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Kriegel: "Don't Think Like A Ski Area!"

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March 31, 2006

This is the one bash that mountain resort execs and tour operators list in capital letters in their PDAs. Read: essential. To kick it off, Kriegel plans to deliver a shake-'em-up message.

"If you talk 'ski resort' you'll still look through a ski resort lens. You've got to throw away the lens. You have to challenge your assumptions. The game has changed, the population has changed, the needs have changed," he told IR a few days before heading to Squaw.

The 68-year-old pioneer in sports psychology has built a career on contrarian thinking and on shattering stale business myths. After all this is the guy who wrote a best-seller titled If It Ain't Broke...Break It.

He's the guy who, years ago, when ski instructors were still blabbing about angulation, exhorted learners to "ski like a gorilla." While others preached parallel turns, Kriegel and co-author Timothy Gallwey whispered "skiing is magic."

In prepping his "inner skiing" instructors, he told them they couldn't treat everyone the same. A favorite quote from football coach Mike Ditka: "Some guys you gotta kick their butt, some you have to kiss their butt, some you gotta wipe their butt; the key is knowing who's who."

Kriegel hasn't changed his tune. Instead, lately he's sung to a new audience that harbors old-school management attitudes-- whether at a winter resort or a supermarket chain. Old-school was "you ski at our market. Now," says Kriegel, "it's 'we make what you want to buy, when you want to buy.' It's customer-driven."

The problem begins with top-level owners and managers, he insists. "A lot of people who run ski areas are not business people, they're skiers," he said. "But big hospitals don't have health care people running them, they have business people running them. You have to understand marketing. You have to take off that ski hat."

How can a resort shake things up? Switch managers around and have them perform jobs they never did before.

"When people get used to a certain job and get good at it, they often stop learning. They go on automatic," Kriegel says. "When you come into a new job, you have fresh eyes. When you bring people who don't know the rules, they see things you don't "

More nuggets that he'll expand on at MTS:

"You need to think like a beginner." (He once had ski instructors get out on a tennis court and play with their nondominant hand, so they got a sense of what it felt like to be awkward at a new sport.)

And, "Listen down, not up. A manager spends his or her time behind a desk. But the people on the ski patrol, the lift ops, they're out there all the time hearing the complaints and the ideas." Kriegel says to companies "Don't have a suggestion box, have a complaint box" because "in the seed of every complaint is a great idea."

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