What Judo Done Right Can Teach You About Business

Oddly, I found myself having the exact same discussion twice. The first time was with a group of people who had flown in for training and we were discussing effective vocational rehabilitation (the program that puts people with disabilities back to work).

I said,

As an employer, I don't care if you broke up with your boyfriend, your child got the chickenpox, you were up all night studying for exams. I just don't care. This business largely runs on fixed deadlines - the bid is due  February 24th, close of business, Eastern Standard Time -  and if you get it in one minute late, they won't accept it. So, if you don't show up to work when it's crunch time, someone has to cover for you. You do that three times without a DAMN good reason and you're fired. I can guarantee you that my idea of a damn good reason is probably a lot stricter than yours - it better involve somebody's death, or, at the very least, blood, bones sticking out or a trip to the emergency room. Your kid is sick? Guess what, I started this business with three kids and had a fourth one while I was building it up. (Not, as Justin Flores always contends, giving birth on the floor of my office nor on the judo mat while simultaneously strangling my opponent with the umbilical cord - he exaggerates.)

The point is this, a very valuable trait to employers is that you can get your shit together enough to show up every day. Find a babysitter for your kids, schedule your studying and take some Nyquil, whatever you need to do, but when the push is on - get your ass in here. As Dr. Jacob Flores often said about coaching,

I can't put in what God left out.

Meaning, he could teach skills but if the person did not have the innate talent or motivation, there was nothing he could do about that. The same is true about business. I can teach someone SAS or how to interpret a Kaplan-Meier curve. Not knowing how to do something is no big deal, you can learn. Being unreliable, though, is the kiss of death as far as making it in business with me is concerned. One of the main points I emphasized in training was developing "soft skills" in employees - showing up when expected, not being on Facebook for hours at work - that sort of thing.

The very next day, I was talking to Jim Pedro, Sr. and we got into a discussion on coaching. He brought up a couple of times when Ronda was injured - she landed on her head and thought she might have a concussion, another time, she had dislocated her elbow in a match, won the match, fought a few more rounds in the tournament and then practiced at a training camp for several days. At the time, she hated him and thought he was the meanest person on earth, but now she knows she can fight through anything. He said,

I tell these players - no one cares if you have cancer, no one cares if you're injured, if your mother died - if you lose, that is all anyone remembers. Athletes are always looking for an excuse to lose and you have to not give it to them. They need to know that there is never an excuse to lose. There is no excuse. You can fight through anything. Obviously, if they are going to aggravate that injury so much it is going to become career-ending, you don't have them to do it. In 90% of the cases, though, if it just hurts, they're sick, it's some personal problem - get out there and fight. I make them do it because I am trying to help them, whether they realize it or not. What do you think, on the day of the Olympics, the world title fight, it's going to be guaranteed everything is going great for you? So you make them fight even when they don't feel like it so that when that day comes, they know that no matter what the conditions they can fight and they can win. 

There is an assumption that judo, karate and other martial arts teach people discipline and that they develop all sorts of useful skills and attitudes that translate to other areas of life. That is only partially true. Martial arts (and sports in general) *can* develop those traits, but they often don't, because too often people take the same attitude in their sport that they later adopt in business - "It's too hard, you're just mean to make me do it."

So, you can learn a lot about success in business from judo, but that doesn't mean that everyone will.

Everybody has their own dream: The Sequel

"I have it all - great career, nice wife, huge house, lots of money. It's like I'm living the American dream - but it's somebody else's dream."


One of Ronda's teammates on the 2004 Olympic judo team, Dr. Rhadi Ferguson made the point that no one who has earned a spot on the Olympic team decides not to go, what people do is decide not to train for the Olympics. Karo Parisyan qualified for the 2004 Olympic Trials at 81 kg but went into the UFC instead. He said he never regretted it. Rick Hawn, who won the 2004 Olympic Trials at 81 kg, placed ninth in Athens and is now a fighter for Bellator. He also says he never regretted his decision.

