“How you cope and behave in moments of failure, is in my opinion the way you can see right into the soul of somebody.”
“There is no silver bullet. No simpler answer to come up with a concept of life generally. You read all these inspirational quotes on Instagram, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I like that one.’ And I’m going to take that on board but there are many nuances and there is much more than just a quote and there is just much more than black and white. Every situation is different. Every environment is different. You just need to have a constant reflection of what’s happening around you. You have to be mindful, you have to realize the dynamics within yourself. Dynamics within the group that is around yourself, and the group of individuals that are responsible for making you look good are the ones that provide performance to the team. That is very important.”
What I most appreciate about these two quotes is that Toto is open to the fact that life is messy and it’s during these messy and challenging moments when a persons’ true identity is revealed. When I think of Toto Wolff I think of a Phoenix, because of his rise from the ashes story to become one of the best of all time.
Toto Wolff is the CEO, Team Principal and co-owner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team. With Toto as Team Principal, the Mercedes Formula One team has achieved an unprecedented seven consecutive World Championship doubles to become the most successful team in F1 history and most successful sports team in the world based on consecutive world championships. Beyond Formula One, Toto is also a partner with Mercedes in the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team and continues to invest in start-up technology companies.
| “My experience with high performing individuals – that very last percentage of high performers – is that they either suffered trauma or humiliation or both. Because what would justify developing that above average drive and ambition.” |
Early Years
Born in Vienna 46 years ago to Polish and Austrian parents, you speak six languages, you now run a very successful motorsport team, how did you get from A to B? Where did it all start for you?
- Toto Wolff: “Well, all the parents that want their kids to be inspired should switch off now. Because, there was not a lot of inspiring stuff around my early childhood. I was born in Vienna, as you said, and was lucky enough to go to the French school. This is where I learned an additional language. It was a tough upbringing; my father was very ill when he was young, and he died when I was a young teenager. There wasn’t a lot of financial means and if you grow up in a city where you can see that in front of you, but you haven’t got it yourself, it is difficult. Therefore, I wouldn’t say it wasn’t the best childhood and in school it wasn’t great either. I just managed to get through every year by the tiniest of margins.”
Being Shaped by Trauma
- Toto was 8 when his father was diagnosed with brain cancer and it didn’t fully make sense. It was very difficult when he was an early teenager and he had to be there to support his father since his father was too ill to do it. Since he lost his father Toto took on the role of being responsible for the situation and looking after his mother and sister. “As long as I can remember, I only wanted to get out there and look after them. Be able to have my own money and not ever be dependent again on anybody else.”
- Toto says that the pain wasn’t only losing his father but he lost the family situation of security. Toto thinks that for a child or young adult having safety is the most important thing.
Accepting Your Past
- “I’m trying to develop as a human being. Certainly I’m working very hard on reducing childhood memories in real life today. I’m not any more than the boy that back in the day and I don’t need to carry so much baggage from the past into today’s lives. But it’s still there, it’s still who I am. I acknowledge it, it makes no sense to try to ignore it because it is part of who I am and that is sometimes difficult, but it’s also important to just accept that.”
Facing Difficulties
“Resilience is something that you need to remember all the time, because when you face a difficult moment, you tend to dive into it and the world is breaking down, but it’s not actually. It is an opportunity to grow and to develop and to become stronger, but is not a natural instinct. The natural instinct is to delve into it and be sorry for yourself.”
- Toto uses the analogy of skiing when thinking about difficult moments or facing anxiety.
- “It’s like anxiety, you need to go straight into it and face it. The more you try to avoid it, and this leaning back in skiing is like the avoidance on the back foot is what it says. It’s always only going to make it worse and leaning forward, going into things and facing the problem generally makes things much easier.”
The Stopwatch Never Lies
- Toto likes to benchmark himself with whatever he does and loves the competitive element of knowing whether you won or lost, succeeded or failed.
- “The stopwatch never lies. You can come up with lots of explanations why it went wrong or right, but in motor racing you are either too slow or fast enough.”
- This is why Toto likes sports because it’s a great environment for this type of feedback, you either win or lose.
