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Marc Coma. When the Dakar champion becomes CEO of KTM. Success stories

IESE Standout — Fri, 28 May 2021 13:57:33 +0000

Marc Coma, CEO of KTM AG in Spain, won the Dakar Rally five times on his motorcycle before making the leap to business management.

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Hardly anyone expected it. So when he said that he was retiring from top-level competition, it was like a bomb. He had achieved international legend status as a rider, he was at the peak of his career and his fans and sponsors didn’t even want to imagine a future without him.

It was 2015 and, in the two years prior to his surprising announcement, Marc Coma had won the Dakar and Qatar rallies twice in a row and had also been crowned rally champion in the Morocco Rally and in the world championship of Rally Cross-Country. He was a fierce, cunning and unstoppable rider. How was someone like this going to retire in their prime?

That question, which many were asking at the time, was a trick question. Coma wasn’t thinking of retirement. Quite to the contrary. What he needed was a change in his life and profession, to take on new challenges and compete in a different kind of way. A legendary rider was aspiring to become an extraordinary manager.

“The most difficult thing is managing the moment where you stop competing. It is the most complicated step an athlete has to take. Managing this stage in your sporting career well is a victory in itself, ” the rider admitted months later to Spanish news agency Agencia EFE.

But, in 2015, after a career full of successes, Coma was almost forty years old … If he wanted to become a manager, he had to get moving.

How to design a professional transformation strategy

Coma knew that he had to first analyze his main strengths, identify the sector where he could develop them, acquire some business experience and choose the right training program that would provide him with the knowledge and contacts he needed in a short period of time.

His strengths seemed clear: it takes exceptional leadership and temperance to prevail in competitions that force you to cross the desert. There the conditions are extreme and you have to make decisions extremely fast. In parallel, he had been managing his assets and his sports career for years – he was his own manager – and he knew what it meant to lead a project, since he had launched a team to help younger motorcyclists.

Shortly after stepping away from racing in 2015, Marc Coma assumed the sports management of the Dakar Rally as number two in the organization, below its director, the Frenchman Étienne Lavigne. There, as he himself acknowledged in numerous interviews, he immersed himself in the organizational and business side of the competition. He was there for almost three years thrilling years.

Coma reached his next goal in 2018. He wanted to stop, take time, get perspective and train as a manager. And he chose an Executive Education program at IESE to do so. He was looking for a different vision of business management and a network of contacts with whom he could grow professionally and personally, beyond motorcycling.

And beyond the program itself, he found himself immersed in an environment that gave him the opportunity to collaborate with other future senior executives, soak up different ideas, experiences and dreams and put his leadership to the test in a different way. “The feeling when you start learning again – he acknowledged – is fantastic”.

From the classroom to the company

True to his career, after going through IESE, Marc Coma continued to accomplish his objectives. In 2019 he joined the senior management of KTM Spain, the brilliant Austrian motorcycle firm that he knew all too well from his time as a rider and that has more than 100 dealerships in Spain.

There he made the most of the opportunity to learn for an entire year alongside César Rojo, the CEO who had placed the company on the map for major competitions, along with Husqvarna Motorcycles. The Spanish subsidiary of KTM had become one of the fastest growing in the group and, in addition, Rojo was another great reference in the sector: he had won nine world titles as team leader with Derbi and Bultaco.

After this period of adjustment, Coma was more than prepared. His great opportunity had come. In 2020, he rose to the top leadership of KTM in Spain and completed an impressive transition from the deserts of Dakar to the demanding offices of the Austrian multinational.

Marc Coma: 5 keys to reinvent yourself professionally

You don’t know how to run if you don’t know how to stop. Get it in your head.
Realistically identify your skills. And learn to develop them.
Find a great school. And great teachers.
Already know how to lead? Learn to collaborate.
In the desert or in the office, always believe in yourself.

The post Marc Coma. When the Dakar champion becomes CEO of KTM. Success stories appeared first on IESE Standout.

What are you: A boss or leader?

IESE Standout — Tue, 04 May 2021 10:55:45 +0000

No, they aren’t the same thing. Giving orders is one thing and leading is another. When it comes to giving orders, all you need is hierarchy, rank and a desire to achieve objectives. To lead, you need a whole lot more.

The productivity, satisfaction and loyalty of teams are firmly linked to a manager’s ability to inspire, motivate and transmit passion to their employees. Ultimately, great bosses are great leaders. And you can become one.

Leader vs. boss. 4 differences.

If you want your team to produce more, be happier, be more committed to the project and last longer in the company, you have to be more than just a boss. And the only way to achieve this is for you to learn to identify the four traits that distinguish giving orders from leading:

To be a leader is to know how to communicate

Leading is in large part mobilizing, influencing and guiding other professionals towards continuous improvement and achieving ambitious goals. That’s why leaders are extraordinary communicators. And here we’re not just talking about giving impressive speeches at important events. We’re talking about humility, empathy and close, daily contact.

