How to Learn Like an Olympian: A Conversation with Mike McIntyre

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm your host, Michael Rivo, from Salesforce Studios. We've got a great episode today, following up on the Tokyo Olympics. I had the opportunity to chat with Mike MacIntyre. Mike won gold in the 1988 summer Olympics in the Star class sailing competition. He's also a founding partner at Xenogenix, a business process consultancy that's been helping companies around the world streamline and grow their businesses for over 20 years, and he's the proud dad of Eilidh McIntyre, who just won sailing gold in Tokyo. It's a first for a British daughter and her father to have both won gold. Today, we're going to talk about what it takes to compete at the Olympic level, and how to take those lessons into business and into life. So, let's get into it. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Mike McIntyre: Thanks very much Michael. Pleasure to be here.

Michael Rivo: Tell us a little bit about your Olympic history.

Mike McIntyre: So, it started a long time ago, and as any Olympian will tell you, they get the bug from there about 12 or 13 years old, and decide that what they want to do with their life is go to the Olympics, and that's the way it was for me. And I got inspired by a couple of British guys, Rodney Patterson and Iain MacDonald- Smith, who had won a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics. And I just started sailing, and I decided that's what I wanted to do, and really geared my life around it. I left Scotland, my home country, as soon as I'd finished university, came to the south of England to be as close as I could to the sailing. And I actually did three Olympic campaigns myself. So, I sailed the Finn class for about seven years in the run- up to the 1980 Olympic games, where we actually boycotted the Olympics like lots of other people, and then sailed it in 1984 in the Los Angeles Olympics. So, I sailed the Finn there, finished seventh which was a bit of a disaster, and then for the 1988 Olympics, between the two, I'd done a lot of big boat sailing. I sailed in the America's cup in Perth, Western Australia, and then I got a phone call in September 1987 by a guy I knew vaguely, who said," Look, I've got this great boat. I've been sailing with this great guy, who's lending me his boat to do an Olympic Star campaign, and would you like to sail?" And that's how the Star campaign started, and off we went, and over the next 10 months, we sailed the Star boat whenever we could. And then went on to Olympics in Korea in that summer and managed to win.

Michael Rivo: Fantastic. I'd love to hear a little bit about some of the challenges, I think a lot of listeners aren't going to know necessarily that much about sailing specifically, but I think we can all relate to what it takes to compete and to win and how you need to drive yourself. And you described in that story coming in seventh and a bit of a disaster, and then moving on to victory. What do you think you were drawing on to keep going and to improve, what was that process?

Mike McIntyre: I used to talk about it as a continuous improvement or continuous personal development type process where you basically like anything you're trying to improve iteratively, you're going around the cycle of analyzing where you are, putting a plan in place to get better, executing the plan and then measuring whether you got better or not. And you go round and round this cycle of trying to improve. What was interesting was in the run into 1988, we had very, very little time. So, we only had a 10 month campaign. The perceived wisdom was that it would take not 10 months, but 10 years to get really good in the Star class yacht thing, so we had to be incredibly careful about how we used our time. I think that was the key thing that made the difference for us was really analyzing where the big opportunities were for us to improve and then focusing very hard on those, making the improvement and then moving on to the next one.

Michael Rivo: Do you think having less time in some ways improved your performance?

Mike McIntyre: It's certainly improved our focus and what we actually did and we didn't waste time and we've managed to get on this very steep learning curve. The Star boat is an incredibly complicated boat to sail, if you get things wrong, the mast just falls over the side and it's very, very difficult just to sail. So, the first few months I spent just learning how to do the simple maneuvers of getting around the racetrack, attacking and jiving and going round marks, that thing, before we even worried about how to make the boat go fast. And then we moved on to the subtleties of making the boat go fast in all different conditions and we put together a training group with two other boats where we would meet up for weekends in Holland and we would go and work on heavy weather sailing or light weather sailing or whatever it happened to be at the time, and that was incredibly productive as well.

Michael Rivo: I had heard in an earlier interview that you said that sailing taught you how to really identify what's most important. And that resonated with me so much because I think when we think about that, that's the task every day, what's the most important I should be working on and how to focus. How do you do that? Is there a framework for deciding what's most important, are there some core values that you look at how you look at a situation, whether it's in business or in sailing?