- “In business you can get away with things, and in politics, you can have explanations, but in sports, the explanations are not worth anything if you haven’t won.”
When asked to look back and decode how he goes from having a dad who is suffering with a terminal illness to one of the most successful people in the history of Formula One, Toto pushes back which is telling in itself.
- “I cannot answer that question, I think to decode or trace back how that all happened is difficult for yourself, and it’s not something… I don’t see myself at that stage of my life as somebody that has been successful and that has achieved his targets, and that it’s kind of half time in an entrepreneurial life. I’m not a sportsman where your first career ends at 35. I’m just right there, and hopefully if I’m healthy, I can go another 30 years or 40 years. I wouldn’t like to summarize now and say what made you successful. Well, let’s have the conversation in 30 years.”
- If this quote doesn’t give you some insights into Toto and his mindset then I don’t know what will. Here he’s already won multiple championships in Formula One and achieved financial success beyond most people’s wildest dreams and he doesn’t even think he’s successful yet! Talk about drive!
Toto’s Journey in Racing
- Toto’s first taste of motorsport came at the age of 17, when he watched a friend compete at the Nürburgring in Germany. As well as a short single-seater racing career in his early 20s, Toto has competed successfully in national rallying, touring cars, and world championship GT racing. He is a class winner of the Nürburgring 24 Hours and Spa 6 Hours, and an overall winner at the Dubai 24 Hours.
- Toto decided to end his racing career after an experience on the track, “I had a Eureka moment when the driver in front was sliding the car on the front wheels on the exit, a natural reaction to compensate for oversteer. I realized my technical skills wouldn’t take me to the next level. That moment never left me.” Sometimes knowing when to quit since you’ve reached your peak is key in life.
- After dropping out of the Vienna University Economics and Business, Toto founded one of the earliest tech-focused venture capital firms in Europe making a string of high-profile deals in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Among other investments, Toto and company founder Hans-Werner Aufrecht co-owned HWA AG – the motorsport engineering expertise behind 10 DTM titles for Mercedes-Benz, over 450 Formula 3 race wins and one of the world’s most successful GT customer racing programmes. Toto divested his stake in HWA in 2015.
- By this time, Toto had also created a racing driver management company with former F1 world champion Mika Häkkinen, and in 2009 he entered Formula One by acquiring a stake in the Williams F1 Team. He became Executive Director of the team in 2012, when it took its last race victory to date at that year’s Spanish Grand Prix.
- Less than a year later, the board of Daimler AG asked Toto to analyse the performance of their Formula One works team. Toto subsequently acquired a 30% stake in the Brackley based team, alongside co-shareholder Niki Lauda. At the same time, he assumed the role of Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport, with overall responsibility for the company’s works motorsport programmes, which today include Formula 1 and Formula E.
Journey Into Entrepreneurship & Investing
- “In 1996, I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Koloman had taught me how to calculate margins as a matter of percentage on a selling price and within a year I started to analyze how much the owner was going to make. I saw that I could earn more as a shareholder in the first year than as an employee.”
- “I was so passionate about the investment business, I was like a sponge. The motivation was being the best we could be in the tech investment industry.”
- Toto learned the importance of due diligence when a paper supply company he set up with two partners looked at buying a company to recover their outstanding debt but decided against it.
- With this new knowledge Wolff traveled to the US when the internet was starting to takeoff. “In the U.S I’d read about these up and coming internet providers, search engines, and mobile portals that gave free SMS access and I wanted to see if they existed in Austria.” With this insight he returned to Vienna and tried to take a stake in every internet startup he could by providing consulting expertise for equity.
- “I picked up the phone and called these companies being run out of their apartments and told them I wanted to become a shareholder, find outside investors, and even list them on the Vienna Stock Exchange.” Less than two years later he listed Jorgan Software Production on the Stock Exchange.
- In 1998 with Rene Burger they launched the venture capital firm Marchfifteen that focused on technology, software and mobile communication.
Correctly Timing The dot.com Bubble Burst
- In 2000 Toto had a massive windfall after selling a business “with no revenue” to Deutsche Telekom for “a tremendous amount of money,” Wolff had another Eureka moment and started thinking something was wrong when you’re able to sell a business for hundreds of millions of dollars with no revenue. That month Toto and his CFO decided to divest all 9 of their other investments. Two months later the dot.com bubble had burst.