Leadership is based on trust

A boss who goes to every single meeting and who is involved in absolutely everything going on is not a good leader. And not just because they don’t know how to delegate. That, of course, creates inefficiencies and friction. But the bigger problem is that their subordinates don’t feel that they’re trusted. And when you think someone doesn’t trust you, you lose interest, motivation, and even start to doubt your own ability.

A good leader empathizes

A leader sees and treats their team members as individuals, including and beyond their working capacity. Hence the importance of emotional intelligence and understanding personal difficulties that may temporarily reduce team performance. The most talented professionals are fully committed to projects because they remember how their bosses engaged with them and with their peers.

To lead is to be honest

Honesty is a core value for any leader. The best leaders lead with straightforwardness, with a clear strategic vision, recognizing their employees’ merits. Leaders fulfill their promises when it is in their hands to do so, and when they can’t, they explain why it’s impossible. They aren’t afraid to admit that there are factors beyond their control. This is one of the great signs of their humility.

Discover the Guide to the main types of leaders, which one are you?

The impact of good leadership

There are countless stories that exemplify what it means to be a leader and what impact they can have on their teams.

Raúl Bartolomé remembers how Jesús Luis Yu, his boss, urged him to attend an extremely important meeting on his own. Yu needed to get ahead on another project he was leading and he simply told Bartolomé: “You’re invaluable and you can manage on your own.” And he did.

Carlos López explains how Javier Ventura-Traveset never misses the opportunity to acknowledge every good decision he makes. And this has led them to become close and sincere with one another.

Ana Navas highlights the advice she receives from her boss, Ana López Ranz, to continue growing professionally every day. She knows what she expects of her and that she can count on her support, her understanding and her enthusiasm to achieve whatever needs to happen. And not just at work.

Because nothing starts and ends simply in the office. Perhaps that’s why Javier Pérez Blanco was so impressed that his boss, Miguel Ángel Leal, asked him to prioritize taking care of his father, who was seriously ill, over his obligations at the company.

Discover the 13 questions to find out if you are a good leader.

Miguel Ángel Leal, Ana López Ranz, Javier Ventura-Traveset, Jesús Luis Yu and many other professionals have trusted IESE to guide them in their growth as managers through the Programa de Alta Dirección de Empresas (PADE). The equivalent in English are the Advanced Management Program (AMP) and the Global CEO Program (GCP). In addition to these programs, IESE offers a wide range of executive programs for you to develop your full potential as a leader.

Read the article Keys to Being a Good Leader.

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Iván Tintoré. From a parachute jump to a general management course. Success stories

IESE Standout — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 10:39:43 +0000

Iván Tintoré, director at iContainers Solutions, enrolled in IESE’s General Management Program after losing a bet to his wife. Want to know what the bet was?

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Discover his story in this video:

Elena Fontelles, CEO at Happets.com, had it very clear: when challenges arise at work, you need a clear method for finding the best solution in record time. And that can be learned. What’s more, you have to learn it as soon as possible.

Elena had completed the IESE General Management Program (PDG) in 2017. And it had served her precisely to learn this approach to problem solving. The case method had given her a new strategic vision and she believed that the same path would also be very useful for her husband, Iván Tintoré. But she also knew that it wouldn’t be easy to convince him to do it.

Iván acknowledges that his working hours are extremely long and that he turns off his cell phone around eleven or twelve at night. All this, plus his family responsibilities barely leaves him time for another one of his passions: flying. Occasionally he also enjoys parachuting. Where was he going to find the time to go back to school?

But Elena hadn’t reached where she was professionally by giving up on the first try. So, she started a campaign to persuade her husband that the program was going to be as useful to him as it had been for her. Ivan, however, was hiding an ace up his sleeve to avoid pressure. Aware of his wife’s respect for heights, he told her: “I’ll do the PDG, if you parachute.”

Contradicting how well Iván believed he knew his wife, in less than a week they had already jumped out of a plane. Elena smiles whenever she remembers how everything happened: “They say that you always have to find new ways to surprise your partner, right?”

Both agree that there is a clear parallel between doing a management program and parachuting: they are both experiences that prepare you to know how to react to pressing challenges without being overwhelmed by confusion or fear.

Exactly one year after Elena finished her General Management Program (PDG) at IESE, Iván began his. The equivalent to this Spanish-imparted program for English speakers is the Advanced Management Program (AMP).The first day of classes, when a professor asked participants why they had decided to do it, he got up “with great humility”, smiled and said: “I’ve been forced to do it because I lost a bet to my wife.” And it didn’t take long for him to plunge into the experience with the same giddy illusion with which his wife had jumped out of that plane.

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