Last week the Giro d’Italia went down to the wire. 3 weeks, 20 stages, 2163 miles in 85h22m07s. Two riders tied with the same time going into the final stage. A first in Grand Tour history.
The final stage was a 10-mile Time Trial, the ultimate race of truth.
Local Hackney boy Tao Geoghegan Hart took the unlikely win by 39 seconds. “Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine this would be possible when we started out in Sicily almost a month ago,” he said. “All my career I’ve dreamt of trying to be top 10, top 5.
Tao won for Team INEOS ‘Grenadiers’ (formerly Team SKY). The team famous for their ‘Marginal Gains’ philosophy.
The idea is to find tiny gains in undiscovered areas that compounds.
I’d been thinking about how the Marginal Gains philosophy applies to value creation.
How easy or difficult is for someone to disrupt your business using technology? How much would disruption impact you? How can you make it even more difficult?
One way of doing this is a big transformation programme like a move to the Cloud.
The other is through lots of small changes:
- Technical points of failure that need fixing
- Software licences that have expired
- Technology that is being phased out by vendors
- Technical bottlenecks that stop you being able to scale
These small changes could create more value than a cloud migration.
What both of those approaches give you is the ability to make change, easier.
There is a huge amount of value in reducing the friction of change. Why wouldn’t you then make the small changes and do the transformation at the same time?
Marginal Gains could result in step changes to value creation for Private Equity, when done thoughtfully.
Seems simple enough!
Thomas
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P.S. Tao is the 5th Britain to win a grand tour. Our first winner used to be Bradley Wiggins 2012 Tour de France but after Juan José Cobo’s 2011 disqualification Vuelta Espana Chris Froome now takes that honour, retrospectively. The other British winners were Geraint Thomas and Simon Yates.
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