- Wolff see’s commonalities transpiring over the past couple years that remind him of the dot.com bubble. He was reading an interview about a billion dollar startup valuation. “The CFO was asked about revenue and profits and replied, ‘Profitability is not an important metrics at this stage of the company’s growth.’’
Reinventing Yourself
Do you see yourself as an entrepreneur or do you see yourself in a different way?
- “No, I see myself as an entrepreneur. That’s what I’ve done over 20 years but I’ve reinvented myself twice. I had an investment background and an investment firm. I was somehow lucky enough to be able to combine the two worlds by being an investor in a racing team. Combining the sporting side with the entrepreneurial, the financial side.”
- In 2013 Wolff combined his two passions of racing and entrepreneurship when he left his executive director position at Williams to become a managing partner at Mercedes, taking a 30% stake in the team.
How do you think about success?
- “For me it’s very easy. It’s about winning Formula One World Championships.”
What does it feel like when you’re at your best?
- “It doesn’t feel so good, actually…. Yes because I’m already thinking about the next challenge which as a life concept is not great because it doesn’t make you cherish today a lot because when it’s about time to celebrate, or time to acknowledge an achievement, the skepticism kicks in about the next challenge ahead.”
- Toto’s response to this question displays brilliantly the continual tension he has brewing inside of him that constantly pushes him to achieve more.
- This is something that shows up again and again in the elite elite elite high performers. I think of Nick Saban winning a National Championship and at the press conference talking about enjoying it tonight and then thinking about next year tomorrow.
- Toto’s response to this question displays brilliantly the continual tension he has brewing inside of him that constantly pushes him to achieve more.
Day 1 at Mercedes
- “The first day I walked in, I went, arrived at reception and I sat down in reception and it didn’t look like a Formula One team. There was an old Daily Mail on the table from the previous week and coffee cups with dry coffee and I couldn’t believe that this was the Mercedes Formula one team. And now you may say how dry coffee cups or an old daily mail impact on the performance of a Formula one team. But it shows an attitude. It shows attention to detail. And I think this is most important for a high tech team and all these soft factors that many will ignore because it’s not data, it’s not aerodynamics, it’s not vehicle dynamics, it doesn’t make a car faster, but all that is part of the values of the team. And if everybody runs in the same direction, everybody acknowledges that attention to detail is important, then eventually the wheel is going to gain some momentum. And so that was my first experience of Mercedes F1.”
Character Traits Toto Looks For
- “Integrity, loyalty, respect for the individual, attention to detail, fanatical obsession with what you do, purpose. I mean I could sit here for half an hour naming what I think is important. But this may vary from person to person, but I would say this is the core skeleton of the team.”
The Ego Can Be A Force
- “When you have cameras being pointed at you. There is the danger of ego running away with you. You need to realize that. You need to be able to come back into your hotel room in the evening after a race or game, look in the mirror and say I’ve been a little bit of a dick today. I got that one wrong. I think that you can channel ego. What is ego? Ego at the end is trying to be better… It’s about getting recognition for what you do. It’s about standing out. Which again, in my opinion, sources from trauma and humiliation because if you’re a pretty balanced guy why would you want to stand out? It’s about being happy, right? That is what it all comes down to but why would you want to stand out? The ones that succeed, in my opinion, are the ones that recognize the danger of the ego carrying you away. People lift off from the floor, they think they are better, they think they are more important. It is very short sighted.”
Ultimate Transparency
- “What I tried to implement very early on in the team was the ultimate transparency – we talk about things. Sometimes it’s the inconvenient truth – things you don’t want to hear. But over time, over the years, we got to know each other better, we started to trust each other and the inconvenient truth is something that can be very helpful in helping you to achieve your objectives.”
How do you establish trust with others?
- “Trust isn’t established by words. Clever sentences. Trust needs action. Trust happens or grows in those difficult moments when the other person realizes they can rely on you because you haven’t let them down although it would have been easy to let them down.”
