Few things in the world ignite our passion and unbridled joy like sports.
We see this in scenes as far-flung as New York Knicks fans flooding the streets of Manhattan for days on end to celebrate the team’s first championship in more than a half century, to bleary-eyed Tunisian World Cup supporters cheering on their team from halfway across the globe.
As admirable as the dedication of fans and athletes to the games they love can be, sports can also offer business leaders lessons in everything from recruiting to building a team to performing at our peak. Professional sports can even help us think about creative ways to incorporate AI.
Below, Kellogg faculty offer sports-inspired career and leadership lessons.
1. Your athletic past may open doors
Sports, by their very nature, are competitive endeavors. Scores are kept and trophies handed out to winners. So it makes sense that athletes would condition themselves to gain competitive advantages wherever they may present themselves.
It turns out that when athletes hit the job market in high-status industries such as finance and medicine, the halo of that athletic experience can increase their odds of landing an interview or a job offer.
A study by Kellogg professor Lauren Rivera and her coauthors looked at candidate evaluations by Norwegian firms to see how experience in sports influenced the ways the firms viewed candidates—and the impact that may have on hiring preferences. They found that high-level sports participation was a key factor in evaluating applications.
In her earlier research, Rivera found that sports played “a huge part” in how American investment banks, law firms, and consulting companies evaluated possible hires. Companies favored candidates who played sports like lacrosse or squash that are typically associated with affluence, particularly at the varsity level.
In the study of Norwegian firms, the researchers noticed a strong focus on athletics in the hiring process at finance, accounting, law, and medicine organizations—often at the expense of other criteria.
Some evaluators saw athletics as a marker of valuable traits, such as good time management, ambition, determination, and the ability to work in teams (even if the person had only played an individual sport). Other evaluators reasoned that a sporty candidate would fit in better socially.
Instead of focusing so much on sports, however, Rivera believes firms should think about which traits they want to measure and assess those traits directly. She says they should ask themselves, “Are there people we are excluding for reasons that have nothing to do with how good a worker they could be?”
2. Sports can teach you to look to your rivals for talent
Sports can also show how competitive solutions to your company’s talent gaps may be closer than you think, as Kellogg professor Brian Uzzi learned when Satyam Mukherjee, a post-doctoral researcher in Uzzi’s lab convinced him to look at how Indian cricket teams were composed—and recomposed—through trades and signings.
Uzzi, Kellogg’s Noshir Contractor, and their colleagues then built on this initial research to investigate what happens when players who leave their team for a new one—whether through trades, free agency, or “auctions” in cricket—play against their former teammates.
The researchers analyzed data from nearly 500 matches over eight seasons of the Indian Premier League, from 2012–2019, including identifying players who had previously played for opposing teams and analyzing both wins and runs scored. They found that a team’s familiarity with the opposing team’s players was far more critical to its success than the team’s overall skill level.
“If you play against someone you know,” Uzzi says, “you know their strengths and weaknesses and can better strategize around them. You might know how the team reacts collectively and the sort of advice the coach will give—the overall playbook.”
In short, players going up against their former teams or teammates may be able to anticipate how key elements of the competition will go and come up with tactics to win.
This has implications for academic, business, and other types of organizations looking for a competitive edge.
“It shows that winning isn’t just driven by individual talent or team spirit,” Uzzi says. “It also has to do with how much experience players have with teams they’re competing against.”
3. Sports can teach you to take risks
There’s an old saying in sports that offense wins games, but defense wins championships. Keep an organized, rugged back line to stifle your opponents, then think about how you’ll score at the other end. This strategy is typically viewed as a cautious, risk-averse option for coaches and players alike.
So why, then, do we see coaches—or anyone in a high-stakes situation—take big gambles rather than going for less-risky, tried-and-true options? Derek Rucker, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, and his colleague David Gal, a professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, set out to study this aspect of the decision-making process.
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They found that when facing a risky choice with meaningful consequences for their lives, people have the opportunity to display courage. And because people prize being courageous, they may be more likely to opt for the high-risk, high-reward path.
“This suggests that, in contrast to some of the findings in controlled laboratory gambles, people might have a radically different response to risk in some situations,” Rucker says. “When people see an opportunity to be courageous, and want to see themselves as courageous, that may actually lead to a preference for the riskier option.”
4. Sports can help you build resilience
Athletic excellence can inform a leadership career in a lot of ways. For Kellogg’s Carter Cast, that success came in the pool, where he carved out a competitive swimming career that culminated in two trips to the U.S. Olympic trials.
But as Cast learned, the margins between making the team or not are razor-thin. Stepping away from the sport after the 1984 trials (and several knee surgeries), he moved on to new challenges.
“I locked up swimming, and I put the key in the back somewhere where I couldn’t find it,” Cast says.
But decades later, after his son took up the sport and started making waves at local meets, Cast began to reflect on the lessons he learned over his years in the elite reaches of the sport.
“Swimming formed me,” he says. “It gave me discipline; it gave me resilience and introduced me to pressure and disappointment.”
A big part of that discipline is based on dedicated effort. Studies affirm that excellence isn’t something that happens right off the block. Typically, our best efforts and ideas take time. Swimming training helped Cast learn he can usually find a way to “put another hour in” to improve an idea or get past a stubborn issue.
Years of meets also primed Cast to perform at his best when the race started.
“I think of it as turning on peak performance in a moment—at the moment it matters,” Cast says. “In a pressured situation, it’s about applying tremendous focus while trying to keep your adrenaline level where it needs to be.”
Though the sting of missing out on his Olympic dream took a long time to heal, Cast now recognizes the resilience swimming taught him.
“It shaped how I work, how well I prepare for things, and even how I teach. The outcome wasn’t what I wanted, but the person it helped shape is here.”
5. Sports can offer lessons in how to lean into technology
At a time when organizations across industries are attempting to make the best use of artificial intelligence, sports have been putting AI to good use for a long time. Leaders at the National Football League have embraced the technology in their decision-making processes for years—and they have some lessons that apply broadly.
Joel Shapiro, a clinical associate professor at Kellogg and leader of its Analytical Consulting Lab, sat down with Paul Ballew, the NFL’s chief data and analytics officer, to discuss the league’s use of AI as well as its plans for the future.
One key to starting off on the right foot is having a clear idea of both early wins and longer-term objectives.
“You know you have to have it,” says Ballew. “But then the question is, What do I do? What do I invest? How much do I spend? How do I justify it? What’s the ROI?”
Those objectives are going to vary throughout the organization, with different constituencies being more or less prepared to take advantage of them, as Ballew notes when describing the competing needs of the NFL’s franchises and the league itself.
“I think oftentimes people associate any sports league as this monolithic sort of entity. And it’s not,” says Ballew. “It’s 33 entities: 32 clubs and ourselves. And our job at the end of the day is to help them.”
AI is offering NFL teams personalization opportunities that can draw fans closer than ever to its brand, from the game experience to fantasy football.
“We’re in the entertainment business,” Ballew says. “Ultimately, we want to help individuals fully take advantage of the experience how they want to take advantage of the experience.”