Mike McIntyre: There are lots of great stories from the Olympics around athletes who are four years out from the Olympics have set their goal from a certain speed that they needed to swim a hundred meters or whatever it is, and then they work every training session to try and improve by maybe one 1200th of a second or something every training session. And that's really clear goal actually helps you keep going because, one of the things for the elite athletes is they are working so hard for such a long time for just a performance in that one moment in time or in the sailing event, it's over eight days, but you have to perform in that very, very short window of time. And that brings almost a separate pressure to really deliver on the day as it were in business slightly different because, a lot of the time you're working at not a hundred percent, you're working in a manageable rate for a very long time. It's almost more like training the whole time when you're working.

Michael Rivo: I'd love to hear more about that, the pressure of that moment and how you manage that. I suppose it is a little different running a hundred meter race versus sailing for eight days. And even with that, now you have a bad day, you have a good day, you have to come back the next day. I imagine there's a lot of emotions to manage, how do you get in the right mindset to take that on?

Mike McIntyre: That is the million dollar question actually. And it's actually the most important question, the hardest one to answer really because, the whole process of getting yourself up for an event, and then not taking yourself over the top and getting too stressed is really, really, really difficult. Everybody has to find their own way of doing it. And one of the challenges with the sailing in a sense, it's a bit like golf or tennis even where you've got lots of time to think about the next mistake you mustn't make, and you got lots and lots of time to talk yourself out of a good performance. Here, lots of top sailors in particular, talking about just staying focused on the processes, which is really interesting because it's all about all these processes that you've got for doing the various parts of a yacht race, be at the start or making the boat go fast or turning a corner or hoisting sails, dropping sails, all these different maneuvers, all the teams have a process for doing those. And if you can control the controllable, then that's all you can do really, and when you've done that to your best ability, you've done the best you can and if someone does better, there's nothing you can do about it really. But, it is about really trying to control the things that you can be in control of.

Michael Rivo: Now, your daughter just won a gold medal as well from what I understand in... well, congratulations, that's got to make you feel like a proud dad for sure. Did you work with her over the years, was this her own thing, how did you manage that relation? I know as a parent, it's always a little tricky. Did you guys work together, what, what was that like over the years?

Mike McIntyre: The sailing world is full of what we call pushy parents who are living too much of their life through their children's performances. So, we tried really hard not to do that. I tried to follow the example of my parents, who gave me all the encouragement in the world, but never pushed me hard to do anything. And I think that's really the parenting lesson in all this is we're here to give our children opportunities, help them to achieve what they want to achieve and just be happy when they achieve that. Obviously Eilidh my daughter has just won a gold medal at the Olympics as well and that's an unbelievable achievement, it really is. And I think it's only the second father daughter gold medals we can find certainly in the world of sailing. That's good fun as well. But, over the years I've tried to mentor her really, and I haven't been super involved in her actual day- to- day coaching. I haven't tended to do very much of that. I'm very much the sounding board because I've been there and done it and failed one time at the Olympics and then succeeded the other time. I was able to give her a lot of advice around how to deal with the pressure, how to deal with the regatta itself, and I've done that over the years as well. I'm the strategy mentor.

Michael Rivo: So, tell me a little bit about your career trajectory Mike, I know you've been a consultant with your own company for many years. Prior to that, what type of work were you doing?

Mike McIntyre: Before or immediately before setting up the consultancy, I worked in the telecoms world, the mobile telecoms world actually for about 12 years. First of all, with a manufacturing company, then with an added value services company and finally with a small network operator. So, I did quite a lot of different jobs there. Very much on the senior sales and marketing roles, mostly on the product marketing side proposition marketing those stuff, and sadly the little company that I was with went bust in 2001 and one of my colleagues and I we decided we'd had enough of the corporate life and we would do our own thing. So, we set up Xenogenix.

Michael Rivo: That's exciting. So, this is 2001. This is post dot- com bust era and just the two of you started the company?

Mike McIntyre: We started the two of us and the company we set up, was just going to be small... really it started out as a lifestyle business, just the two of us doing enough to do something interesting and pay the bills. And we were very much a business process improvement consultancy. So, what we did was go into big organizations, help them map out the business processes, identify where the waste was and then help them redesign better ways of working and help with some of the change management around doing those implementations. And we did that for about five years before we came to Salesforce as a customer actually. We needed a new CRM system. So, being a tiny company of course with only two of us, we obviously started off looking for something free, then we started looking for something really cheap, and then a company that we worked with, who we knew the directors really well, they were very early adopters of Salesforce, and they basically said," Look, guys, if you want a CRM system buy Salesforce, it's the next big thing. You'll never regret it." So we did.

