by Kerr, James
Much has been written about the agony of the long-distance runner, the loneliness of the artist in their garret, and the kinds of sacrifice – of time, comfort, socializing, hedonism – that it takes to make the transition from ordinary to extraordinary, good to great, but the winning difference is most neatly encapsulated in the mantra given to Thorn by his father.
Champions do extra.
Another father; another gift to a promising son . . .
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 trainer from the States. ‘These are the things I need to work on,’ Ben told him, ‘these are my weaknesses.’
Champions do extra.
In 1986, the story goes, Buck Shelford was leading his men against France in a Test match now known as ‘The Battle of Nantes’. It was brutal. And it was bloody. Early in the game, a French boot raked and ripped Shelford’s scrotum. They say a testicle was showing. He limped to the sideline, where a medic stitched up his scrotum, without anaesthetic, before he returned to the field and kept on playing. Shelford later came off, not because of the testicular injury, but because he was concussed, with two teeth missing.
It’s a particularly All Blacks brand of courage this – to never surrender, to spill blood for the team, to sacrifice.
To put your balls on the line.
Champions do extra.
It’s true in all kinds of sport. There’s the story of marksman Károly Takács who was denied a place in the 1936 Olympics as, in pre-war Hungary, only officers could qualify. Undeterred, he set his sights on the 1940 games. But in 1938 a hand grenade shattered his right hand, his shooting hand. He trained himself to shoot with his left hand but the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were cancelled as war ravaged Europe. Finally, in 1948, thirty-eight-year-old Takács competed in his first Olympic event, winning gold and setting a new world record, a right-hander shooting left-handed.
Champions do extra.
It doesn’t just apply to sport. As a young Time journalist, writer Hunter S. Thompson copied out the entire texts of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, twice. As his friend Johnny Depp told the Guardian, ‘He wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece.’ Thompson went on to invent Gonzo, a genre that combines the objectivity of journalism with the subjectivity of the novelist. He has been called the greatest American comic writer of the twentieth century.
Champions do extra.
According to Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs, the Apple founder rejected the circuit board of the Apple II because ‘the lines are too close together’. He insisted on reducing the start-up time on early Macs by ten seconds calculating that, with five million users, this would save over ‘a hundred lifetimes a year’. Later, when Jobs built a factory in California, he had the floors painted white in search of purity and perfection. ‘I want it to be as beautiful as possible,’ he said, ‘even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.’
At the time of Jobs’s death, Apple was the most valuable company in the world.
Champions do extra.
‘What does self-sacrifice mean to you?’ It’s a question Andrew Mehrtens asks the teams he coaches. ‘It’s everything in a team . . . Pushing yourself outside your comfort zone . . . It’s doing extra, doing extra from what you’re asked to do, or doing extra from what someone else will do. “Train harder than a non-All Black,” we used to say.’
‘What’s the most important thing in life to you?’ asks Sean Fitzpatrick. ‘If you ask most business people that, or most sportsmen, they’ll say family’s number one, work’s number two, but then if you actually sit down and think, “Well actually, no. Work’s actually number one, family’s number two”, and then you might think to yourself, “You bloody horrible person, that’s terrible”, but if you want to be the best in the world, you’ve got to put that at number one . . . you’ve got to make huge sacrifices.’
˜
A story.
Once described as ‘the most famous man in the British Empire’, Dave Gallaher led the 1905 Originals and is considered ‘the father of All Blacks rugby’. His team had a brilliant, irrepressible style, playing twenty-five games, losing only one in controversial circumstances when, it is still maintained, the Welsh players dragged Bob Deans, the try-scorer, back from the line before the exhausted referee could catch up. This exceptional team scored 747 points, and only conceded 53. They began the All Blacks legacy.
At irregular intervals, en route to the autumn internationals in Europe, today’s All Blacks stop over at a small cemetery in France in order to pay tribute. In Nine Elms British Cemetery, near Ypres, Grave No. 32513 is marked with the silver fern and the name Dave Gallaher, who was struck by shrapnel in the attack on Gravenstafel Spur on 4 October 1917 and died later that day. He was forty-three.
