Comparing corporate leaders to athletes is a well-known metaphor. Heck, I use it on my own website as a by line: “…the high-performance coach for corporate athletes”.
However, I’m always struck by the actual difference of approaches: a professional athlete (in rough numbers) trains 95% of their time and performs 5% of the time. Corporate leaders perform 95% of their time and if they are lucky, they get 5% of their time for training/practice. That would mean about two weeks each year a corporate leader spends in training/practice.
Despite this training versus performance discrepancy between athletes and corporate leaders, there are indeed a lot of useful practices that organisational leaders can learn from professional athletes, as this article shows:
turbocoach.co.nz 