Winners: And How They Succeed

Product Information

To become a winner, you have to reach and cross this threshold of pain. In the summer of 2000, Michael Phelps was ready to compete in the Olympics. He felt ready in every way. Physically, mentally, emotionally.He even got on the team, butonly started in the 200 m butterfly category, where he ended up fifth. He had no control over themedia or the reactions of the public when his affair was publicized, but he could keep doing his job, for example by keeping up conversations with Tony Blair about the Russian nuclear arm situation. Clinton still ended up getting impeached at the very end, buthe still managed the situation as best as he could. What is it, he muses that enabled a deeply conservative institution to not only survive its ‘annus horribilis’ but go still further to reinvent itself and win the hearts and minds of generations globally?

Recently, I’ve been sending out a motivational video with the Four Minute Books newsletter every Saturday. One of my favorites has been one that encourages you to do what is hard. It makes a very simple distinction between those, who are successful in life, and those, who aren’t: winners win and losers lose. The book is split into sections, with each section starting off discussing different parts of the skills Alastair sees as essential to any sort of success, which then proceeds into a case study of an individual who Campbell feels shows the perfect example of the winning trait in action. For example, the first section of the book focuses on the holy grail of “Objective, Strategy, Tactics”, followed by chapters on how effective leadership and teamship is essential to carrying out a winning OST blueprint. After this, characters from the world of business, sport, and politics are given as examples to study, from Ana Wintour of Vogue fame to Jose Mourinho, possibly the most infamous non-player figure in the world of professional football right now. Another major focus of Part 1 of the book is around leadership and teamship. In sport, politics and business, great leadership is vital. There are lots of people who dream of being a leader, but I loved the fact, Alastair mentioned the downside of leadership – “Big decisions are likely to be controversial. All leaders go through periods of being popular and unpopular.” Whilst being a leader is glamourised the fact is that leaders have to make unpopular decisions and it can be very lonely at the top. Winners inspire others; “whatever your job title, whatever your role, you are here to make Tony Blair Prime Minister”.

Retailers:

Winning is about not being satisfied with anything less than winning. A winner is happy under pressure and doesn’t fall into a comfort zone. In any team, there can only be one leader. Tony Blair understood that perfectly which is why he appointed John Prescott, someone with no leadership qualities, to be his deputy. Winners also need to be resilient, have a good command of the facts and be good in a crisis. Who’d have thought it? I have been involved in a few political crises in my time and have always come out on top by bullying people, shouting a lot and being entirely economical with the truth. A winner always remembers that his own survival is more important than maintaining the integrity of the democratic process. We use the word “crisis” too liberally. When your hair won’t look the part, that’s not a crisis. Neither is Trump calling Hillary “ the devil,” or when your favorite pizza place doesn’t deliver after 10 PM. 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.

But it is in the penultimate chapter around the British monarchy as the surprising but enduring winner that the really important messages emerge. You can have the greatest strategy going, with a perfectly capable leader and team, but without the right mindset these are nothing”. This part of the book explores what mindset is needed to win, the power of visualisation and then discusses the mindset of boxer Floyd Mayweather (a boxer who never lost a match in his professional career).

Customer reviews

If you're an ambitious individual, looking forward to enhancing your approach to your goal, this book suits you. If you're an arrogant person, bursting with confidence, on the edge of thinking all other people are fools, this book even suits you better. Because it will slam you to the hard truth of reality, that there are plenty of winners with extraordinary qualities you can't even imagine. Innovate – By paying attention to the details you create the opportunities that allow you to take a product, service or process and make it better.

As long as a tactic works for implementing your strategy in a way that gets you closer to your objective, keep doing it. But once it stops, drop it and try the next one, without changing the strategy. Lesson 2:Winners are so terrified of losing that they’re happy to get uncomfortable to avoid it. 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!) What is meant by that is that for elite performers, doing exceptional work is the norm.They’ve made it part of their identity, not by deciding to be exceptional, but by deciding to work hard every day.In Winners: And How They Succeed, Alastair Campbells set out to get to the heart of success by analysing the best athletes, political leaders and global business empires. However, right at the beginning, Alastair states that “ there is no such thing as a single ‘recipe for success’ and nobody is likely to win anything simply by following the formula of another winner”. This seems to be contradicting the purpose of the book, but hey ho. The main gist of Campbell’s work, as it says on the tin, is to identify the traits and qualities from the real life stories of winners across the worlds of sport and business. Including, as you would expect from Tony Blair’s communication guru, a fair number of ‘inside’ stories from his political experience. Do you love reading about successful people and finding out how they achieved their success? If so, then Winners: And How They Succeed by Alastair Campbell might be a book for you. Keep on reading to see my review of the book. 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. 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.