In the spring of 2014, Vitaly Saveliev signed his second five-year contract as CEO of Aeroflot, Russia's flag carrier. In the fall of that year a crisis struck Russia. Following a collapse in oil prices, the rouble lost almost 50 per cent of its value, Russia's Central Bank raised its benchmark one-week repo rate from 10.5 per cent to 17 per cent, and the fourth-largest Russian airline (Utair) defaulted on its bonds – all in a matter of weeks. Continuing Western economic sanctions added a few dark brushstrokes to an already bleak picture.

‘Bad luck?’ asked the 60-year-old executive who, in the previous five years, had turned Aeroflot from the ‘airline to avoid’ into a rising star of the European aviation industry, increasing yearly revenues from under US$3.3 billion to almost US$9.1 billion and net income from US$86 to US$230 million, lifting passenger figures from 11.1 to 31.4 million and improving labour productivity by a factor of 3 (see Table 4.1). ‘Opportunity!’ answered the seasoned leader, who had managed through many crises in his 30-year career. And he turned out to be right.

In the two years that followed, Aeroflot improved its market share and profitability – and strengthened its position as one of the most dynamic airlines in the world. Under Saveliev's leadership Aeroflot did what most businesses refuse even to attempt – reduced costs and raised the top line. In the fall of 2014, Aeroflot quickly adapted its strategy to the new economic reality by withdrawing seven planes from action, delaying the delivery of new aircraft, cutting administrative expenses and letting staff go. In 2015, Saveliev categorically refused the Russian government's request to acquire a defunct Transaero, the second-largest Russian carrier, for 260 billion roubles (US$4.5 billion) – but negotiated a deal.

Leadership Agenda

The goals and objectives of each athletic leader are highly specific – and to a large degree determined by the company they lead and the industry it operates in. Alexander Dyukov wants Gazprom Neft to be the best in class in terms of operational efficiency and health, safety and environmental (HSE) protection. Vitaly Saveliev strives to make Aeroflot one of the top 20 airlines by number of passengers and the most profitable in terms of return on equity. Herman Gref is building a digital organization that will provide a whole range of services to hundreds of millions of private and corporate customers, including banking. Yet there are some striking commonalities in their leadership agendas: the ambitions and major themes that guide their leadership action.

The agendas of athletic leaders are complex and multidimensional, with many different overarching themes, time horizons and specific projects. However, there are two central leitmotifs in all this diversity: winning and transforming(see Table 2.1).

Like top-performing athletes, athletic leaders are determined to win. We will see later how this goal (or, rather, attitude) translates into specific leadership practices. For now, it is enough to note that these leaders are very competitive and want to win on multiple fronts. First, they want to beat specific competitors – companies and leaders that they recognize as such. Some are open about this, while others keep the names and criteria to themselves, but they all have such rivals – which may not necessarily come from the same industry. In fact, some of our protagonists compete with each other. One of their deputies told us, ‘Sberbank is both a benchmark and a rival for us. Our boss constantly follows up on what's going on there and feels good when we do something better.’

Second, athletic leaders work hard to beat their own records. They want their companies to constantly outperform themselves. Vadim Yakovlev, vice president at Gazprom Neft, says, ‘Dyukov sets the bar higher and higher for himself and the organization, even if market conditions or the board of directors do not require that to happen.’

Herman Gref, the CEO of the Russia's largest bank, is probably the closest match to the model of the athletic leader among the protagonists of this book. The scale of his work is unprecedented. In less than ten years, he transformed a clumsy, old-fashioned, gigantic bank into one of the country's most innovative companies – a change that is visible to literally every Russian citizen.

Herman Gref: Profile of a Leader

In 2007, to the big surprise of the international financial community, the former minister of economic development and trade of the Russian Federation, Herman Gref, became the new CEO of Sberbank. At age 43, Gref had a spectacular government career behind him but had never worked in business. Born into a family of ethnic Germans in a small town in Northern Kazakhstan, he graduated from the prestigious St Petersburg University with a degree in economics and became engaged in social and political life during the perestroika years. After holding government jobs at district and city levels in St Petersburg, he went to Moscow to head a ‘centre of strategy’ that had been set up to create a blueprint for the economic development of Russia. There he assembled a team of experts from different spheres of life and engaged various organizations to contribute to the centre's work. The ideas thus developed formed the foundation of President Vladimir Putin's initial reforms in early 2000, which are recognized for having given a significant a boost to Russian economy. Gref then became a minister and earned a reputation as a committed liberal reformer who could push his agenda through the corridors of power.