War makes few distinctions between men. As the Italian proverb says, ‘At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box’.
‘It’s not letting you get too much up yourself,’ says Andrew Mehrtens of the pilgrimage. ‘You are part of something far bigger. And at the end of the day when you are playing rugby and you are feeling like you are asked to make certain sacrifices, it’s good to remember there are a lot of people who have made far greater sacrifices.’
Whatever we give our life to – whether a business or a project, a family or a sport, a cause or an art or a belief – we are always making sacrifices. Whether we are giving up an hour, or a day, or a lifetime, we are spending our lives.
We are giving our lives for it.
Every day we go to work, every meeting that bores us, everything we do just for money or out of obligation, all the time we kill, we are giving our life for it. So it better be worthwhile.
Pyschology 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.
Champions Do Extra
The motto ‘Champions do extra’ refers to the extra, discretionary effort and sacrifice it takes to do something extraordinary. Whatever we do in life, we’re giving our life for it, so we best be sure it is worth it. Killing time is slow suicide. Treading water is drowning. So, what are we prepared to give our life to? As leaders, what kind of life will we lead? It begins by doing extra; the extra set at the gym, the extra burst of hard work, the extra sprint, the extra effort. Think of Buckminster Fuller: ‘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?’ What is the extra that will make us extraordinary?
Champions Do Extra
Find something you would die for and give your life to it.
—— Kaua e mate wheke, mate ururoa.
Don’t die like an octopus, die like a hammerhead shark.
XII
LANGUAGE
—— Taringa whakarongo.
Let your ears listen.
INVENT YOUR OWN LANGUAGE
Sing your world into existence
In 1999, John Kirwan and Sean Fitzpatrick decided to write a book.
Standards were slipping. So were results – the All Blacks had lost five games in a row. The recently retired pair felt that no one was passing the principles on, so they decided to do something about it.
It became known as ‘The Black Book’, and was for All Blacks’ eyes only, on pain of excommunication, almost. For a time it became the team bible and its collected wisdom, in the form of aphorisms, still informs the culture.
° No one is bigger than the team.
° Leave the jersey in a better place.
° Live for the jersey. Die for the jersey.
° It’s not enough to be a good. It’s about being great.
° Leave it all out on the field.
° It’s not the jersey. It’s the man in the jersey.
° Once an All Black, always an All Black.
° Work harder than an ex-All Black.
° In the belly – not the back.
° It’s an honor, not a job.
° Bleed for the jersey.
° Front up – or fuck off.
The Black Book was, writes Fitzpatrick in Winning Matters, ‘a system of meanings that everyone understood – a language and vocabulary and a set of beliefs that bound the group together.’
Not everyone was convinced it was needed. ‘In my day you didn’t have to write this bloody stuff down,’ said one old warhorse. Never the most literate of cultures, the All Blacks’ belief system – it’s ethos – had been handed down from player to player, team to team, generation to generation, by word of mouth and by example; meaning, rituals, stories, heroes, all bound together by a common, sacred language.
An oral culture.
A common story.
˜
Daniel Kahneman writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow about the power of our stories to change and shape our lives, often in ways of which we are not aware. Remember, stories don’t need to be true to be real. Kahneman tells the story of when he pulled up beside a bus the day after a terrorist attack on another bus – his rational mind knew that the chance of it happening again was low, almost non-existent, yet his emotional brain presented another story and wanted to get the hell away from there. Or there is the story that we tell ourselves as we buy a lottery ticket: we know we have almost no possible chance of winning, yet we still imagine what will happen when we do. The truth never gets in the way of a good story.
Leaders are storytellers. All great organizations are born from a compelling story. This central organizing thought helps people understand what they stand for and why.
True or not, stories are the way we understand life and our place in it. We are ‘meaning making machines’, interpreting and reinterpreting a sequence of events into a narrative form and reassembling at will.
