Winners: And How They Succeed

359 Pages·2015·1.79 MB·English

by  Alastair Campbell

With special thanks to my son
RORY CAMPBELL
who pressed me to write this book,
and helped me every step of the way
CONTENTS
Introduction to the American Edition
Introduction
PART 1: THE HOLY TRINITY
1 Strategy
2 Leadership
3 Teamship
4 The Strategist: José Mourinho
5 The Leader: Anna Wintour
6 The Team Player: Edi Rama
PART 2: IT’S ALL IN THE MIND
7 The Right Mindset
8 The Extreme Mind
9 The Power of Visualisation
10 The Mind of an Unbeaten Winner: Floyd Mayweather
PART 3: STANDING OUT FROM THE CROWD
11 Boldness
12 Innovation
13 Data
14 Turning Data into Bold Innovation:
From Formula One to Narendra Modi
PART 4: CHANGING SETBACKS INTO ADVANTAGES
15 Crisis Management
16 Resilience
17 The Winning Spirit of Australia
18 The Queen: A Very British Winner
Conclusion: The Art of Winning
Acknowledgements
Index
INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN
EDITION
I am thrilled to be publishing Winners in the United States. To be honest, there
are so many great American winners, past and present, I imagine some U.S.
readers will wonder what on earth they have to learn from some Brit who only
made his name because he used to hang out with Tony Blair and had someone
play him in that movie with Helen Mirren as The Queen?
Well, of course Tony is part of the answer. So is The Queen, and my chapter
on how she steered the Monarchy through very rocky and unhappy waters. As
for Tony, he was my party’s most successful ever election-winning leader, I was
there every step of the way, contributed a lot, and learned a lot from him and the
many political winners around the world we met and worked with: Bill Clinton
to name but one, and one of the best. But this book is not a book primarily about
politics. Though my thoughts and experiences weave their way through most
chapters, nor is it a book about me. It is a book that seeks to distill the stories of
the names of the front cover, the vast bulk of whom I have worked with or
interviewed specifically for Winners. More than that, it seeks to apply lessons
from them in a way that all of us might learn something. Finally, to the more
parochial-minded among you, there are a fair few Americans dotted around the
place. How could a book about winners not have a rich vein running through it
from the most winning country for much of our lifetime?
This is my eleventh book, and it is never clear to me why a particular idea for
a book falls into one’s head at a particular time. This one has been percolating
away for a long time, possibly since childhood, when I grew up wanting to be
the first person ever to win international caps at football (oh okay, soccer), rugby
league (most of you have never heard of that one), and cricket (you may have
heard of it but you don’t understand it any more than I fully understand
baseball). These ambitions were never fulfilled because of a lack of basic talent,
and I have taken it out on politics ever since!
Most of my adult life has been devoted to the Labour Party in the U.K., first
covering successive defeats as a totally biased journalist and commentator, then
deciding to help turn this losing organization into a winning one under Tony
Blair. Tony gets a rough press these days, particularly at home. But the guy is a
winner and I was proud to play a part in helping Labour win three big majorities
in the U.K. Parliament. Outside family and politics – and frankly most days now
it comes ahead of politics – the big passion in my life is sport. I have been
blessed to know some of the greatest sports people of all time – through
friendships with football’s greatest ever club manager, Sir Alex Ferguson; Sir
Clive Woodward, the only man ever to lead England to a Rugby World Cup;
Lord Sebastian Coe, a great Olympic champion and the man who later presided
over the London Games in 2012; the U.K.’s most decorated Paralympian Tanni
Gray-Thompson; or Sir Dave Brailsford, the first man to deliver a British winner
in the Tour de France, and to do it clean in the post-Armstrong era. Actually
Lance Armstrong is another sportsman I know well and have interviewed three
times. He is one of two ‘winners’ who are in the book, but not on the cover, for
what we might call editorial/ethical reasons. The other is Vladimir Putin. My
sense is Americans don’t like the Russian president too much so might have
taken offence. But if leadership is about making the weather, winning power and
generating fear – which is how he seems to judge it – he is a modern, and
resolutely Russian, winner.
As for Lance, a man I grew to like, admire, and respect, as did so many others,
before the scales were dragged from our eyes – I felt I had to include him in the
book because of his record as a winner, but exclude him from the front because
how you win can be as important as whether you win. See Ethiopian running
legend Haile Gebrselassie on the Lance question in the final chapter. How the
Putin story ends is anyone’s guess, but my guess is either it will have a bad
ending for him, or a lot of bad chapters for the world. As for Lance, try though
he might, it is hard to see a route map back to reputational strength. If you lose
your good reputation, you lose everything. Oh, actually, there is a third winner in
the book who is not on the cover, but for very different reasons. I feared it might
look a little weird to have The Queen sandwiched in between swimmers and
surfers and the like.
So now back to the question ‘why write this book? And why bother you
Americans with it?’ I think part of the motivation – and part of the pleasure at it
coming out in the States – is to reflect on the similarities and also the differences
I sense between our two countries. I worry that my own country is somewhat
losing the winning mindset. We have some great business and sports people and
probably more cultural icons per capita than any country on earth, but politically
and diplomatically we are in decline, and psychologically and educationally I
think we are too. I think there is a real danger that we are lapsing into a mindset
