What can we learn from Federer about running a business?

For an avid tennis aficionado, like myself, this year has been great. To watch the old rivals Federer and Nadal battle it out with the younger crop of talented players and meeting each other, not once but three times in the first few months of this year has been exhilarating. I will admit that I am a Federer fan and the outcomes having been in his favour has made it more rewarding. As I watched these matches I noticed that one of the keys to their performance is their ability to return the powerful serves which are getting faster by the day.

Some of these big servers of the game, such as Nick Kyrgios or Milos Raonic serve at 140 to 160 miles per hour! The distance between the base line and the service line on the other court, is just 60 feet, and simple math will tell us that at these speeds the ball takes less than a quarter of the second to traverse that distance. It is physically impossible for the brain to react and reach the ball within a quarter of a second, based only on sighting the ball. So how do these professional tennis players not only reach the ball but manage to return it so well!

I was surprised to find that there are many others who have delved deeper into this subject and done extensive studies to come up with good answers. If any of you are interested, here is a link to one such research finding published in the sport journal, titled, “The kinematics of the return of serve in Tennis: The role of Anticipatory information.”

As the title suggests a lot of it depends on anticipation. Anticipation is based on a lot of data that is being processed such as the position of the opponent, the angle at which the ball is tossed, the way he has served both in the recent past and historically, the surface in which the game is played etc. A good tennis player is processing all these inputs to decide on whether he or she, should move towards the corner or towards the centre of the court, stay near the baseline or move in and so on. The players themselves may not be aware that there is so much processing that is going on within their head.

I think running a business is very similar. The days when we can observe an event or a trend and take our time to react are gone. Product life cycles are shrinking and the pace of change in customer expectations and behaviour is also accelerating. Competition is not just coming from your traditional players but from next generation companies that are changing the way you provide that service. It is therefore crucial that businesses begin to act on “anticipatory information” rather than relying on observed information. To be competitive and to grow, businesses need to not only get better at anticipating these customer needs, but also be very agile in acting on those insights. The new generation, digital native companies are built grounds up to leverage technologies such as social media, wearables, IOT and such which give them much more insight. These same technologies are available to traditional enterprises but they must learn to harness the power and insight provided by these technologies.

The key to anticipatory information is the underlying ability of the organization to collect relevant data in a timely fashion and analyse and make sense of it. Take Banks as an example, the amount of information that we as customers provide to the banks is immense, every swipe of our card, tells a story of our preferences and interests. While a company like Google or Facebook is able to get so much insight about the consumer based on emails, searches and likes, the banks are yet to get that level of insight. Analysis is just the first step, having analysed, it is also important the organization has the agility to make the right offer or right action at the right time.

The advances in social media, wearable technology and other IOT devices, provide the volume and quality of information that was never possible before. Just look at the type of information that a company like Uber has about its fleet and its customers compared to other traditional fleet managers. Jeffery Immelt, CEO of GE in conversation with Fareed Zakaria on CNN highlighted how, information has changed the way even an industrial company like GE operates. Today it is possible to get information on how an airline engine is performing in real-time and this information can be used to not only track critical performance indicators but also predict issues and opportunities and thus anticipate and provide proactive services.

The fact that there are so many ways to collect information in real-time also means that you need the “intelligence” and the capacity to process these. For example, Google is able to connect the email sent by your airline regarding your travel, to your home and airport location and the traffic in your area, to prompt you with the right time for you to leave home to catch your flight. This is the intelligence that organizations need. To do this organizations need to store and grow with the data, deal with surge in compute needs and the cognitive computing ability that can discern the important from the peripheral. We need to equip our employees with intelligent and automated systems that enables them to perform in this accelerated environment. Leveraging the cloud for these flexible surges in needs and growing wealth of data is key. Cloud also gives one the ability to tap into specialized analytical functions and tools that are too expensive to build just for one business or one task. Making the connections between social data, structured data and data feeds from the devices require good analytical and cognitive ability in machines.

Real-time data, Analytics, Cloud, cognitive or Knowledge based computing, become the Enabling Technology, although a bit contrived, that is the RACKET you need to return a winner!! All this time we were thinking that businesses were ‘serving’ customers!!

(About the Author: This article has been contributed by Srikumar Ramanathan, Senior Vice President and Head of Industry Solutions Group for Banking and Capital Markets at Mphasis)