are moments when we both waiver, I cannot tell you how powerful these Mindset anchors have been. Being well trained in psychology and understanding the stages of grief, I am confident this is not just denial.  This is a very clear decision to choose to experience an event in a particular way.

I have been a Mindset teacher and coach for many years. These past few weeks have made my professional work deeply personal and reconfirmed the power of Mindset. The practical Mindset strategies that we teach to executives, such as reframing and using mental imagery, really do work. This is why, even as we deal with our current medical challenge, I ask you to consider the ways in which you are choosing to frame up events and experiences in your professional and personal life. Have you created a story about some people or events that could be updated to something more helpful, more constructive, and more high performance?

Cure Cure Cure…what about the Cause?
My second observation from the past month is that the vast majority of the Cancer conversation is about the ‘cure’. Huge fundraisers, massive media attention, pink ribbons, races for the cure…and hardly a word about the causes. In many ways it’s similar to business where we talk about the lack of business execution, the lack of innovation, and the lack of new thinking but we don’t talk enough about the cause.

Of course with my wife’s treatment I am only too grateful for all the effort that continues to be put into treatment and finding a cure.  But I am just blown away by how it seems as if as a society we have agreed that cancer will happen broadly throughout the population and the primary solution to cancer is to find the cure. Surely we should also be finding the causes. With over 80% of all cancers caused by our environment and our choices, we need to be more conscious and selective in the choices we make every day.

What causes cancer? Well, it depends who you ask and I think that the answer is complicated. There is certainly no single answer. The answer is some combination of nutrition, life experience, lifestyle, hormones, habits, stress, emotion, and of course genetics. If I put this into the language of Tignum, it is some combination of Movement, Nutrition, Mindset, and Recovery. I can’t help but think that so many business problems could also be prevented with better habits in these areas.

At Tignum we don’t like to use fear and threat as a motivational tool, we choose to talk about benefits. But speaking from personal experience, I am even clearer of the importance of paying attention to all 4 pillars and the thousands of choices we have every day in these areas. I write this note with a sense of hope and possibility for what we are all still to learn as a society about the true causes of cancer. I also write it because I realize that this disease can quickly overwhelm you but there is a high performance way to approach it. As always, it’s a personal choice and I hope this short glimpse of our situation helps you think about your choices.

Duncan Coombe, PhD
Tignum High Performance Partner

When you look at the great leaders throughout history, whether in politics, business, or sports, one quality they all have is courage. When we ask clients about the key qualities of a high performance Mindset, courage always comes up. But what is courage? As we take our discussions deeper, high performing executives in our groups often say something like, “It’s the ability to be bold, to go against the norm, to stand up when others won’t, to choose to perform regardless of fear, to step outside your comfort zone, or to be the person who has to do the unpopular thing because it’s right.” Several weeks ago, a CEO I was working with, made a really interesting comment. He said, in the last 3 years (even worse in the last year), in his opinion there has been a real vacuum of courage in leaders in business. He went on to add, “very few people today have the courage to be different, to think different, to argue for a better solution, or to risk being unpopular.”

How could this be? Is it possible that there’s a new breed of leaders who never developed courage? Having worked with many different top consulting companies, highly ranked international business schools, and very successful leaders, surely we would have heard if there was a new philosophy of leadership where courage had been discounted. So what is the reason that courage seems to be fading fast in the top of organizations?

One of the biggest causes of a lack of courage is actually fatigue. As Vince Lombardi, one of the most famous and successful American football coaches, used to always say, “Fatigue will make a coward out of everyone.” I don’t think this is just a product of sleep deprivation. This is clearly the result of several years of mounting pressures and challenges colliding with an epidemic of a lack of high performance behaviors in leaders. In 2008, when we completed our research for our book “Sink, Float, or Swim”, we reported that based solely on an executive’s Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, Recovery, and Preparation for Key Event behaviors, only 5% were swimmers, while 81% were floating and 14% were sinking. In 2010, on the heels of the downsizing and increased responsibility and accountability on leaders within an organization, we saw an interesting shift. Some leaders became more diligent with their Sustainable High Performance behaviors while others became overwhelmed. This led to a distribution of 14% being swimmers, 62% floaters, and 24% sinkers. Now comes the scary part, and probably a huge reason for the current lack of courage. In the third quarter of 2011, in the middle of a second wave of cutbacks and increased performance pressure from shareholders, we have not seen one leader with the Sustainable High Performance behaviors to be a swimmer. In fact, we have seen 53% sinkers and 47% floaters.

This is alarming because, the world economy, and many great companies,  are fluctuating between sinking and floating and the only thing that will ultimately change this course is a group of leaders who have the courage to be bold, to think different, and to chart new courses (even when they are unpopular). But in order for this to happen, these leaders will need the energy, executional stamina, mental agility, and resilience to be their best. Without these things there is no way they can lead others, there is no way they can change company cultures, and there is no way they can swim. Without personal energy how will they energize others? Without executional stamina how will they push their new ideas forward?  Without mental agility how will they possibly be innovative? Without resilience how will they possibly bounce back from the setbacks they will face?

