How to win?

Sky British Cycling, the first UK team to compete in the Tour de France for nearly a quarter of a century, is managed by David Brailsford, who carried away a hoard of eight gold track medals from the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Brailsford intends to put a British rider on the podium by following his already proven philosophy of the aggregation of marginal gains. Put simply that means being as good as you possibly can in as many areas as you can so that cumulatively 1-2% improvements in areas that matter add up to a considerable gain in performance.

In practice this means digging into the detail to identify all the elements that drive performance then experimenting to deliver improvements. For Sky, this resulted in using fabrics in the team’s cycling jerseys that minimize the weight of perspiration absorbed in the fibres and developing cycling helmets with less air vents giving less drag and an advantage of about one second per kilometre. I guess when you know exactly what you want to achieve, there is less ambiguity about what needs to be done to get there. Brailsford also knows about risk management too bringing along a team chef and their own food to minimize the chance of riders picking up a debilitating stomach bug from eating hotel food – and carrying every rider’s favourite duvet and pillows so they get a good night’s sleep.

No doubt Brailsford would get on well with Drs. Kaplan and Norton, who developed the concept of the balance scorecard to help companies become more effective in communicating and executing their strategy. But having spent last week listening to how some of Europe’s largest companies are rolling out performance management, it’s clear that all too often strategy management is the one piece of performance management that companies choose to ignore leaving the organization without a map of the margin improvements that would accumulate into a superior performance.

Having a good strategy management process and a solution such as SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management in place to deliver it will not automatically guarantee success as team Sky discovered on the opening prologue when they misread the weather and sent out their star rider Bradley Wiggins during what turned out to be the worst rain of the entire afternoon. Now four minutes adrift, he is facing an uphill task to get back among the leaders. But knowing Brailsford, they’ll know how and when they're going to close the gap.