How would you describe yourself as a leader?
- “It’s always a very slippery slope if you start to describe your own leadership style.”
- “I struggle to discuss leadership in that context because I believe that in successful organisations, everybody must take responsibility and be accountable for decisions. So, there’s never just one leader – but many. In our team, we established some values when I joined and they have been our core performance differentiator at Mercedes. It’s all about the right mindset. We all have the same attitude about being loyal and transparent in our actions. We always stick with the truth, empower each other, and have a no-blame culture. To be successful as an organisation, you must live and breathe these values every single day, rather than just writing them on a chart on the wall.”
Which skills are required for being a leader?
- “Empathy. Interest in the people you manage. An understanding of their individual strengths and weaknesses. And an understanding of empowerment and standing by those values.”
Relationships Are the Key to Great Leadership
- “We’re always speaking about the companies or teams but at the end of the day, it’s all about the people.”
- Toto see’s relationships as the most important element of leadership. When you interact with not only your direct reports but everyone within the organization they get an understanding of how much you care about them. This can’t be faked.
- He wants to really understand his people and uncover what worries them, what incentivizes them, what motivates them. Once he has that he can provide a framework for each and everyone.
- Most people spend time focusing on their own lives and trying to see how they can impact the organization. They try to uncover the impact they want to have, how they should organize their time, what incentives they are drawn to. Toto thinks we need to put the same amount of effort and time into analyzing the needs of the people we work with. If you can find alignment between your objectives in life and those you work with, that is when you’re in a strong position.
- “I can’t design an aerodynamic surface but I know a lot about the person who can and they feel that I care and in a way they are my most important…. Customer. I have a ‘Customer Theory’, that customers are people that are important in your life. Everything
that I communicate or that I plan strategically is about the people in the organization.”
Developing Patients
- “I think when you would ask the people that work with me, they would say I’m impatient because I want things to change now. I’m exercising pressure to the point where I think it’s helpful and not beyond. I get on with things if I want to solve a problem, I pick up the phone you know, there’s no postponement of any action. But on the other side life has proven to me that sometimes the things that you want to achieve also need patience and I enjoy that. To look for an outcome or in my interaction with people or what I wanted to achieve for this team and it happens, but it happens over time and it’s almost a self discipline being able to wait.”
Focus on The Process
- “We have this concept of ‘The day we fail is the day that our competitors will regret”, because you come away from a race saying, ‘why the hell did we win?’ Everybody is in a mood of satisfaction when you win. Of course you analyze and you look at things, but you’ve done a good job. The car is good. Everybody has worked. But when you lose, you go away and say, ‘why the heck did we lose? What went wrong and you analyze in much more depth. And because our hamster will run so fast. There’s one race after the other. You need to be pretty quick with that. So our meetings on monday, the debrief is pretty straightforward and what I tried to put in many years ago was that the leaders need to be able to come out with what they did wrong. And only then the organization, we learned that it’s actually true that we are never blaming the person, but the process where we need to optimize. And it’s still something that I just had a situation today where I realized that somebody didn’t speak up and I encouraged him to speak up. I actually told the person, I see it as you owe it to the company to speak up because if you don’t, you damage us in our performance.”
How much of your success over the last seven years has been down to people versus the process?
- “100% people! Because people make processes. When you speak about the team or the company, you need to speak about all the people that work in the team. Everybody is adding their part to the team’s success. When you have 1,000 people meditating, you will feel the aura of the place and there is some scientific studies about that. So I strongly believe that everybody, everybody pulls in the same direction to the best of their abilities, with important character traits and values. This will trigger positive force. Now this sounds like uh you know, Obi-wan Kenobi speaking about ‘force’. Meditating doesn’t make the car faster. That is down to data, that is down to process solid engineering and stability, but all that is made by people. And that’s what I find fascinating.”
It Starts With One Person Raising The Bar
- Toto believes that we can increase each other’s level and ability but it starts with someone coming in and raising the bar just a little. When someone does this the others around them feel the effects and begin to raise their own bar. This becomes infectious.
- This takes guts and it reminds me of Derek Sivers video on How To Start a Movement
We have no allowance for politics inside the team. “No place for dickheads”, the All Blacks mentality.
