Think Tank: sport and business are not a good fit Sport is all about beating someone else. There are no win-win solutions, you can't increase the size of the market in victories and you don't need to watch out for new entrants who play by different rules. The fickle tastes of consumers may determine the size of your sponsorship prize but no amount of clapping and chanting will alter the finish time or final score. Yes, to be successful in business or sport you need determination, the trust of your colleagues and a good coach, but you need these just as much in ballet. The thing is that businesses are mainly run by men who enjoy sport. The sporting analogy allows them to indulge their hobby and meet their heroes on the company's time, no matter that they guide us down the wrong fairway. Whereas most business decisions are guided by facts, when it comes to messages about motivation and leadership, instinct takes over. We go with what we like or what reinforces how we see ourselves rather than what works. And it's not just a question of sport. It is widely but mistakenly believed that extroverts are more effective leaders than introverts. In fact, as Tom Hinkley at Liberty University demonstrated, there is no correlation between the five qualities of a leader (challenging the process; inspiring a shared vision; enabling others to act; modelling the way forward and encouraging the heart) and extroversion/introversion. Indeed, there appears to be an inverse correlation between publishing an autobiography and business success. Compare the little-known Ann Mulcahy, who turned around Xerox, with Carly Fiorina, one-time CEO of HP and author of The Fiorina Way, who saw HP's share price go up only on the day she resigned. Lou Gerstner transformed Chrysler but, once he turned into a celebrity CEO, the company's performance plateaued. Even when achievements are genuine, we run the risk of drawing the wrong conclusions. Look at someone's photo album and it will be brimming with sunshine, foreign climes and people smiling. It would be easy to conclude that they live a charmed life where it never rains, people are always happy and there's no need to work. The photograph album effect occurs when we imagine the snippets we see of someone's life are representative. The comparison inevitably leaves us falling short. Compare and despair. "When we admire someone, we are much more inclined to imitate them," explains Professor Guy Claxton, co-director, Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester. And so we are drawn to, and are more likely to emulate, people who have excelled at something we enjoy but do only moderately and people with charisma, even if they don't deliver the goods. This explains the choice of hurdler or rower as after- dinner speaker as well as the liberal distribution of corporate autobiographies at the end of management conferences. The heart of the problem is that the language of business is dull. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then talking about business is like cooking with clay. The answer lies not with flawed analogies and the lustre of CEO celebrities but in finding ways to make business interesting by telling stories and importing our passion from the stadium into the office.