Team Sky is an excellent example of a 1% gains across every conceivable little gain possible. They re-defined how cycling teams won Tour de France.
Turn the clock back to 2010 and Britain had never produced a Tour De France winning rider.
The team was founded with the primary
goal of producing the first British winner of the Tour De France. To accomplish this, it was decided that the core of the squad should be comprised of relatively young British riders, supplemented with several established foreign names. The first roster of Sky riders reflected this, including the likes of; Thomas, Froome, Wiggins and Stannard, alongside Simon Gerrans, Edvald Boasson Hagen and Thomas Löfkvist..
Marginal gains yield major rewards
The long list of triumphs enjoyed by Team Sky since their inception can be largely attributed to what is known as the ‘
aggregation of marginal gains‘.
This philosophy was implemented by Dave Brailsford following his appointment as general manager of the team.
In his own words, the basis of the theory is that
“if you break down everything you could think of, that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together. They’re tiny things, but if you clump them together it can be the difference between winning and losing.”
Their search for efficiency has included countless innovative tweaks, some of which may seem to the untrained eye to be tenuously linked to performance on a bike.
Such changes include; travelling with their own mattresses and pillows to ensure riders sleep and recover as best as possible, colour coding water bottles to differentiate between water and energy drinks saving time on the road, and travelling on their state of the art team bus known as ‘The Death Star’, decked out with reclining padded seats, a shower, a treatment room, and a built in sound system.
Result? The British based outfit have produced the race winner 7 in a row.
Apply this to business - ANY business, and success is 10x more likely.
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