How 1% Performance Improvements Led to Olympic Gold

When Sir Dave Brailsford became head of British Cycling in 2002, the team had almost no record of success.
British cycling had only won a single gold medal in its 76-year history.

 “To give you a bit of background, when we first started out, the top of the Olympic podium seemed like a very long way away.
Aiming for gold was too daunting. As an MBA, I had become fascinated with other process-improvement techniques.
It struck me that we should think small, not big, and adopt a philosophy of continuous improvement
through the aggregation of marginal gains.” 

That quickly changed under Sir Dave’s leadership. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his squad won seven out of ten gold medals available in track cycling, and they matched the achievement at the London Olympics four years later.
Sir Dave now leads Britain’s first ever professional cycling team, which has won three of the last four Tour de France. 

Sir Dave, a former professional cycler who holds an MBA, applied a theory of marginal gains to cycling — he gambled that if the team broke down everything they could think of that goes into competing on a bike, and then improved each element by 1%, they would achieve a significant aggregated increase in performance.

“Forget about perfection; focus on progression, and compound the improvements.”

– Eben Harrell