The Art of Speed: Leadership Lessons from Racing Around Corners

I have talked about race cars before. They are a wet dream for engineers and physicists. A tangible application of science that moves metal, or now mostly carbon, faster and faster, that filters down, eventually, to the cars we drive around in.

The aim of the game is to be the fastest around the track. The key word there is track. Not corner.

The whole point is what are you optimising for, as illustrated in this video.

There is a theoretical best line to get through the corner, but what the drivers are aiming for is to be the fastest out of the corner, not have the highest minimum speed.

They are searching for the ideal line to connect the corners to get the best overall time for the lap and the race.

Process after Strategy

The drivers could around every corner perfectly based on the theory, yet still have a slower time than someone who didn’t.

This is because the best drivers are looking at the big picture rather than every corner in isolation.

As a leader, you should be looking at this too.

The big picture is what you want to achieve. Along the way to achieve this, there are going to be many decisions. Each decision will have a cost and an output.

Your job is to figure out how to have the lowest cost for the most output. This might mean that you have to make a very suboptimal decision in isolation to achieve a better outcome for the project.

People will pick apart this decision because they will look at it without understanding the big picture.

You will need to stand fast and continually re-emphasise what the big picture is. Every armchair critical will see the error in your individual decision, they will even rejoice in it, ignore them.