Corporate Athletes

A lot is made of both professional athlete salaries and executive salaries, particularly how ridiculously high they are. In the case of executives salaries of CEOs have come under scrutiny for the obscene payouts for those whose companies either tread water or fail. I am in Vancouver attending a conference and a performance expert from Human Performance Institute who trains what they call executive athletes made an interesting comparison between professional athletes and corporate executives:

Workday: Athlete 4-5 hours; Executive 8-12 hours

Career span: Athlete 5-7 years; Executive 40-50 years

Train/Perform ratio: Athlete 90%/10%; Exec 10%/90%

Accountability: Athlete Game or Race Day; Exec ALL the TIME

Off Season: Athlete Several months; Exec 3-4 weeks

Maybe both earn their pay. Or to put another way -- why would a normal person want either job? Professional Athletes put demands on their bodies that impair their bodies later and executives (at least high profile ones) don't seem to have much of a life outside of their job. Of course lots of people want either of those jobs for the simple reason that how can you ever get the highs associated with competing and winning that you get as professional athletes and executive athletes. And if they reach the top, they get paid VERY, VERY well.

Like Business

You can read a lot of political news these days with an election a month away. Today, I read about the prospects for the two main political organizations -- democrats and republicans. In this article from an Arizona website, I was intrigued by this quote: "In some ways, Democrats were bound to face this kind of pressure. The party's recent run of good political fortune is hard to sustain."

In fact, political parties are just like companies who "market" their services to consumers (voters). In politics, the parties seek some kind of sustainable edge -- often the concept used is political realignment where some kind of enduring coalition is built. In business it is called "sustainable competitive advantage." But the notion of sustainable advantage is becoming more fleeting all around as the quote above indicates. Perhaps, it is because consumers have so much better access to knowledge. In any case, political analysts may want to be careful asserting such a thing as political alignment just as business leaders should not assume they ever will reach that holy grail of sustained competitive advantage.