Pressure Reveals
- “How you cope and how you behave in moments of failure is in my opinion, you can see right into the soul of somebody.”
- Toto says in these pressure packed situations when you make a mistake in public all your “shields” drop away.
- “You need to be able to recognize your own mistakes and your own failures. Only that is going to make it possible for you to assess them and avoid them in the future and grow. This is something which we are really working hard within the team. Is to have the ability of pointing at the problem, blaming a decision or blaming a situation, rather than blaming a single individual.”
Hiring
- Are there any key questions you ask in your recruiting process?
- “There is no killer question. I look in the eyes and if somebody is authentic and humble enough while being ambitious, you feel that. You sense if the person is the missing link for that position.”
- Have you made mistakes where your instincts led you astray and you cared too much about their credentials?
- “Yeah, of course. Because I’m impressed by academic record also and we had the situation that we only hired from the best universities. You need to have an engineering degree, aerodynamics, aeronautics from Cambridge, Oxford, Cranfield, whatever. And I said, ‘well, are we not missing out on students that maybe didn’t have the possibility to study at top universities? Are we not missing out on people that have a passion for the sport that understand racing?’ And the answer was no, no, no. We just need to have the best every year. And this is an engineering sport. And I said, ‘What about somebody who hasn’t got an academic degree at all?’ Well, impossible. We wouldn’t even consider him and probably wouldn’t even write him a response letter. I said, ‘Okay, that’s interesting. So you wouldn’t have ever employed such a person, well then he would have never employed me.’ No, no, that’s different. That’s different because you found us. So today, why we are really pushing hard for diversity in the team is that we are looking for diversity and opinion and we are looking at universities that are not in the most privileged areas. We are looking at schools that are in a similar environment. We’re working with the library trust and the mulberry schools to allow children that would never have access to a STEM education or job in Formula 1 to inspire them. And that is something that I take great pride in doing.”
| What are the 3 non-negotiables that people around you must buy into? Never lie Don’t bullshit meBe authentic with all your weaknesses and strengths because even your weaknesses can contribute |
See It, Say It, Fix It
- Mercedes Petronas has a philosophy and motto that is “See it, say it, fix it.” and they try to make everybody in the company live it day in and day out.
- This empowers everyone in the organization to speak up and Toto feels that if you don’t speak up you’re harming the organization so you have a moral obligation to say something.
- In order for people to speak up you need to create the environment for this to happen and not only put it on a powerpoint or on the wall. The empowerment part comes from creating a safe environment where people are not afraid of losing their jobs, they are not afraid of taking risks. Toto views taking risks as essential because innovation can only happen when you take risks.
- “We have worked so hard over all these years to achieve a situation where we have a collective organization that is able to bring their inputs and their innovation to the table through the hierarchies. The head of department must not be worried if one of the workers below him presents something to a manager high up.”
- “It starts with the leaders. I remember when I first joined the team in 2013. We have this big debriefing on Monday morning. It’s the top 50 managers that come together after a race to debrief on the race weekend and it starts with myself and it ends with myself. How I started my first ever debriefing was to say what I didn’t do well that weekend and that I interfered in the strategy call at not the opportune time during the race and that I had a discussion on future regulations with the governing body and I don’t think I got it right. And I saw the surprise of the people in their eyes that it started that way but overtime it became really ingrained in the organization and when you listen to a debrief today after a weekend where we finished first and second you would think that this is Williams debriefing today after a weekend where we finished in tenth place. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way it’s just a culture that is always skeptical. We always believe we’re just not good enough. We have to stay on our toes in order to maintain that success and that starts with going where it hurts but they say that if you don’t go there then you’re not going to improve as an organization and it needs to start with all of those leading the organization.”
How do you manage the emotional investment in the team and remain balanced?
