Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

by James Kerr

What is my job on the planet? What is it that needs doing, that I know something about, that probably won’t happen unless I take responsibility for it?’

Create the highest possible operating standards, develop the character of your players, develop the culture of your team and, as the title of Walsh’s book proclaims, The Score Takes Care of Itself. ‘Walsh knew,’ Stuart Lancaster, the current England rugby coach, told rugby writer Mark Reason, ‘that if you established a culture higher than that of your opposition, you would win. So rather than obsessing about the results, you focus on the team.’ ‘The challenge of every team is to build a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another,’ said Vince Lombardi. ‘Because the question is usually not how well each person performs, but how well they work together.’

Performance = Capability + Behaviour

Our values decide our character. Our character decides our value.

A winning organization is an environment of personal and professional development, in which each individual takes responsibility and shares ownership.

‘The emotional glue of any culture – religion, nation or team – is its sense of identity and purpose,’ says Owen Eastwood. What we identify with are the ‘things we recognize as important to ourselves – to our deepest values . . . this kind of meaning has the emotional power to shape behaviour’.

‘Reason leads to conclusions,’ Canadian neurologist Donald Calne says, ‘Emotion leads to action.’ If you want higher performance, begin with a higher purpose. Begin with asking, ‘Why?’

Seek the treasure you value most dearly; if you bow your head, let it be to a lofty mountain.

—— Language is pivotal to winning, language sets the mental and the physical frame for victory . . . A team of ‘followers’ is immediately on the back foot. A team of leaders steps up and finds a way to win.

In Drive, Daniel Pink lists the three factors that he believes creates motivation in a human being: mastery, autonomy and purpose. Purpose is the connection to the core identity of the team, as discussed in Chapter II; it creates a shared emotional connection between a group of people and is a stronger motivator than money, status or a new company car. Autonomy is the direct result of the dual leadership/mission command model discussed in Chapter IV; it comes from team members having control over their own destiny, the choice of how they respond to a given task and a sense of self-determination. Mastery is the subject of this chapter. The key questions are ‘How do leaders create an environment that delivers the opportunity for personal growth and professional development?’ ‘How do they enable mastery?’ And, ‘How do they make it happen every day?’

‘Races are won by a fraction of a second,’ wrote John Wooden. ‘National Championship games by a single point. That fraction of a second or a single point is the result of relevant details performed along the way.’

Woodward brought in Humphrey Walters, a consultant who ran a ‘learning and development’ company called MaST International. Together, they set out to effect wholesale culture change, restructuring the players’ experience ‘from driveway to driveway’. That is, from the moment the English players left home to play for their country to the moment they returned, everything would be considered, analysed and aligned with the team’s values, purpose and strategy.

It’s better to have a thousand enemies outside the tent than one inside the tent.

Successful leaders have high internal benchmarks. They set their expectations high and try to exceed them.

Muhammad Ali began calling himself the greatest before he had any real right. ‘It’s the repetition of affirmation that leads to belief,’ he says, ‘and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.’

On game day, the first words in McCaw’s book are always the same – ‘Start Again’ – a reminder that you have to prove yourself again, today. For McCaw, if it’s not written, it’s not real.

Embrace Expectations By embracing a fear of failure, we can lift our performance, using a healthy loss aversion to motivate us. Equally, it pays to hoist our sights if we aspire to be world class: to create for ourselves a narrative of extreme, even unrealistic ambition. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true, or reasonable, or possible; it only matters that we do it. In this way, we set our internal and team benchmarks to the ultimate. Inspiring leaders use bold, even unrealistic goals to lift their game and the power of storytelling to ‘sing their world into existence’. They tell great, vivid, epic stories of what is possible to themselves and their teams – and soon the world repeats the story back to them.

‘Pressure is expectation, scrutiny and consequence,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘Under pressure, your attention is either diverted or on track. If you’re diverted, you have a negative emotional response and unhelpful behaviour. That means you’re stuck. That means you’re overwhelmed.’ On the other hand, if your attention is on track you have situational awareness and you execute accurately. You are clear, you adapt and you overcome.

Maps and mantras allows us to, in Gilbert Enoka’s phrase, ‘meet pressure with pressure’; that is, rather than feeling it, we can apply it. By controlling our attention we control our performance, by controlling our performance we control the game.

