Who is the most successful coach in the history of Alberta?

While your mind might be drawn to greats of the football field and the hockey arena, the answer, without a doubt, is Robert Schulz, PhD, professor of strategy and general management at the University of Calgary.

“Dr. Bob,” as EVERYONE calls him, has a string of wins that simply makes your jaw drop. For the past 25 years, his U of C business team has finished first or second overall in the top national competition. In 2003, they were the only team to enter all eight events, and brought home gold, silver or bronze medals in six of them.

Dr. Bob’s “sport” is Inter-Collegiate Business Competition, and the events range from gnarly accounting cases to presentations in business ethics and marketing. This is not some obscure game for academics. The judges are real business people and they ask hard questions. Teams are given five hours to analyse a new business case and 15 minutes to present their best try at a solution. Schulz is always there, encouraging, challenging, and when push comes to shove, reaching into his own wallet to help out his team members.

Bob Schulz

How did Bob Schulz get to be such a great coach?

He’s observed national championship and Olympic coaches and thought a lot about what the sporting arena has to say to the business world. He shared what he’s learned with a group of high-tech entrepreneurs and wannabes in a recent talk at Calgary Technologies Inc.

* On Recruiting: “Recruiting talent is a 24/7 job,” he says. “People ask me where I find my students. It could be anywhere. A faculty member from Medicine Hat calls me to tell me about a kid we just have to recruit. I hear about Al Kettles’ son, Brent, who’s taking the debate world by storm. A former student of mine, who’s now an immigration lawyer, has a daughter coming to U of C. She’ll be on the team next year, but I knew her three years ago. You have to always keep your eyes open for talent, because you don’t want them going somewhere else.”

* On Goals: Once you get great people, what do you do with them? “Set goals, but make sure that they’re attainable, and not so big that people just give up,” says Schulz. “We start at the goal of winning a national championship and work back. What’s my finish line? A bunch of judges asking my students questions. So we think of what might happen and say: ‘Hey, we’ve never practised that.’ ”

* Feedback: Schulz makes sure his students get continuous feedback, even on the smallest things. “This carries over directly to the world of business,” he says. “As a salesperson, when you put the phone down, you should be able to say if that call was a win or a loss. And if you don’t know . . . figure it out.”

He describes a fast-growing company that gave one of their brightest people the job of answering the phone calls of certain key customers. “They recognized her voice, and that made those customers happy. That’s a little win. Most startups put their most junior person in touch with customers, which is a recipe for disaster.”

He says every person in a company should always know, and be able to explain, what’s a win or a loss as they’re doing their job. Schulz cites a survey showing that only 20 per cent of people in business could actually do this.

* On Responsibility: Schulz talks of Peter Connellan, legendary U of C Dinos football coach and CIS Coach of the Year in 1977 and 1985.

There were four seconds left in a game. Connellan gave the quarterback instructions for a risky play and told him not to tell anyone else. Calgary scored a touchdown and won the Vanier Cup. But, if it hadn’t worked, Connellan was ready to take all the blame.

Sometimes, when things are unusual, real leaders must take the onus off their “players” and carry the risk themselves.

Bob Schulz believes different sports reflect aspects of business life. “In football, everyone has an assigned responsibility. Do you want a lot of creativity? No. This maps into your production and accounting people.”

Baseball, on the other hand, involves considerable independence. “Can the left fielder help the right fielder catch the ball? Not really. This is more like your sales force.”

He sees basketball and hockey as sports where you have an assigned role, but are also highly interdependent. This would be the right model for, say, your research and development team. Sports such as figure skating and synchronized swimming mirror the aspect of business where judging is all-important. “Who is judging us in business?” he asks.

“Customers, bankers, stockholders, the government. It’s something that everyone needs to be aware of because everybody is being judged by somebody.”

Now, what about the sports that most of us still do, such as skiing, golf, and jogging? “These are paced sports,” says Schulz. “If you’re out skiing, you need to ride the line between falling and being slow and boring to your friends.”

Another lesson is to learn from your mistakes. Schulz believes that managers, like sport coaches, should be able to blow a whistle and ask each person “what are you supposed to be doing right now?”

His most important messages from sports to business are probably, “the better you are, the clearer you see what you can do to get better” and “have some fun!”

There’s no doubt Schulz is having fun – as did generations of business people who look back fondly on their time on “Dr. Bob’s team.”

(Tom Keenan is dean of the Faculty of Continuing Education at the U of C. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)