Winners: And How They Succeed

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Brailsford’s thinking on dealing with the energy sappers is certainly one that will chime with many school leaders. He cites the Donald Tosti model, a four quadrant matrix of High/Low Energy v Attitude with a clear, succinct and in some cases, brutal set of tactics for people assigned to each one of the four boxes. O.S.T. - Objective, Strategy, Tactics - the structure used to define your plan to success. The objective is likely to be fixed and very simple to define, strategy is what approach you'll take and is generally long term but must be communicated and brought up frequently to get everyone pulling in the same direction. Tactics on the other hand are the actions required to implement the strategy at any given moment in time, they are likely to change quite often and must take changing factors into account. There are some good quotes on Leadership: “A leader never stops learning, never stops teaching, and never stops looking to the future” (Clinton) though Campbell doesn’t really provide any real analysis of substance here. It is a kind of ‘spray and pray’ approach, hoping that something will land with the reader though there are better ideas following under Teamship (once you get past the indulgent reference to his beloved Burnley FC!) Use the mirror test. To find a weakness about oneself imagine yourself being the interviewer of you for a job. Tony Blair did the same when preparing for PMQs. His team would act as the Tory Opposition Leader. I suspect that Campbell has had to have a tough word with himself from time to time, has learned lessons from the success of others as means of personal survival, and that 'Winners' is in fact the fruit of that very extended, hard-won and probably rather painful harvest.

Superb book with loads of interesting insights although the three that I want to remember are these: Simple solution arrived at from consulting a top, external’ coach who knew nothing of the sport or the context and the rest, as they say is history with world cup glory a year later. Alastair Campbell knows all about winning. As Tony Blair’s chief spokesman and strategist he helped guide the Labour Party to victory in three successive general elections, and he’s fascinated by what it takes to win.Some people are winners simply because they’re scared of losing, and this fear propels them into greatness. However, winning isn’t just about having a motivation to win, winners are also comfortable with being outside of their comfort zone. It’s easy to do things you find easy, but you only really improve when you do things you find difficult, so putting yourself under pressure to get better is crucial to winning. But it is in the penultimate chapter around the British monarchy as the surprising but enduring winner that the really important messages emerge. While it is widely accepted that sports people need to study the behaviour of winners – and get psychological support – to become winners themselves, the worlds of politics and business haven’t really caught up. But things could be changing; since my book came out, I’ve been inundated with requests to speak at business colleges, including Regent’s University in London, where I’m holding an official launch event. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington anticipated the impact digital technology would have on newspapers and decided to create an online platform for good journalism that was free and available to all.

The book's strength comes from interviews with winners from a range of fields, from politics, sport and business, which works both ways. On the one hand, we should get a genuine insight from figures such as Jose Mourinho, Haile Gebrselassie and Sir Charles Dunstone. On the other hand, Anna Wintour and Richard Branson get to put out their brand unchallenged, with the former dismissing claims of how she got ahead in her career and the latter promoting Virgin almost as a service that just gives people what they want, rather than a business which exists to make a profit.The first part of the book is about The Holy Trinity. According to Alastair, The Holy Trinity is Objectives, Strategy and Tactics. The idea of having an objective, strategy and tactic is then applied to the people Alastair later analyses, even if at times it is contradictory. The first comes from the opening section on the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Strategy, Leadership and Teamship with a useful clarity on the differences between Objectives, Strategy and Tactics. Discipline is not the same as a regimentation. Discipline is not the same as measurement. Discipline is not the same as hierarchical obedience or adherence to bureaucratic rules. True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values performance standards and long-term aspiration's.