By Adrian Gonzalez, ARC Advisory Group

This past weekend, I listened to a sermon about “own[ing] the podium,” which was the goal of the Canadian athletes heading into the Vancouver Olympics. The main question raised by the rabbi was this: What happens Monday morning, the day after the Olympics end, when the cameras go away and the world’s attention moves on to something else?

Life goes on, and you can either choose to live in the past, standing on that same podium over and over again, or you can move forward with new ambitions and new podiums to strive for.

The rabbi used Mark Spitz and Eric Heiden as contrasting examples. Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals in swimming at the Munich Olympics, remained metaphorically stuck in 1972.  Every four years, when the summer Olympics rolled around, Mark would reappear in ads, television interviews, and the speaker circuit.  Reliving the past became the cycle of his life.  Thirty-eight years have passed since the Munich Games, but Mark Spitz is still in 1972, figuratively speaking, standing on that same old podium.

In contrast, Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals in long track speed skating at the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, stepped down from the podium and left 1980 and his world records behind. He attended Stanford University, graduated with a medical degree in 1991, and is now an orthopedic surgeon.  Eric was the team physician for the U.S. Olympic Speedskating Team for the past three Winter Olympics games, he opened a sports medicine-based practice at The Orthopedic Specialty Hospital in Murray, Utah, and he was one of doctors that assisted U.S. speed skater J.R. Celski recover from the serious injury he suffered during the US Olympic trials in 2009.

The lessons of this sermon also apply to business. When I began my career at Motorola in 1990, it had only been two years since the company had won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. When I left Motorla six years later, the company was still reliving that moment, standing on that podium, showing off its medal to customers and the world. But Motorola had ceased to “walk the talk” by then. Ramping up production and getting product out the door had shoved quality to the side.

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