Here is the continuation of the discussion Ronda and I had (with guest commentary from Henry Akins of Dynamix MMA) about whether people really choose the UFC (or anything) over the Olympics - and what do you do after the Olympics is over.

Everybody has their own dream

Since I am really busy with work and behind on The Book  (which now has a new title our editor at Black Belt liked --- Winning on the Ground )   I decided to rope Ronda and Henry into doing a video blog with me. (Thanks, guys!)

The topic was whether we agreed with Dr. Rhadi Ferguson, who believes that anyone who had an opportunity to go to the Olympics would take it or whether we believed Karo Parisyan who said he had never regretted not going to the Olympics.

 (Disclaimer: We've known both Rhadi and Karo for years so nothing here should be taken as unbiased - but, of course, if you've ever read or listened to anything on my blog, you know that nothing here is ever unbiased!)

I didn't show up here to look good losing

If you looked at me and Jim Pedro, Sr. as competitors, you might guess the big body-builder - looking guy with all the muscles (him) was the one who would really focus on using strength to win and the little midget-sized one (me) would be all about technique.

You'd be wrong. One of the people I really learned a lot from was Miguel Tudela, a teammate of mine at Los Angeles Tenri Dojo, a member of the 1980 Olympic team and national sambo champion. Miguel was ungodly strong. He was also a very, very intelligent person, with a degree in international business and fluent in Spanish and English. He won national championships in multiple sports and in multiple weight divisions from 189 and under to the open weight category.

Two really valuable lessons I learned from Miguel were:
1. Use your head. Literally. When attacking someone with a double-leg take down he would grab both legs but he would also smack into the opponent's chest with his head. He figured for a guy his weight the head was at least 15 pounds and having the force of a thrown bowling ball smacking into your chest could only help off-balance you and send you in the direction of the throw. Miguel would come off the mat with mat burn all over his face because he used his head as an extra appendage to hold you down and to block in matwork. Pretty soon, I, too, came of the mat looking like I had wiped out on my bike and hit the pavement with my face. The other thing I had in common with Miguel is that I won.


2. If you're stronger than your opponent, use that advantage.  Jim disagrees because he says that at some point you're going to run into someone stronger than you. (I'm not sure he really disagrees, because he later said that, sometimes even if you have better technique than someone, if they are a lot stronger than you, they'll beat you any way. I suspect he just argues with me for a hobby.) Here's what I learned from watching Miguel - both he and I were stronger than at least 95% of the people we fought. Technique may beat strength but people with technique AND strength have a better odds of winning than people with just technique. To win, I only needed to have technique as good as the people who were not as strong as me. I only needed to have BETTER technique than that 5% or so of the population who were stronger than me.


I saw this video of the finals of the Panamerican Games where I was fighting Natasha Hernandez. At the end, I locked her arm, rolled to the mat and when we were on the ground, I grabbed her legs and hauled her over into a pin.

Two things amused me by this. One is that the video had edited out the two times when I armbarred Natasha. (It was a double- elimination tournament, so she had tapped earlier in the day.) The second match, she did not tap and the match kept going. They did show her being taped. Almost 30 years ago, people being arm locked seemed a bit extreme for network television.

The second thing that amused me was a comment on the video, "Some of the worst judo I have ever seen". Natasha wasa gifted judo player. She moved up in weight and won the world championships the following year, at 61 kg. I had already beaten her once by ippon that day and I beat her by ippon again in the finals to win the gold medal.

I'm not sure how many international gold medals that commenter had won. I don't feel at all bad about winning because I am stronger than the other person, we're talking about a sporting event here, not the SATs. To some people the main point of a judo match is to look good, to throw with a nice, pretty uchi mata. To me, if I am representing my country in an athletic event, the goal is to win the event any way the rules allow.

As my friend, Steve Scott, often says to his athletes at major events,

"Guys, we didn't come all this way to look good losing."

For those of you who want an equation (all two of you), it would look like this:

y = a + b1X1 + b2X2

where Y = the log of the odds ratio of winning versus not winning
X1 = strength
X2 = technique

You're welcome.