Michael Rivo: And so you've been doing Salesforce implementations for your clients for a long time now. Tell us about the platform. I always like to hear from customers and people who work on Salesforce. What do you like about it, what can we improve?

Mike McIntyre: Well, the first really interesting thing about our journey with it was, we started out as a tiny little two person company. We've got a couple of licenses. We uploaded our accounts and contacts into the platform, which was super easy, and then we just use it straight out of the box without any configuration at all, which is great because you can do that. Not so great because of course that's not what you should do when you're implementing any CRM system. So, we found of course as soon as we started using it, it didn't really quite work for us and we didn't like the pick list values or page layouts or anything like that. So, being practical guys, we got in the back end and started changing things, and actually that was when we had what we call our light bulb moment, which was very much around the realization that the huge difference between Salesforce then and lots of other systems was that with Salesforce, you could work out how you wanted your business to work. So, what you wanted your business process to be, and then tailor Salesforce to fit that business process. So, that was a real aha moment where we thought well, hang on, this is all about understanding the process, implementing the system the way we want our business to work, and I think that is maybe one of the biggest things about the platform is that it lets you essentially take virtually any business process and run it the way you would like to run it, and it doesn't have to be just the sales and marketing side of things or the service side of things. The platform will support virtually any business process at all and that's super flexibility is a massive plus for the platform I think.

Michael Rivo: I'm curious too. I was thinking while we were chatting there about going into so many different companies and helping them sort out their business processes, some of it is processed and some of it is organizational. What do you see as the common threads that are holding back some businesses or messing up these processes. What are the big things that you've seen over the years?

Mike McIntyre: Where to start? There's so many things you can say. I think that our mission is very much trying to help improve the way that people processes and systems work together to drive performance. That's what our whole mission is really at Xenogenix. And I think one of the things that really holds companies back is people are not taking an end to end view of how the business should work, with a modern system you can have these systems that can cut right across the boundaries of departments, and there are not enough companies embracing that opportunity. There are still too many companies out there who sales just are interested in the selling piece, marketing just interest the marketing piece, operations just interested in the operations piece and not enough people looking right across the way the business could work. I think that there's a big opportunity for a lot of businesses to embrace that approach more. We see the companies where people are looking at things from an end to end view right the way through the value chain from first touch with a new lead, right in the way through not just through sales and support, but operations and finance and invoicing and chasing invoices, the whole value chain of the business there's huge opportunities to streamline those processes and make the businesses work better.

Michael Rivo: It seems like part of the challenges that the structures that we've traditionally set up with businesses there really isn't a person who has that necessarily that 360 view of the whole process. Because, if you're working in marketing, you're thinking about marketing sales et cetera. Is there a new role? How do you break those silos? What have you seen that's been successful in companies in helping everybody to see that whole role and then being able to build the tools to implement it?

Mike McIntyre: There is quite a chat now coming on about centers of excellence and people in the Salesforce world talking about centers of excellence as well. I like the term, but I would prefer it to be called a center of operational excellence. So, what you really need is a group of people in a business, who have got that remit to look at the whole business from end to end from an operational excellence point of view, which is not just the process, but it's how do the people and the processes and the systems actually interact together to really help the business perform. And I think there's definitely a role for head of operational excellence frankly in any business of any size at all.

Michael Rivo: And when you think about the inputs there, I think we've all probably been in situations where we've got siloed tools it's frustrating. Where have you seen that implemented specifically and really have you seen it in a more legacy or a company that has a bunch of systems in place already that's been able to make that change and how have you seen that done successfully?

Mike McIntyre: The change, the real goal and our mantra is for any business up to fairly sizable medium sized business, you can put your whole business on the Salesforce platform, not just a bit of it, but actually everything, including finance, ERP, project management, HR, everything, it can all go on the one platform. And getting people to understand first of all that's possible is a challenge. And then where we've seen it work best is where there's someone in the business, and it's often an operational type director who's got the ear of everybody else who can say," Look, we've got an opportunity here to really simplify our business by putting everything on the one platform." And then it's just a question of deciding in what order do you actually do it in, and usually it starts off with a sales or a service and then it goes to marketing, then it goes operational and finance coming on afterwards.

