Kurt Matzler: How to achieve the impossible

What does it take to push yourself to the absolute limit and keep going for a cause bigger than yourself?

Imagine you’re cycling 3000 miles in 12 days on no more than two hours sleep a day. You feel exhausted, with nothing left to give, but important decisions need to be made to achieve your goal.

This was the reality for my guest in this episode, Kurt Matzler, one of the world’s most cited strategy professors and an elite ultra-endurance cyclist who has completed the Race Across America, often described as the toughest race in the world.

We dive into how Kurt blends his expertise in strategy with the demands of ultra-cycling: from meticulous planning and team building to the mental resilience needed to ride for 22 hours a day across deserts and mountain ranges. It’s a conversation that will inspire you to think bigger, plan smarter, and persist longer. And perhaps, to take on a challenge you once thought impossible.

You’ll hear about:

• Race Across America: the world’s longest bike race
• The role of purpose in endurance challenges
• Balancing training with work and family
• Building mental toughness before the race
• The power of delegating decisions to a team
• Lessons from setbacks and resilience
• Creating a high-performance support crew
• Why strategy means saying no
• Turning big goals into smaller milestones
• The impact Kurt wants to have on the world

More about Kurt

Kurt is Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. According to Brightline Initiative he is one of the best strategic thinkers in the world. He is academic director of the Executive MBA program at MCI in Innsbruck and partner of IMP, an international consulting firm, the winner of the hidden champions in consulting in the field of disruption in Germany.

Kurt is author of more than 300 academic papers and several books. He is co-author of the German edition of The Innovator’s Dilemma, one of the six most important management books overall (Economist). He is author of The High Performance Mindset (2023, among the 10 best business books of 2023, Forbes), co-author of Open Strategy (MIT Press, 2021, according to Strategy+Business magazine the best strategy book of 2021) and Digital Disruption (2016).

With more than 35,000 citations in Google Scholar and an H-Index of 82, Kurt belongs to the top 20 strategy researchers in Europe and to the top 50 in the world. He is included in the John Ioannidis Stanford University’s database of the world’s top 2% of scientists in all disciplines. He is a passionate cyclist and a solo finisher of the Race Across America 2022 and 2025, Race Around Austria, Northcape4000 and Ultracycling World Champion 2024 (Master class). With his participation in RAAM, his Rotary team raised more than $4,500,000 to help eradicate polio.

• Kurt’s profile
• Kurt’s book