- “I found out that as someone that is more in the spotlight, in front of the camera representing fantastic brands such as Mercedes and Petronas, I need to be authentic. I have also seen that when people that have more visible roles you tend to think they’re happy to have everything in their lives, good relationships, money and success. The truth is that is not a universal rule. I myself before I joined Formula 1 had a bit of a midlife crisis. I didn’t know whether I should stay in finance or whether I should do something else and I found myself at the Monaco Grand Prix by sheer coincidence and for me everybody who was there working in the teams was just living the perfect life. So fast forward 20 years and I find myself in the same situation and I still struggle in a way. At times we just need to understand that we’re all having bad days or bad weeks or bad months where we need to spend time with ourselves and comprehend what makes us happy. I think reflection helps you to understand how you want to structure your life. So to come back to your question like many other people I struggle with mental health issues and I have a great team… It’s more that I acknowledge that all the best people that I have worked with have downtime and if they have a great group around them, the group will carry the ball. For me that was last year. Covid came and I didn’t really know whether I wanted to continue in the sport, whether I was a one-trick pony or finance was what I actually wanted to come back to. For months I couldn’t find an answer to my questions and obviously then you’re not your best self. So in order to protect your organization, in order to create the best possible framework you need to look after yourself. If I’m not in a good place I can’t, and this is something that my technical director used when I said I’m just not the best me and I will come back in a few days. He said ‘ take all the time because when you come back you need to sprinkle your magic dust, if you don’t feel like you can at the moment, that’s okay we will carry the ball’, and that is something that I found really assuring and showed me that the organization that we have all been a part of is really strong. If you need to put yourself out for a moment, somebody else is doing to carry the ball.”
How do you switch off and recharge?
- Toto says staring at a screen sucks his energy and is not good for him. He loves long airplane flights because he can sit there for 10+ hours just staring at the ceiling thinking. He enjoys reading finance books that give him a different perspective. He enjoys spending time with intelligent people who he can learn and develop from. Toto thinks developing a new understanding from someone is much more interesting than staring at someone’s Instagram post. “I’m not interested in looking at somebody else’s life.”
Free Time to Think
- “I’ve had a 20 hour journey back from Australia. I haven’t listened to one single song, I haven’t watched one single movie. I haven’t read one single page in a book. I’ve just been there with myself and wrote down notes… I think it’s a competitive advantage. If you look at all the distractions that we’re having everyday today, you can see it in an airport lounge, that people that have a minute of peace, they grab their phone, they look at social media, they flip through some pictures, rather than just thinking. I’ve been saying that to my teenage kids, don’t distract yourself with something that doesn’t bring you anything. Of course looking at a couple of Instagram pictures of your friends is good fun but we lack the time for reflection. I encourage everybody on the campus here to take a walk. You don’t see that in the camera but take a walk out there rather than surf the internet. I put my feet on the table and I look outside and people come in and say, “Do you have a minute?” And I say, ‘No, I’m busy.’ With all these things flying at us every day, with all these channels that distract us, that will be a crucial competitive edge in the future. I think being able to activate that thing rather than stimulating it with external channels.”
| “I enjoy listening and observing, and I see myself on a trip of permanent development.” |
How do you recognize your own shortcomings?
- “I think it is more listening to myself. I’m very skeptical about my own achievements and generally very skeptical of whether what we do is good enough, but then I have great confidence in the people within the team. I know that they can fix it. For myself, I think it is important to surround yourself with individuals that you trust. That you provide them with a safe environment so they can speak up. It’s not necessary just in doing a 360 and hope that some of your juniors or some of your reports are going to point into your deficits, but it’s really that people are able to come into your office or your wife speaking to you in the evening and saying you’ve been an idiot here, or you’ve done that wrong, you have been carried away with your ego.”
- Toto believes it’s critical to have someone at home such as your spouse to challenge you.
- “I see that with guys that have failed or that have been carried away. Is that they haven’t had that environment at home. They have somebody that is looking up to them and that is somebody’s wife or partner that’s going to say how great they are and that it wasn’t their mistake, it was somebody else’s fault. That is absolutely dangerous ground. You need to have challenge at home, you need to have a sparring partner at home that is able to point at your own deficits.”