Michael Rivo: What have you seen from a change management perspective where are there certain areas or groups where people are typically more open to this or less, what are the issues there around how people are interacting? And I think about it in the context of a team, how do you get the team to work together on this? What have you seen as some of those bigger change management challenges?

Mike McIntyre: It comes back to something I talked to my daughter about as she was going off to the Olympics a few weeks ago, and that was when you're out there in the regatta, there are going to be opportunities come your way, and you need to be open to them, looking for them, and you need to grab them with both hands. And that's quite a good thing to carry into business as well. Businesses need to be continually looking for ways to do things better. So, they need to be open to the opportunities, looking for them and when they see an opportunity just grab it. And I think there's that attitude, and it's not so much with particular departments I don't think, it's just that some people are open to opportunities and looking to improve the business and other folks are not taking that same view of the world, they're too stuck in their silos, they're too stuck in maybe their old ways of doing things and they're just losing or missing lots and lots of opportunity.

Michael Rivo: And how do you think you'd change that attitude? Obviously people are people, but are there things that you can do or that you've been able to do when you've felt stuck in a rut to be able to change that?

Mike McIntyre: Where we've seen it work and where we managed to turn things around to an extent it's where you might be going to environment where everyone's very set in their ways, I've done it with one or two bigger companies where you go in and everyone says, no, no, no, we all have to do it this way and it's completely different to these people. You get this in multi- nationals quite a bit where the British are saying one way and the French say a different way and the Germans and Europe here are saying do it this way, and everyone says well, we do it completely differently. And one of the very interesting things I've found is when you get all these people in a room and you sit them down and you start to actually map their process out, suddenly they realize that actually their processes are almost identical. And what they're arguing about is just semantics. So, that's very interesting is when you get people in a single room and get them to talk openly about what they do and what's different and why is it difficult, those things. Then you can bring people together and I think the secret of getting this vision of how we could create a better business is to get the right people in the room and get them to talk and communicate, understand each other's problems, understand how they could get their teams to work better together, and you find that that just breaks down barriers between departments and individuals incredibly quickly.

Michael Rivo: Well, hopefully we're all going to be able to get in the same room a little easier than it has been for the past couple of years. Maybe it's all in the same slack channel is the answer there.

Mike McIntyre: That's right. Although we've all become incredibly good at video conferencing haven't we? In the last a year and a half. It used to be no one would ever switch their video on Zoom or anything like that for fear of what people might see, and now just everyone's talking away on video like we've always done it. That's been an interesting and quite a positive thing that people have got much more comfortable with effectively be in the same virtual room as each other, without being physically right beside each other, and I think that adds a lot to these Zoom calls and the like, because you actually see people and it's much more like being in a room with them, but there's still nothing quite like being in the same room with people.

Michael Rivo: It's true. I think figuring out what that hybrid model is going to look like and how you can be in the same place sometimes and then take advantage like us right now we're speaking 5, 000 miles apart or whatever it is. Where are you right now, Mike?

Mike McIntyre: I'm on the south coast of England in a little place called Hayling Island.

Michael Rivo: I'm on the west coast of California in a little place called Tiburon, which is actually right across the bay from San Francisco and a big sailing town, lots of sailing here. They have a great junior program and I take the ferry and when I come back in the evenings or when I used to come back in the evening, you would see all the small boats and the kids who are probably about your age when you got the bug for it, sailing in the little bay there. So, it's great.

Mike McIntyre: Lots of very good sailors come out of San Francisco. That's for sure.

Michael Rivo: Well, Mike this has been a really fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Mike McIntyre: It's been a pleasure and it's great to share the stories.

Michael Rivo: That was Mike MacIntyre, Olympic gold medalist and founding partner at Xenogenix. If you want to learn more about how you can grow your career on the Salesforce platform, head over to trailhead. com, where you can skill up for the future and their new skills from anywhere, and check out the newly re- imagined Trailhead community. It's a great place to connect with trailblazers from around the world who are growing their careers on the Salesforce platform. Thanks for listening today. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios.