Winners and how they succeed by Alastair Campbell

Winners and how they succeed by Alastair Campbell

Alastair Campbell was the press secretary under Tony Blair and was his official spokesman and director of communications from 1994 to 2003. Alastair Campbell has conducted in-depth interviews and uses his own experience in politics and sport to get to the heart of success. He examines how winners tick. He considers how they build great teams. He analyzes how these people deal with unexpected setbacks and new challenges. He judges what the very different worlds of politics, business, and sport can learn from one another. And he sets out a blueprint for winning that we can all follow to achieve our goals.

“Too many coaches teach technique when they should be teaching strategy - Martina Navratilova”

Strategy is God. That is why it has to come first in the holy trinity of strategy, leadership and teamship. You can have all the talent and ambitions you need, but without clear strategy, understood by everyone from the top of the organization to the bottom, the ambition will not be fulfilled. So, strategy first, last & always.

The simplest way to view strategy is to consider three letters, O for objective, S for strategy and T for tactics. Objective comes first because it’s the most important initial step, and to an extent it is also the easiest one to define. It is where you want to get to, what you want to achieve.

Having decided what your objective is, you need to put in place the strategy to achieve it. A business plan is not a strategy: Strategy is the one of the means of securing strategy. As John Brown says: “Strategy is the bit between your purpose and your business plan. People with a clear view of winning know that strategy is everything. You have to have a strategy and stick to it, and never lose the plot”,

Strategy is like putting together a gigantic puzzle, hard to assemble, but easy to understand once it’s done - Jose Torre.

If you don’t have a clear objective, you have no definition of winning. If you do not have a clear strategy, you have no chance of winning. And if all you have are tactics, you have no right to win - AC

Think in Ink - Marilyn Monroe

Strategy must be repeated endlessly - SIG rule

A company without a strategy is willing to try anything - Michael Porter

Even if people don’t agree with them, they respect leaders who stand up for what they believe - Simon Anholt.

Don’t overbrain things to the point of inaction - Jack Welch

Strategy is the place to have arguments, not avoid them. Strategy is a team game. Strategy is about action, not theory. The best strategies are consistent, but have flexibility to adapt.

• AC

Do what you love and love what you do and everything else is detail - Martina Navratilova.

I believe as well as leader can be a fantastic person who can influence other people’s lives in a positive way. Therefore he has a great responsibility - Arsene Wenger.

Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground - Theodore Roosevelt

You have got to be very comfortable with the brightest people alive being on your team - Jack Welch.

You have to know when to go over the top to get a reaction and when to be calm to get a reaction - Alex Ferguson

Individual commitment to a group effort - that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. - Vince Lombardi

We can achieve more together than we do alone - Labour’s new clause 4

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success - Henry Ford.

You need more than one leader in a team, but they can’t be all leaders - Ben Ainslie

Only the person who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat - Sign at Burnley FC

In a real team, the instinct for individual self-promotion is realized through the pursuit of the team goal - Sign at Burnley FC

Human beings subconsciously understand that alone I am nothing, but in a team I can achieve great thing - Arsene Wenger

Label a man a loser and he'll start acting like one - Peters and Waterman

The tactics are the model,the principles - Jose Mourinho

Strategy is needed more and more, because as the game has grown and developed, so has the technology that is used, it has all changed.... everybody knows everything about everybody - Jose Mourinho

The purpose of the match was to win. We won. That is all - Andre Schurrle

Ah yes, Jose always wants more. that’s how he is - Michael Emenalo

You have to keep trying to improve. Even if I win a title, I am never happy - Jose Mourinho

Even if you aren’t sure of yourself, pretend that you are, because it make it clearer for everyone else - Anna Wintour

I am always responding to other people’s talents. I am not the talent - Anna Wintour

It is important to have setbacks because that is the reality of life. Perfection doesn't exist - Anna Wintour

I have a much stronger understanding of the dynamics of a team because of my experience in sport - Edi Rama

Talent is limited in any sphere so it is important to get  the best of what talent is available - Edi Rama

In the end, to succeed you need your people to own the strategy - Edi Rama

You need fear and doubt to drive you on. Without it, you end up living in the past and being happy with what you achieved. A P McCoy

When I lost my decathlon World record, I took it like a man. I only cried for ten hours - Daley Thompson

Victory is the sweet that can rot the teeth - Oscar Tabarez

The interesting thing about coaching is that you have to trouble the comfortable and comfort the troubled - Ric Charlesworth

You cannot be a dickhead all week and play good on Sunday - Jack Gibson

Mental toughness is doing thing you don’t want to do - Craig Bellamy

I am in the zone when my positive thoughts are beating the negative and the conscious and subconscious are in harmony. Then I am operating by instinct and that is a wonderful thing - Sachin Tendulkar

The reason all really successful people have to be slightly mad is because people like that are not capable of living in the comfort zone - Billy Beane

You will not have mental physical strength. If the body has no more to give, there is next to nothing the mind can do about it - Brian O’Driscoll

The brian can’t really distinguish between a visualized and an actual experience. - Andy McCann

Ignore the negative comments. Ignore all the criticism - Wasim Akram

Tough times don’t last. Tough people do - Floyd Mayweather

If you believe you can do it, then everything else falls into place - Floyd Mayweather

Caution won’t win elections, boldness will - Tony Blair

Physically I’m a chicken, mentally I am bold - Jeff Bezos

I just do not believe that boldness is a vote loser if you are actually doing the right thing - Richard Branson

marginal gains means looking at all the things we do, and never assuming we couldn't do them better - Dave Brailsford

Celebrate it when it is successful; reward it when it is successful and learn from failure by not making the same mistake twice - Justin King

Opportunity is manufactured - Biz Stone

We zig when the world zags - Charles Dunstone

Innovation is never seeing yourself as a finished product - Arianna Huffington

The thing about conventional wisdoms is that they are almost always wrong - David Axelrod

We asked different questions and got interesting answers - Billy Beane

When you have done both intuition and data, I don’t believe you will ever go back to intuition - Billy Beane

To win, you need genuine innovation not imitation - Paddy Lowe

If I had one word to sum up our approach to innovation, it would be iteration - Paddy Lowe

This is a sport that likes problems because we are here to try to solve them; not walk away from them - Paddy Lowe

Nothing can become a brand if a product is not a great - Piyush Pandey

I had a very simple objective - survival - Bill Clinton

All of us in public life are too willing to let monetary press coverage define our reality - Bill Clinton

If it has been the only thing, maybe we would have got there quicker but combine it with them, twenty smaller things going wrong and you are in trouble - Willise Walsh

We reset targets out of failure - Willie Walsh

I have lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times. I have been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. - Michael Jordan

The winner is the loser who evaluates himself correctly - Colm O’Connell

I don’t see obstacles. I see objectives and I see opportunities to meet them - Ade Adepitan

That is where my competitiveness came from, seeing everything as a struggle for survival - Layne Beachley

We have the ‘never give up’ attitude; we like being in the thick of it; and we are not afraid to fail - Shane Warne

In England the average man feels that he is inferior, in America that he is a superior in Australia, he feels that he is an equal - Francis Adams

I would be in a straitjacket if I spent all my time thinking about stuff that I could regret 0 Shane Warne

She [the Queen] ticks a lot of the boxes on leadership. She is clearly good at strategy, instinctively. She definitely has one, and she is good at executing it - John Browne

The Queen just is. That is how she sees herself. Her year is a season and her day is a mini-season - Former member of the Queen's team

If you don’t train enough, you will lose. if you train well, you give yourself the chance to win. I feel the same about politics - Haile Gebrselassie

If you stand still, you get left behind - Jose Mourinho

Crisis management:

1. Stay focused or else lose the plot
2. Be honest with yourself
3. Be honest with others
4. Organize and change quickly
5. Give a crisis a human face
6. Cover all the bases

Book referred:

The human side of enterprise by Douglas McGregor