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AT 6 am, Sir Digby Jones opens the door to his flat, shivers in the
early-morning cold and sets off on his dawn run around
Regent’s Park in London.
Within a few minutes the face beneath his greying hair begins to
turn red, his breathing becomes laboured and sweat starts
running down his face.
Jones said his new exercise regime had made him better able to meet
the demands of his job. He is not alone. The increasing
pressure of running a business means that the average tenure
of a chief executive is now less than four years. To help
give them the edge to survive, more and more business
leaders are turning to exercise and dieticians.
Terry Smith, chief executive of Collins Stewart, the stockbroker,
is one. “When you are fit you can absorb more,” he said. “I
run a business that operates in 43 offices in 26 countries.
Sometimes you spend 15 hours on a plane, halfway round the
world in time difference, and you have to get out, have a
shower and go straight to work. You can do that better when
you are fit.”
Every weekday, Smith spends an hour in the Gym Box boxing gym in
Holborn, near the offices of Collins Stewart. There he pays
his trainers to push him as hard as they can. One is a
former cruiserweight boxer and the other is a paratrooper,
and they earn their money: a typical session involves a
two-mile run followed by three rounds in the ring. Between
rounds Smith does circuits in the gym, followed by weight
training.
“Sometimes they have nasty surprises for you, like running up and
down staircases carrying weights, or shoulder presses with a
5kg medicine ball. If it looks like you are doing well they
will lob something in,” he said.
Smith believes it is the same desire to push himself through this
punishing regime that also drives him in business.
He said: “I’ve spent 30 years or more now in the City and
I’ve observed a lot of people. If I had to choose a single
common denominator, it certainly isn’t education. It’s not
even intelligence. It’s something like energy or
determination.
“The really successful people say ‘I will do whatever it takes to
get it done’. It’s the same thing in boxing. You are facing
someone who is very fit and very tough, so you’ll do
whatever it takes to get it done.”
Allan Leighton, the Royal Mail chairman, packs his trainers
whenever he goes abroad. He runs five times a week, taking
in a six-mile circuit. He said: “Doing a top job is harder
than it has ever been. Anybody who thinks it is not 24/7
every day is kidding themselves.”
Jogging, said Leighton, is a good way of keeping fit, but equally
important is the fact that it helps to “combat stress”.
Philip Mountford, chief executive of men’s fashion retailer Moss
Bros, said his exercise regime gave him the energy to get
through his day. Mountford arrives at the Moss Bros offices
in Clapham, south London, at 6am each morning. Once there,
he goes through his in-tray, then leaves to run 10km around
Clapham Common before heading back into the office for
7.30am.
“It’s the beginning of my day and if I don’t do it I feel quite
unmotivated. It is the thing that kicks me off in the
morning,” he said. Running also gives him a perspective on
his work that is lost if he spends a whole day at his desk.
“In the morning when I’m running, that’s the time I’ve got to think
about the day ahead - what I’ve got to do, who I’ve got to
see, how I’ll plan my day - and that is the time I think
laterally about ideas,” he said.
Moss Bros’s finance director, Roddy Murray, also runs. “A lot of
people who work for me run,” Mountford said. “One of the
guys I brought with me from Gianni Versace runs marathons
with me. Two of my senior buyers are keen runners. It’s not
a criterion for working for me. Not yet.”
John Caudwell, a self-made millionaire whose Caudwell Group owns
the Phones4U retail chain, said: “I’m competitive in
everything I do. I apply that to my fitness and it’s the
same sentiments in business. The love of wanting to work,
the love of wanting to be the best - they are exactly the
same drivers in my head,” he said.
Caudwell also believes his fitness regime has bought him more time
at the top. He works out in the gym daily, on top of which
he cycles to and from the group’s offices in Stoke-on-Trent,
a journey of 14 miles each way. Driven by this sense of
competition with himself, he always rides flat out, looking
to beat his personal best. “As a result, I’ve got massive
energy to do what I want to do,” he said.
At Goldman Sachs, staff are provided with shorts, T-shirts, socks
and a towel every time they visit. One bond dealer said: “It
makes the facilities of even the top private clubs look
ragged.”
Ego Falkovsky, head of design at architecture firm Thorp Design,
said: “Business people tend to use their sports facilities
in quite an intensive way. They also like to use them for
parties where they want to impress people, so they sometimes
want very spectacular things.”
Alan Bird, head chef at The Ivy, one of London’s most fashionable
restaurants, said executives’ desire to stay trim had forced
him to adapt his menu. “Their awareness has changed
dramatically,” he said. “They are more healthconscious,
especially in the business community. “Meetings are now held
at lunchtime, instead of in the evening. Even then, they
tend to have light lunches, and won’t take starters or
dessert,” he said.
Chief executives are also beginning to share the benefits of
fitness with their staff. K2 Performance Systems is a
Reading based company that works with elite athletes,
including Lennox Lewis, the boxer, and Manchester United
footballer Rio Ferdinand, to apply the principles of their
coaching regimes to the world of business.
In the past year, the company has seen its business from corporate
clients, which include Toshiba and EDS, more than double.
K2’s chief executive, Keith Hatter, said: “The key thing
here is that the arena in which the top people in business
operate and the arena within which leading sports people
operate have some similarities. They are: extremely tough
competition; intense pressure; tiny margins for error; and a
very high cost of failure.
“Our programme is about having a look at whether they are fit for
the purpose. Often it’s not about turning people into gym
rats or marathon runners. It can be about making the
smallest changes.”
Those who have worked at the top in both worlds also stress the
lessons that business can learn from sport. George Cox is a
former chairman of the Institute of Directors and currently
sits on the supervisory board of Euronext, the pan-European
stock exchange that is expected to bid for the London Stock
Exchange.
Cox, a former coach to the British rowing team, believes the
principles of coaching can be applied to business.
He said: “Training is about discipline, which is what you have to
apply to business. In sports coaching, you’re really working
out what you are trying to achieve and you gear all your
training up to that.”
Keeping fit also has benefits for a business’s bottom line, say
company bosses. Insurers are now taking a keen interest in
the health of those employed at the highest level of
Britain’s companies. In practical terms, this means tougher
health checks on those employed to take up these roles and
higher premiums for those who fail them.
Tony Reeves, chief executive of Hotgroup, an AIM-quoted specialist
recruitment company, has run six London marathons.
He said: “We are talking to insurance companies about providing
health insurance for members of staff, and the more
innovative schemes make it attractive for companies to
encourage health-club membership. The insurance companies
said to me that in a fitter workforce, there are fewer
claims on their insurance policies.”
Norwich Union, which writes health-insurance policies for senior
executives, now uses health screening as its primary tool.
The screening includes questions on lifestyle, stress and
exercise, as well as a test to detect nicotine. In the past,
companies would instead have used a medical test, which
looked for evidence of major illnesses only.
Ultimately, however, the desire to stay fit has to be a personal
choice. Ian Rosenblatt, a top London lawyer, is in his local
gym at 5am. He later introduced his trainer to Terry Smith,
an act he occasionally regrets, particularly when he is
doing stomach crunches and his trainer whispers in his ear
that Smith “can do it a bit quicker”.
Fred Turok, chief executive of the LA Fitness chain of gyms, said:
“Executives have always focused on building their personal
wealth. People now have an eye on their health, so, at some
point in the future when they turn the work tap off, they
can enjoy it.
“When I retire, I want to climb the Himalayas or sail round the
world and I want to make sure I am in good shape to do so.”
Keith Miller, founder of the Miller Group, Britain’s biggest
private-property group, agrees. |