As children, stories teach us the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, loyalty and love – our ideas of the way life is, should be and could be. Once we’re adults – as advertisers, filmmakers, novelists, journalists and politicians all know – stories help us understand who we are, what we want, what we stand for, what we stand against, and why we do things.
As in the The Songlines, the stories we tell through language still sing our world into existence.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl says, ‘the striving to find meaning is the primary motivational force in man’ – and stories are the way we construct and find meaning in our lives. We should not, he says, ‘be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill’. ‘One should not search for an abstract meaning of life,’ he says. ‘Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out, a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.’
As leaders, it is our job to set that ‘concrete assignment’. Whether it is to be ‘the best team that has ever played’, or a G. A. B. or putting a dent in the universe, it is expressed in language, and imagined as a future memory.
As Kevin Roberts says, ‘Revolutions start with language.’ Key to effective leadership in the All Blacks’ model is how we tell that story, using language to help our people ‘connect to the core’, using values, vocabulary, mottos, mantras and metaphor.
Values
‘Humility, honesty, integrity, respect,’ says Sean Fitzpatrick, ‘you know, I say all those words and for me and for the people I’m speaking to I’m saying, “Look, you shouldn’t really need to work on those because they should just be a given.”’
‘Values,’ writes Frankl, ‘cannot be espoused and adopted by us at a conscious level – they are something that we are.’ Which is not to say that they cannot be worked on and defined – and captured into a living document that makes a difference.
At the same time as Fitzpatrick and Kirwan were asking ex-All Blacks what it all meant, Saatchi & Saatchi were working with the NZRU to define the team’s brand values. This long consultative process revealed a group of words, which included New Zealand, Winning, Power, Masculinity, Commitment, Teamwork, Tradition and Inspirational – as well as three words that would become core to the All Blacks:
° Humility
° Excellence
° Respect
Sacred values are, of course, the bulwarks that have sustained some of the world’s most successful organizations. Faith, Hope and Charity, for instance, or, at the other end of the scale, those of the United States Marine Corps:
—— Honour
Integrity, Responsibility, Accountability.
—— Courage
Do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reason.
—— Commitment
Devotion to the Corps and my fellow Marines.
The Marines’ core values are handed out to every recruit on a red card they are expected to carry with them at all times. ‘I have them tattooed on my heart,’ says one Marine.
‘As Marines, we’re held to a higher standard,’ says another.
After all, if you’re going to die for something, it helps to know what you’re dying for.
Companies that maintain their core values are those that stand alone, stand apart and stand for something.
Perhaps the new archetype of the values-based, purpose-driven company is Apple. In the early days of the company (as Walter Isaacson writes in his book, Steve Jobs), Mike Markkula wrote the ‘Apple Marketing Philosophy’, a document which sought to define the company’s values.
—— Empathy
We will truly understand [customer] needs better than any other company.
> —— Focus
In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.
—— Impute
People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best products, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired properties.
Anyone who has ever opened a piece of Apple packaging, experienced an Apple interface, coveted an Apple product or bought Apple shares will know how powerful these values are.
˜
Meanwhile humility is not the first word that you would imagine belonging to a team of ruthless world champions, yet, alongside excellence and respect, it is central to the All Blacks’ core values.
The idea of humility as a central value grounds the team, creates respect, encourages curiosity and generates bonds that sustain them in the heat of battle.
It is a deceptively tough word that is communicated in everything they do: it’s part of their story. ‘Once you have determined what your set of behaviours are,’ says Wayne Smith, ‘and what you are striving to achieve, you have to keep feeding it.’
Leaders have to develop concrete actions so that values become part of the story. In the All Blacks, it’s about the sweeping of sheds, the signing of autographs, the Rugby Club, the charity work, the connections with the community, the hospital visits, the simple stuff. The being of team.
Successful cultures are organic and adaptive, they change and flow, yet always just under the surface is a bedrock of values, smoothed by the current above, but unyielding.
‘The success was being really good at that,’ says Smith, ‘really good at making our team talks, our reviews, or game plans, all apply to the central story.’