Athletic leadership is not a universal model of business leadership. It is highly contextual and situational. The athletic CEOs described in this book operate in turbulent contexts with a high level of government intervention and vertical leadership tradition. They started with a relatively low base – their companies lagged behind competitions or did not exist at all in the industries with lucrative domestic and international markets. However, its implications go beyond superambitious, curious, highly energetic chief executives operating in rapidly changing, turbulent environments with high levels of government participation. We believe that ‘non-athletic’ CEOs, aspiring leaders, politicians and most of us living in today's world can learn a lesson from the protagonists of this book and borrow some of their practices. In this concluding chapter we present key insights for each category of readers and outline some avenues for future research.

Lessons for Business Leaders

The practice of athletic leadership on a daily basis is a challenging and highly demanding task. It may not suit everybody's tastes or abilities. However, other leaders can benefit from it by using the following approaches.

Borrowing Some Elements and Instruments of Athletic Leadership to Complement Current Leadership Practice

While working on this research project we presented the model of athletic leadership at a workshop for CEOs. Our participants recognized a pattern that they had previously seen in some of their colleagues but generally dismissed athletic leadership as aggressive and egoistic. None of the seven attendees wanted to be an athletic leader. A few months later, three of them told us that they had started using some of the tools we discussed, specifically the metapractice of ‘slack rope’; the setting of a leadership agenda with financial and transformational goals; and the practice of ‘going out, going down, and going deep’. The CEOs had found these experiences positive, even though they had not turned into fans of athletic leadership.

We have repeated throughout this book that business leadership is highly situational: it is up to business leaders themselves to choose the elements of athletic leadership that will work in their contexts.

As demonstrated in the previous chapters, athletic leaders can be extremely successful in turbulent, government-dominated environments with rapid knowledge obsolescence – conditions that are met in contexts other than Russia. In search of non-Russian athletic leaders, we first took a look at the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). We tried to identify companies that had achieved world-beating status and examined whether their CEOs possessed the attributes of athletic leaders. We were especially interested in finding a woman CEO to test our hypothesis that, even though athletic leadership may seem quite masculine, it is independent of gender and can be successfully practiced by female executives.

What if athletic leadership could be effective in developed economies too? Rapid change and knowledge obsolescence, turbulence and heavy government interference need not be characteristics of the market as a whole but of a specific industry, such as technology. If you were asked to name the greatest business leader in this sector, you would probably say Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos – all of them from technology companies, all of them from one of the world's most developed markets (the United States), all of them quite different from the identikit portraits painted by the leadership literature and all of them bearing a striking resemblance to athletic leaders.

In this chapter, we focus on three athletic leaders from different parts of the world: Roger Agnelli, former CEO of Brazilian Vale; Dong Minzhu, CEO of Chinese Gree Electric; and Jeff Bezos, president, CEO and chairman of United States-based Amazon. All three not only exemplify the mindset of athletic leaders (mental toughness, adaptability, super-sized ambition etc.) but have also used the same metapractices in defining their company's path, obtaining new knowledge and dealing with followers, media and government.

Brazil: Roger Agnelli

A member of the BRICS, Brazil is one of the major emerging economies and the seventh largest in the world, with GDP of 3.2 trillion international dollars (PPP) in 2016.

Why AthleticLeadership?

Viacheslav Fetisov played his first professional hockey game at the age of 17 and his last at the age of 40. In his 22 seasons on ice, he had a distinguished career in both the leading hockey leagues of the time: the North American NHL and the USSR Top League. He won two Olympic gold medals and seven more at the World Championships as well as the regular season title of the NHL, the Stanley Cup and the Canada Cup. He was captain of the famous ‘Red Machine’, the USSR ice hockey team of the 1980s and leader of arguably the most powerful and creative quintet in ice hockey's history: Larionov-Krutov-Makarov-Fetisov-Kasatonov. Fetisov explained to us what distinguishes athletes and teams that consistently win at the highest level: ‘If the next minute after listening to your national anthem and stepping down from the top of the podium you don't start thinking about how to beat your competitors again, you are finished as a champion.’ His words resonate with those of Saveliev, CEO of Aeroflot: ‘I am not interested in celebrating old victories; I want to win new ones.’ The metaphor of ‘athletic leadership’ emerged at an early stage of our research. We noticed that all the leaders in our study shared an exceptional desire to win and to improve their performance – just like top-level athletes.

This observation made us look into the research on world-class athletes and led us to interview some of them. Our deep dive into the world of top sport yielded a number of interesting discoveries that reinforced the initial hypothesis about similarities between the leaders we studied and top-performing athletes.

Following the logic of Albert Bandura's triadic concept of human agency, we may look at athlete performance through three lenses: the athlete's behaviour, his or her personality and environmental events. These factors interacting and influencing each other bi-directionally define performance. Performance is thus a function of three variables. First, what elite athletes do: how they train, compete and recover. Second, who they are: what cognitive, emotional, and personal abilities and traits they possess.