- “I try generally to have people around me that tell me no. My wife is clearly my best sparring partner because we spend a lot of time with each other and she tells me no all the time, but she does it in a very clever way. She fights the battles that are necessary, and she lets me win the ones that are not important. In the office generally in the team environment, it is very difficult to cope with a no. Very difficult to be criticized because clearly, taking on board that you weren’t good enough is hard stuff to swallow. You need to be able to take it on board and whether your instant reaction is that you’re going to push back and not accept it, doesn’t really matter as long as you provide an environment for your people to tell you, to continue to tell you.”
Target Setting
- “I am a believer of target setting because it reminds you every single day of what you actually want to achieve. It takes away all the clutter, all the noise.”
- He sets guard rails to control both the long term and short term. Toto does this by operationalizing the setting of metrics, checkpoints and outside stakeholders to hold him and the team accountable. This allows the team to experiment, learn and adapt quickly.
- “You need to wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and clear objectives, and that keeps you going.”
- “You need to always benchmark yourself against the next best. If you achieve a certain target, look at the one who’s more successful.”
- “If you set the right targets, it is targets that are achievable because you shouldn’t set targets that aren’t achievable, because you will make yourself frustrated. You need to set them high and you need to develop a blueprint of your target. I think if you can really imagine how it feels to achieve that target, you will initiate all the right steps in order to achieve the target.”
- This quote shows how Toto uses visualization to think about the outcomes he wants to experience in life. By saying “imagine how it feels to achieve that target”, Toto is conjuring up all his physical senses to more deeply feel the outcome he wants. This is similar to the practice by Josh Waitzkin.
Externalizing Goals
- “I have realized that whatever I could imagine, it had a pretty good chance of actually happening. We try to embrace that within the team, we set those targets. We take all the senior leaders on an offsite at the beginning of the year and we set the targets for Mercedes and the targets for the racing team and then we set individual targets… Each person writes them down. All those targets are laminated on a little piece of paper and everybody gets it in his briefcase. It’s interesting. I’m looking for my phone or my iPhone on a long haul flight and then suddenly I find this piece of paper and I look at it. I remind myself of the targets. I said whether you look at it or not the sheer ritual of writing them down, of finding out for yourself what’s important for these next 12 months or longer is stored somewhere. That is quite forceful. How does that function? I don’t know, but it does.”
Set Both Business & Personal Goals
- Toto sets goals for both business and personal and compiles them on the same piece of paper.
- “My personal goals are the ones that are much more important. Being a good father, or being a good husband has a much greater importance than winning a Formula One World Championship. Nevertheless, they are on the same page on the same list.”
What’s the best part of your job?
- “The best part is to be able to judge whether you have done a good enough job or not. If you have been beaten, if your lap time is too slow and you haven’t won the race or haven’t won a Championship, you were not good enough. It’s that brutal honesty of the lap time.”
What do you expect from the people you work with?
- “Being able to adapt to change. Because like Darwin’s principle, it’s not about the survival of the strongest but of the most adaptable. Suddenly, the environment changes, we must cope with a crisis and curve balls are being thrown at us. So, you must be able to think out of the box – and adapt. We learn the most on our worst days. If you’re able to analyse a problem without blaming the person but instead blaming the problem, your organisation will grow even from painful experiences.”
Great Teams Rely on Each Other
- “We know we can rely on each other, we won’t let each other down. We can have pretty tough arguments with each other or discussions with each other. Sometimes we fall out but we never want to divorce, because we are the best drivers among the best cars. Best driver and the best car needs the best driver. So we’re on this journey we are almost bound together with duct tape in a way. There is this Navy SEAL training where I think they call it Hell Week where they put you together with your buddy into the ocean. And the only way of surviving is using each other’s body heat to cope with the situation. And I think that is what we do not in the same sense, we’re not swimming in an ocean bound together, but we need a reliance on each other in order to to compete.”
Dealing With Interteam Conflict
- When conflict arises such as the conflict between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg between the 2014-2016 F1 seasons Toto says he takes a step back and thinks through the following questions rather than going straight into conflict mode.
- Why is this person’s opinion different from mine?
- What viewpoint are they coming from?
- What is their objective in this conversation?
- How is it different from mine?
