My college soccer team had a catchphrase, “good athletes adjust,” that we applied to everything from facing poor field conditions to fixing flaws in our performance. The truth is; if we hadn’t adjusted, then we would have failed.

This philosophy holds true in today’s business environment—if businesses do not adjust and evolve in response to past mistakes and poor market conditions, they will not be successful.

Good athletes also continually adjust their technique and their strategy to find ways to accelerate their game. Consider swimmer Michael Phelps and pole vaulter Sergey Bubka for example:

• After winning eight gold medals and breaking eight Olympic records in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Phelps changed his ‘perfect’ stroke technique hoping that it would increase his speed.

• Subsequent to clearing the decidedly impossible 20-foot barrier, six-time Olympic gold medalist Bubka commented that, “My jump was imperfect, my run-in was too short, and my hands were too far back at takeoff. When I manage to iron out these faults, I am sure I can improve.”

These champions saw, even in their seemingly flawless performance, areas for improvement, and evolved to keep themselves ahead of the competition.

Businesses can learn a lot from an athlete’s mindset—always reach for a greater achievement level, and never be satisfied. Performance athletes examine their technique and make changes to become more agile, fluid and conditioned, and to eliminate wasted energy. To survive and thrive, businesses need this very same mindset and approach- they must be in peak condition and run with optimal efficiency.

At some point all businesses and all athletes will face tough competitors and environments, and must be prepared to overcome these challenges. To ensure their continued success, Phelps and Bubka understood that they had to stay a step ahead of the game. Making the right technology investments is critical for businesses to gain and maintain this same competitive advantage to stay a step ahead of the game, and to succeed in today’s business environment.

Essential software tools, Business Process Management (BPM), Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) help your business run at peak performance—enabling you to continually see where you are and where you are wasting energy and resources, identify where you want to be, tweak and test potential changes, and execute your new agile, streamlined enterprise to give your business a competitive advantage no matter how rough the playing field may become.

Check out our website to learn how Metastorm Enterprise, our unique integrated product suite of BPM, BPA and EA can help your business gain a competitive advantage to beat out the competition.

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