Last, but not least

The ride is over, the legs have recovered and the riders have returned to their daily lives across Europe. Lives that have been changed by the experience of cycling from Brussels to Monaco.

In this posting I wanted to reflect on the experiences of the 8 riders and summarise what they have learnt from the experience.

Talking to the riders, two themes emerged.

Seemingly impossible challenges can be overcome
Before the start of the ride, all of the riders were apprehensive about the daunting challenge ahead of them. Whilst they were all fit and experienced riders, none of them had ridden so far in such a short space of time. But by being focussed on the end goal and by breaking it into individual segments it was possible to achieve the impossible.

Teams achieve more than individuals
The team of 8 riders (plucked from Johnson Controls 130,000 employees) hadn’t met each other in person before the ride so there were essentially strangers. Albeit strangers with a common goal and a strong desire to achieve. Despite language and cultural barriers the riders soon formed and bonded as a team, both on and off the bikes. On the road the team worked hard to master the Belgian circle and were so effective that any one road with a 50 km speed limit they nearly set off a speed camera!


So the lesson being, you can achieve much more as team than you can ever do as an individual. Which brings us nicely back to the whole reason for doing the cycle ride in the first place (Don’t worry I’m not going to get on my soapbox and start preaching) but is does make a good analogy with climate change. If we are committed and we act together, only then we can begin to truly address global warming.

So until next time ...

The postings on this blog do not represent the positions, strategies or opinions of Johnson Controls