A willingness to challenge established approaches is the key to being successful in sport and leadership, Olympic gold-medallist Lord Sebastian Coe KBE has told a QUT Business Leaders' Forum.
Speaking at the Hilton Brisbane, Lord Coe also backed the Gold Coast's preparations for the 2018 Commonwealth Games but warned they must leave a legacy to be truly considered a success.
The former middle distance runner, who won two gold and two silver Olympic medals at the 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Games, revealed his third place finish at the 1978 Prague European Championships was "probably the most seismic moment of my life."
"It would have been very easy at that stage to say well I got a Bronze medal, I'm coming through the sport very nicely, same old same old," Lord Coe said.
"But thank God I worked with a coach who thought the market has moved on, that we couldn't go on doing the same old things, we had to challenge orthodoxies, we had to bring smart people to the table."
At that time, the methods Lord Coe's team introduced, including treadmill and blood chemical analysis were considered "voodoo science."
"They are bread and butter now but that was very new," Lord Coe said.
"Everything I did after that race, in my athletics career, and what I went on to do was benchmarked that day. And thank God I lost the race because if I'd won it the tendency would have been not to challenge those orthodoxies."
After retiring from athletics, Lord Coe served as a Member of the UK Parliament - "the commonality is injuries but rarely in sport are they inflicted by your own teammates" - before heading the successful London bid to host the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games.
An idea that started among friends in a pub saw Lord Coe spend seven years overseeing an organisation that started "$2 billion in debt, doubled in staff every year for six years and then had to sack all of them on the last day" as Chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Games.
"Leadership is imbued and underpinned and inextricably integrated to the vision to want to be different. The belief that the challenge is worth undertaking," Lord Coe said.
"This will come as a shock from the mouth of a POM, but I am a fully paid-up member of everything to do with Australian sport.
"It is why I so unashamedly nicked everything good out of Australian sport and tried to present it in a slightly modified format in London."
During a wide-ranging address, Lord Coe ruled out running for Mayor of London and reaffirmed his view that "track and field is by a distance the number one Olympic sport."
Lord Coe, who is a candidate for President of the International Association of Athletics Federations, said he was confident the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games would leave a legacy.
"For events to be meaningful and have traction in communities you have to be able to define what you'll leave behind," he said.
"We showed the UK, in the way which you showed Australia and Sydney in 2000, as a modern, diverse, creative, competent nation. Proud and protective of its heritage and history, and overwhelmingly and abundantly welcoming."
David Thodey, CEO and Executive Director of Telstra, will address the next QUT Business Leaders' Forum on Tuesday, 12 May.
For more information, go to: https://www.qut.edu.au/business/about/events/qut-business-leaders-forum
Media contact:
Rob Kidd, QUT Media, 07 3138 1841, rj.kidd@qut.edu.au
After hours, Rose Trapnell, 0407 585 901