prepared to settle for mediocrity. And it gets me down.
America has massive challenges of its own, not easily met by your own
horribly tribal and narrow brand of politics, the tribalism in particular that is
fuelled by the ‘Fox-ization’ of news and the swamping of your political
campaigns with sums of money considered obscene in most democracies. But I
do think you still have – and I know it is ridiculous to generalize about a country
the size of the U. K., let alone the vastly more complex U.S. – a spunkier
approach to life and a real passion for, and respect for, winners. We are much
more in the ‘build ’em up to knock them down’ mode. It harms us. Your love of
winners is good for the American soul, and your future.
So this is a celebration of winners and a study in their mindsets and modus
operandi and how we can learn from them. I should warn you that it is not a
book about happiness. Indeed, there are a fair few tortured souls in here. But that
is partly what gives them their special hyper achieving qualities, which they then
put to greater use in their chosen field.
I have traveled far and wide to get these people and their stories. From India
to Ireland, from Albania to Addis Ababa, from the west coast of America to the
east coast of Australia. I was very lucky, blessed even, with the kind of people I
managed to reach. That being said, it is without doubt easier to get through the
door if your pitch is ‘I am writing a book about the greatest winners on the
planet and would you like to be in it?’ I have pondered a followup. ‘Oh hi, it’s
Alastair Campbell here, I’m writing a book called Losers and How They Fail
and I’d love you to be in it.’ I fear the roster would not be so large.
Mind you, failure is an important teacher, and many of my Winners cite a
particular defeat or setback as their most important turning point, and fear of
failure as their biggest driver to success. The only interviewee who told me he
simply never ever thinks about defeat – and who am I to argue looking at that
body? – was the boxer Floyd Mayweather. Forty-nine fights. Forty-nine wins.
The richest athlete of all time. Some may not like him. But none can dispute that
he is a winner.
One of my rules of life is that we are never too old to learn and I have learned
something from all the names on the front cover. Some of them are household
names around the entire world, others little known outside their own land or their
own sector or sport. I have yet to meet anyone else who knows who all of them
are until they have read the book. For example, outside the Balkans, people are
often stumped by Edi Rama. I’ll tell you why he is there. He is the Prime
Minister of Albania; more relevantly, he is the only current head of government
in the world to have played sport for his country. He was on Albania’s national
basketball team, so a good man to talk to about one of the central themes of the
book – what can sport teach us for politics? Answer, as I know from my own
experience trying to hold a political team of competing egos, agendas, and
ambitions: a lot.
There are some people on the cover I had not heard of until I started my
research. Two of my favourite interviews were with Australian world champion
surfer Layne Beachley and U.S. baseball legend Joe Torre. Until I started writing
the book, I had not heard of either of them myself. Baseball fans, please don’t
shout. I know this is absurd for someone who is a self-confessed sports nut. But
baseball is not a big sport where I come from. Can you name a cricket legend?
In the acknowledgements you will see that I thank Jean Aferman of the New
York Yankees, both for giving me the title of the book and for introducing me to
lots of U.S. sports people. I still don’t get baseball or American football totally
any more than she really gets cricket (though she thinks she does) or rugby
league (no chance), but I really was grateful she put me in touch with Joe.
‘Legend’ is one of the most overused words in sport. But he is just that, this
much I now know. Billy Beane told me so. He is a legend too. I had at least
heard of him, not least thanks to Brad Pitt playing him in Moneyball, but also
because my son Rory, who worked with me on the book and who is now
employed as a data analyst with an English Premier League football club,
worships him.
Luck is of course a factor in most winners’ stories – my favourite in the book
being from Sir Richard Branson who wanted to call his first big business
venture, a record store, ‘Slipped Disc Records’ until a young woman whose
name he cannot remember said ‘what about Virgin – because we are all Virgins
at business?’ I don’t think Slipped Disc airlines or Slipped Disc Space Travel
would have been so effective. Lucky break, Richard.
I, too, had plenty of luck in writing this book. I only got Jose Mourinho
because Chelsea’s director of communications Steve Atkins was a government
ex-colleague, our spokesman at the U.K. embassy in Washington when I was
U.K. government director of communications and strategy. I was lucky, when
deciding to write about the brilliant Obama 2008 campaign, that his digital
architect Joe Rospars was working for Labour in the U.K. and able to vouch for
me with David Plouffe and David Axelrod and the like. I only got Anna Wintour
because her brother, political journalist Patrick, told her that for all my
reputation as some kind of cross between Machiavelli and Thomas Cromwell
(copyright historian David Starkey), she could trust me.
Perhaps the greatest stroke of luck came as a result of that interview, which
led me inadvertently to Mayweather, high on my list of desired interviewees
because he didn’t actually know what professional defeat felt like. I came to
New York to see Wintour. I was paying my own way so put out a few feelers to
see if I could get a couple of paid speaking gigs, the ludicrously lucrative world
that opens up for those who leave frontline politics. Was it Al Gore or Madeleine
Albright who once called it ‘white collar crime’? I landed one at a conference on