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Christoph Grainger-Herr

Calm Under Pressure

By InnerVoice

October 26^th, 2018

The Day that counts

When I was growing up there was still a National Service in the German Army. I joined a mountain battalion in Bavaria, and I found out that they had a professional skiing team. I did the testing and got accepted to the team, which meant 12 months of mountain biking, climbing, ski touring, biathlon, mountain running, and shooting. I was just active all the time. That was the lifestyle I fell in love with; being active every single day. I love that feeling — sleeping, eating and exercising a lot.

For me, that’s the perfect day.

Being on that team taught me discipline, and enabled me to get to know my body. You certainly find your limits in that kind of process. For me, it was helpful to know that if you are preparing for one day where it matters — whether it's business, whether it's sports — you can’t let that pressure crush you. You have to be able to pull yourself together when it counts because on the day nobody gives a damn about your expensive Garmin, or how good your five months of training have been, or how fast you were in the past. Something that I’ve learned is to not mess up on the day it counts.

I think the way I prepare for major meetings and presentations is quite similar to what I do before competitions. People prepare differently (some are chatty) but I’ve always needed a moment to myself. I consciously try to get the nerves out by allowing the moment of stress to happen.

You know it when you go through it — you feel your adrenaline, and your heartbeat goes up — but then you can calm down, take in the situation, and focus.

Photo by Remy Steiner Photography/Getty Images for IWC

Finding Focus

We lived in a mountainous part of Germany, so I did a bit of mountain biking when I was younger, around the time mountain biking started to become a big thing. I always liked road cycling, but I never gave it a go until a couple of years ago when we started doing rides with IWC. I’ve done some extremely memorable rides, like Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas, and in Sydney, Australia. That got me into cycling even more. After doing a lot of mountain running with heavy equipment, my knees are not in the best shape, so I appreciate that cycling is easier on your joints.

I used to do most of my creative thinking while running. When you're jogging you're not going competition speed, so that’s always helped me to be hugely creative. Whenever I got stuck in creative work, I went out for a run to get rid of that blockage. The process of exercising gives you a kick, and you can sit down afterwards and focus. I don’t find that as much with cycling because you’re focused on lots of different things, so it’s hard to zone out.

One Step at a time

I had minimal management experience when I started this job. I come from a different perspective. People usually get recruited for their management skills or their technical background, but I come from the retail design side of our business. I’m creative, which means that I solve problems in pragmatic ways. Often for the team, it’s about reassuring everybody that when we hit a roadblock, it’s going to be okay. Sometimes, people can only see the challenges, that’s just the way they think. To break that down, it can be as simple as someone saying,

“Let’s take this one step at a time. We might not be able to see where we’re going with this, but we’ll get there.”

“When things get tough I often think about my family, which gives me an immense source of strength. I always have someone to come home to. It’s great to have the job, it’s great to be travelling and doing all these projects, but if it all goes wrong, we can cuddle up as a family and everything will be fine. Especially when work gets stressful and nasty, that’s what I try to remember.”

EVerything falls into place

Psychologically, in mountain running, you have different stages. You have the beginning where you feel quite motivated and fresh, and you go for it. Then there’s the middle section, and it’s usually uphill, and you face endless zig zags, so you haven’t got a view of anything and you feel like the path ahead of you will go on forever. Then you get to the final section, where you emerge from the forest towards the summit, and you can see the glimmer of hope that the peak offers. It feels within reach again. Every time I go to Hong Kong, I run ‘The Peak’. It’s six, maybe seven minutes from the city centre into the jungle, and then it’s one of the steepest inclined tarmac roads I’ve seen anywhere in the world. Even though the whole climb only takes about 24 minutes, you go through those three stages in quick succession, in a heat that makes your head hot.

Most complex projects have those three same stages. You start with a certain amount of euphoria when you have a first draft, and then you hit problems — timing issues, budget issues, unforeseen challenges. It’s not much fun, but in the end, you have to have to reassure yourself that you will get through this. I think all creative people can probably relate to this. You have this constant fear that the tap will stop and you won’t have any more ideas. Then there’s this glorious moment where all of a sudden there’s a Eureka moment, and you’ve got it. For me, I always have breakthroughs in the shower. Everything falls into place, the big knot resolves itself, and you’ve got the final part of the project where all the nice things happen: the big openings, the events, the interviews.

Laureus Sport For Good

I love the idea Nelson Mandela shared at the first Laureus Sports Awards in Monaco: sport has the power to change the world. I believe this is fundamentally true and I’ve seen it many times in my life. We all know the powerful stories of people who came from difficult backgrounds and used sport as a way to structure their lives and give them focus and values. In the end, they’ve bettered themselves, and it helps to make a difference.

I think it’s a straightforward premise, but it’s powerful. Laureus allows us to support a lot of their different projects globally, and truly make an impact. In countries like Switzerland, we work with the blind community to help them with sport. In countries like China, we get teenagers into sport to ensure they have something else to focus on other than study. In Latin America, there are book and education projects. They’re all important in their context.

Photo by Lukas Schulze/Getty Images for IWC)

“When I was young, my mom and dad thought I had confidence issues, so they put me into judo classes, and sailing. Sailing is an incredibly disciplined sport. You learn that if you don’t play your part and do your job properly, you will capsize or sink.”

The future

One athletic goal I have with IWC is to add a winter sports competition to what we do in summer with TorTour. We haven’t quite figured out how to do it, but there are lots of different ski marathons around Switzerland that we could explore, and I’d like to build a team around that. When it comes to business goals, I think we truly have the potential to be a top 5 global luxury watch brand, and that’s what we need to be aiming for. We’re very strong in China, Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, and we have saturation in Europe. Sales of the Big Pilot have gone up nearly 90% in Australia, interestingly enough. If you go to the Bondi Icebergs, you see Big Pilots everywhere, and that wasn’t the case a year ago. The same in London. However, for all that, we’re still tiny in America, which is the biggest luxury market in the world.

We have an American founder, and the aviation or sailing themed products we have are well-suited to the US market. For the next 5 or 10 years, I want to develop the American market because I believe we can be great. Our brand is quite understated and not showy, so we have to position ourselves well and play our endorsements correctly.

As an example, a year and a half ago I met Bradley Cooper, and I felt that was an immediate click because he’s intelligent, very art-focused, and very down to earth. He’s a family man, and that is the character that describes the IWC brand. We’re a luxury brand, and we’re creating an emotional product that is entirely inessential. It’s an aesthetic thing; it has a function, yes, but what makes people fall in love with a product like this is that emotional coherence, that story, that dream. Filmmaking is very much the same, so people like Bradley embody that for us.

Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images for IWC

Footnotes

Words by Christoph Grainger-Herr, Cover Photo by Jack Terry and as attributed, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group, Presented by IWC Schaffhausen.

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FootNotes

Words by Christoph Grainger-Herr, Cover Photo by Jack Terry and as attributed, Edited by Cody Royle, Published by Travis McKenzie, Copyright NTSQ Sports Group, Presented by IWC Schaffhausen.

Colin O'Brady

Christoph Grainger-Herr

Calm Under Pressure

FootNotes

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Season 3