- By doing this reflection you can analyze and understand the other person’s position and then you can hope to reach a solution which suits both parties best rather than fight. Adopting this approach has also helped in other areas of business, such as contract negotiation and getting a better understanding when two parties within your business are not getting on.
Working With & Learning from Difficult People
- “You have to recognize that these are the best ones (drivers) are the edgiest ones in terms of personalities, behaviors and this is not only in a sporting environment, but it’s somehow compounded for sports people. I’ve seen a few exceptional people in business life, chief executive officers or engineers, bankers that have been really mind blowing. None of them have been easy characters. All of them had complexities to the personality that you have to understand in order to deal with them. But with sports people are different because you’re only as good as your last race. The pressure is enormous. Nobody else can really help you in that moment. And in a way it’s traumatised kids that have been pressured by the dreams of their parents into a go cart at the age of six. Letting them drive out there alone and for sure you need to overcome these fears and all your life. You are alone in this car, all throughout your sports career and suddenly you’re being embedded in a big team and everybody tells you you know, you have to be a team player and how can these people be team players at the beginning? They have never been told to be team players. They had to rely on themselves. And I think a great achievement of our group and Lewis and also Viteri with a certain degree back in the day was that they really understood that in order for them to perform well, they needed the support of the group. And I think that is a big difference with the Mercedes F1 team, but I really like to work with difficult people and sports people because there’s a lot to learn from them and there is a reason why they are the best in their area. It’s just so interesting.”
Do you think it’s necessary to push yourself to the edge to be a high performer?
- “Absolutely, absolutely. I think why can somebody push himself or herself to these edges to have failure and cope with it and stand up and become stronger. Drive a car on the edge, risking your life because unfortunately today you don’t see this through the cameras anymore. But it’s really risking your life. And go get up in the morning and train all day, push yourself to the limits. Have the discipline in your daily activities in nutrition and training and sleeping, finding out how you function best in the constant pressure against being measured with your peers. You know that is a real, real skill and it’s a combination of nature and nurture but there are only a handful of boats and that is the reason.”
Failure + Reflection = Progress
- Toto believes that “Success is a lousy teacher and it’s important to reflect on why failures happen.” Toto has a framework that is “Failure + Reflection = Progress” which is similar to Ray Dalio’s “Pain + Reflection = Progress”.
Be Brutally Honest With Yourself
- “In my early business life there was a motto we had in our investment company and that was that for every startup that we looked at, we wanted to tell them the brutal truth because it makes no sense to mislead anybody and it makes no sense to mislead yourself. So I’m brutally honest with myself every day. In the evening, looking in the mirror, washing my face, brushing my teeth, I judge myself and I say, ‘How was I today? Where do you think there is room for improvement?’ And I would look at the positives in the same way when I look at the negatives.”
- Toto has to be careful when communicating with others because being negative can be very harmful and always seeing things from a glass half empty perspective can be draining to those he works with unless they also have the constant improvement mindset. The culture he’s created at Mercedes tends to develop and self-select for only people with this mindset.
| “It has probably been part of my upbringing, always expect the worst. There are no positive surprises, there’s only the risk of failure and that is something that has followed me all of my life.” |
What is failure for you?
- “I think that little failures happen throughout your whole life but my concept is that at the end, when I sum it all up, it should be a success. It’s not about trying to grab every bit of success that’s on your way, it’s about long term success. It’s about adding up all the dots. You have a constant, long term, upward slope with all the little setbacks that are necessary. It’s not a constant graph that’s showing upwards but the long term trend should be upwards.Therefore it is easier to cope with failures in between because they are part of the upward trend.”
How important is legacy to you?
- “Zero importance. I live in the, in the now. I try and I try to be better tomorrow than today. Nobody’s interested in anybody else’s legacy.”
What advice would you give to a teenage Toto?
- “That’s a difficult one because I made all the mistakes that you could probably make and every single one was important. And if you open up your first chapter of your professional life. You shouldn’t look at somebody who is in his 30th chapter because you need the in between to learn. If there was one piece of advice that I would give, it would be to find out where your skill is and what you enjoy doing. And even if it’s not clear what that could be in terms of a job, eventually it will find you.”
| “Trying to master yourself and your life is the ultimate challenge.” |