Losing in order to win: An Olympic strategy for the business world? You've probably heard about the strategy employed by some of the Olympic badminton teams last week in London. And in the vein of all those 'What you can learn from the Kazakhstani Olympic Team', 'How training like Michael Phelps can improve your profits', and 'Train your sales team like Olympians' business articles that pop up online to accompany global events, I am adding my own contribution on the Olympic Badminton Strategy: Why losing to win sometimes just results in, well, losing . Why on earth is this relevant to you as a chief decision maker in a Canadian business, not a badminton player? Because any competitive strategy is generally applicable to any competitive activity, be it sport, business or child-rearing. And they say that a smart man learns from his mistakes, while a truly wise one learns from the mistakes of others. Many TEC members will echo this; that one of the powers of the TEC group is that you can learn from your peers' mistakes before making them yourself. So it is in the spirit of TEC that I tell you: There are business lessons to be learned from this experience! If you're not familiar with the Olympic Badminton Strategy, it goes like this: Under a new competition structure introduced for the 2012 games, competitors realized that by losing early-round matches they could avoid playing the stiffest competition -- such as the current world champions -- until