Winning Playbook: Damon Buford on why CEOs need an athlete mindset

Damon Buford, MLB veteran, on preparation, pressure, and the parts of elite sport that transfer directly into running a company.

The athlete-CEO comparison is usually made badly. Somebody puts a locker-room quote on a slide, everyone nods, nothing changes on Monday. Damon Buford took it the other way — into the unglamorous mechanics of how people who compete for a living actually prepare. He spent a career in Major League Baseball, which is 162 games of being measured in public, and it shows in how he talks about the work.

The first thing that transfers is the relationship with film. Elite athletes watch themselves fail, in slow motion, in a room with other people, every single week. Most executives have never once sat down and reviewed their own performance with that level of specificity. They review the company’s numbers. They do not review themselves.

The second is the taxonomy of pressure. Athletes are trained to separate the moments that decide an outcome from the moments that merely feel intense. Founders often cannot tell the difference, so they spend the same adrenaline on a board deck as on a term sheet and arrive at the decisive moment already empty.

The third is the size of the unit. A locker room teaches you very quickly that talent does not survive contact with a bad culture. The players who last are the ones who make the people around them better, and everyone in the room can name them without being asked. Companies have that person too. They are almost never the one on the org chart.

And the fourth — the one that lands hardest with people who run companies — is that in sport, the season ends. There is a scoreboard, a record, and a date after which you cannot change it. Business has no natural full-time whistle, which is exactly why so many operators never stop long enough to ask whether they are winning.

That is the argument. Not that executives should train like athletes. That they should be reviewed like them.

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