First, Honesty ‘In the belly, not the back’ is how Gilbert Enoka describes it – the ability to deliver honest feedback. Owen Eastwood considers it a prerequisite of a peak performing environment: —— The key to strong peer-to-peer interaction is a high level of trust. This is trust in the sense of safe vulnerability. The leaders need to create an environment where individuals get to know each other as people and gather insight into their personal story and working style. This needs to be supported by the leader’s role-modelling behaviour around admission of mistakes and weaknesses and fears . . . This is essential for safe conflict and safe confrontation, where the most important interaction often occurs. ‘I think early on we didn’t deal with losing very well,’ says Anton Oliver. ‘It was very much point the finger, everyone very isolated. That changed a lot as the team became more collective, took the burden of loss equally, shared it.’ ‘I enjoy watching the game together as a team because everything’s out in the open,’ says Andrew Mehrtens. ‘Your missed tackles are out in the open, things you have done well are out in the open . . . Being able to say to another guy and just being matter of fact without it being a personal judgement, “You need to be doing this to help me out with my job.” Or, equally, “What can I do that helps you do your job?”’ If you are able to do that, Mehrtens says, ‘I think you’ve got a good team.’ High-performing teams promote a culture of honesty, a...

Unsurprisingly, there is a rigorous integrity within the All Blacks camp, an almost total accountability. ‘When deeds speak,’ says Wayne Smith, ‘words are nothing.’ If someone says they’ll do something, you can be sure they will do it. If they say they’ll be somewhere, they will be there. In fact, they work to Lombardi’s rule: if you’re not early for a meeting, you’re late. Many set their watches ten minutes fast. No one is late for the bus. No one wants to let anyone down. It gets the job done. If integrity is a central leadership tool and everyone in a team does exactly what they say they will do, clarity, certainty, productivity and momentum are the results.

There is a saying: ‘There are no crowds lining the extra mile.’ On the extra mile, we are on our own: just us and the road, just us and the blank sheet of paper, just us and the challenge we’ve set ourself. It’s the work we do behind closed doors that makes the difference out on the field of play, in whichever field we compete, whether we’re in a team, leading a business or just leading our life.

Neville Carter wanted to give his son Daniel something special for his eighth birthday, so waiting on the back lawn one morning was a set of full-size rugby posts, painted in the blue and white of Southbridge, the local rugby club. ‘He’d be out there for hours and hours,’ Neville told the New Zealand Herald. ‘Every day after school and in the weekends.’ He would even kick the ball over the house, breaking drainpipes, his father says, but never a window. Dan Carter became the highest points scorer in Test history. Champions do extra. Around the age of thirteen, brothers Ben and Owen Franks told their father, Ken, that they wanted to be All Blacks. Pretty much every New Zealand boy tells his father this at some point but Ken, a personal trainer, took them seriously. ‘It wasn’t a pushy parent thing,’ he says, ‘you have to have that drive, and they did. So first we set some goals . . . where you want to be in one year, in five years, but also where you want to be in six months, one month, one week, tomorrow.’ He says, ‘We got them into the gym – just technical stuff, you know, building the platform. But by the time they were eighteen they were lifting more than the All Blacks of that time.’ The brothers now prop the All Blacks scrum. ‘Everything they do is at intensity . . . It’s the business of Ben and Owen – it’s something they invest in. You don’t rest on your laurels; you’re always seeking that perfection.’ Within a couple of weeks of winning the World Cup Ben flew in a tr...

Psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote, ‘Wisdom consists of appreciating the preciousness and finiteness of our own existence, and therefore not squandering it.’ ‘We don’t get a chance to do that many things,’ said Steve Jobs, ‘and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.’ Stephen Covey encouraged us to begin at the end, imagining ourselves at our own funeral. Who would be there? What would they say about us once we’re gone? What would our life mean to them? Would they cry? This isn’t morbid, but the opposite. It means putting something at stake – our life. It means a sense of urgency and immediacy, and it is good to have a bit of urgency and immediacy in life. If we’re going to lead a life, if we’re going to lead anything, we should surely know where we are going, and why. Champions do extra. They find something that they are prepared to die for. Then they give their life to it.

Kaua e mate wheke, mate ururoa. Don’t die like an octopus, die like a hammerhead shark.

Companies that maintain their core values are those that stand alone, stand apart and stand for something.

‘Life is no brief candle to me,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, ‘It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.’

As leaders it means that we will truly lead, not just manage, and that others will spill blood for our team. People want to believe in something bigger than themselves; purpose propels and moves people, and moving people is the purpose of a leader.