So where do we start? Right now is the time for companies to teach their critical leaders (those who lead the programs, processes, and products that create meaning and momentum) the Sustainable High Performance skills they will need to be their best. Right now is the time for companies to support these critical leaders like a Formula One race team supports their car and driver in the middle of a heated race. Right now it’s time for these critical leaders to model Sustainable High Performance to their teams and the organization to create cultural change. Right now is the time for bold and courageous leadership.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Scott Peltin
Chief Performance Officer

When you hear the word engineering you probably think of a mechanical engineer who designs tools and machines, or a chemical engineer who designs polymers, or a nuclear engineer who looks at the fusion and fission of atomic particles. What you probably wouldn’t think of is a human performance engineer.

Engineering is the combination of art and science that brings together a multitude of disciplines to look at external and internal loads and then to create effective and efficient solutions. When you break this down around human performance it makes total sense. The combination of art and science means it’s not just what you create but how you implement it to create meaning, emotion, and in our case - lasting change in human behavior. The multiple disciplines include Mindset, Nutrition, Movement, Recovery, Leadership, New Ways of Working, Time Management, Performance Medicine, and many more. The external loads are all the performance killers that high performing executives face every day like shareholder pressure, uncertain political environments, long haul travel, endless deadlines, etc. The internal loads are all the performance killers that occur in the human brain and body such as sleep deprivation, low performance thoughts and stories, jet lag, hypoglycemia, adrenal fatigue, etc.

Understanding the problem can be quite complex, but when this is your passion it’s quite interesting. When we engineer Sustainable High Human Performance we take the complexity of being a high performer and we create simple, effective, and pragmatic strategies to help those who need it most deliver high performance. We realize that this is a new field but it’s a badly needed field. With only 5% of all the executives we have worked with being Swimmers (high performers), the cost of taking the same old approaches to human performance will be enormous. It’s time to think different, be different, approach our performance different, and to quit depending on luck or chance. As Geoff Colvin says, “Talent is Overrated”. This means it’s time to Engineer Sustainable High Human Performance.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

by Jogi Rippel
Founder & CEO

Being a hybrid, or new breed, of company in the business performance world we are often perplexed at how many people want to always put you in a box. Oh I get it - you guys are a wellness company. Oh I get it - you guys are a team building company. Oh I get it - you guys build energy. I guess in some ways we should be happy that people resonate with some of the benefits we deliver but we have come to realize that being part of a new breed isn’t always easy for people to understand.

If you look back in sports to 30 years ago, athletes did very little performance training. You were either strong, fast, agile, and confident…or you weren’t. Then along came strength training and suddenly athletes were benching and squatting huge amounts of weights but the training was not very specific or refined. Still, performance improved and the idea of performance training in sports began evolving. Now 30 years later, training high performance athletes is a complex endeavor. You have strength coaches, speed coaches, movement coaches, flexibility coaches, massage coaches, skill coaches, psychologists, sports nutritionists, etc. As the margin between winning and losing diminished (and the investment teams made in their athletes increased), the need to find every possible way to improve performance became critical. Similarly, the amount of support that is required by the athlete to perform at the highest level has also increased.

In my opinion, today’s business world is where sports were 30 years ago, except the demands are much higher, the available time to train and recover is much shorter, and the cost of losing is much greater. While a lot of training has gone into the strategy and leadership of business, very few people have looked at the human side of business performance. As executives begin to break down from the huge load of external performance killers, companies reach for health and wellness programs as a quick fix. The problem is that while this approach has some value, it is the equivalent to just telling an athlete to lift some weights like they did 30 years ago. With health being the absence of disease, and vitality being the state of being strong, energized, and active, clearly there are some raw benefits to these programs even if they are only treating the symptoms of the problem. But when you look at performance as being focused, strategic, present, engaged, resilient, agile, solution-oriented, and innovative, clearly you see that just having energy or being healthy isn’t enough.

As the demands on today’s top executives increase, clearly the need for advanced human performance strategies has also grown. Businesses who want to win have invested heavily in their critical talent (we call them the critical 1%) and if these leaders and teams don’t deliver, the business will fail. Ironically, why did athletes reach out for advanced training and support from performance specialists?  It was the increasing level of competition, the narrowing of the margin between competitors, and of course the huge value in being the one who wins that led athletes to today’s complex and advanced training methods.

As you look at the growing amount of external performance killers, the need for high performing talent, and the limitations of the human brain and body to sustain high performance without support, you can clearly see that we don’t have 30 years to wait. Digging into the human “black box”, dissecting the demands that today’s business world places on top talent, and developing pragmatic solutions that will create high performance is the only answer. We must look under every rock (mindset, nutrition, movement, recovery, preparation for key events, etc.) for every opportunity to develop and support talent. This is the competitive advantage that many top athletes are enjoying today and it could be the competitive advantage for companies tomorrow.

As always, let us know what you think.

Scott Peltin
Chief Performance Officer