Winning in Politics, Sport and Business! Watch This | High Performance Podcast

[Music] alistair campbell welcome so from all the things you've learned all the people you've spoken to the experiences that you've had what is high performance uh i think it's setting really big bold objectives and then working out what you need to get there and doing it now obviously that has to be realistic i couldn't run a four minute mile so i wouldn't ever set myself that objective but i might if i did i might set myself the goal of running a four hour marathon or a sub four hour marathon because that would be you know ambitious but realistic for when i did it so i think it's that combination of what are the goals how far can you push them and then do you have the wherewithal to to meet them that's high performance to me well let's talk about meeting them because i think most people listening to this can think of an objective they'd love to achieve but getting there is often the stumbling block for people and you talk about in in win as you talk about the three most important letters in the alphabet o s and t would you mind explaining those to people and why they are so fundamental to not just setting the goal but achieving it as well because well always objective s is strategy and t is tactics and i think particularly in the modern world because the pressures are all to be tactical 24 7 media social media instant gratification all that stuff i think people tend to go very tactical when actually the response to that change well should be to be more strategic so oh set the objective s work out the strategy and only really go tactical when you've got those two in working in harness um and i guess it's interesting you know we're meeting at a time when mourinho is back in the news again i focused him on him as my my sort of in-depth study of strategy because he has a completely different model of strategy which is and it's there's no right or wrong and you know who am i to argue in the football world with somebody like mourinho but he said that to him strategy and tactics are interchangeable yeah and that's kind of anathema to me i just i think that the reason for example without getting too political the reason i think we're in such a mess as a country is because david cameron never had a strategy for europe for britain and europe so he decided to have a tactic of a ref calling a referendum to try and keep his party and his government together won the election had to have the referendum tactic imploded he's now gone we're johnson's in charge and i think we're in a bit of a mess so that to me is a classic confusion of strategy and tactics but mourinho's view was that as a coach he builds a tactical model for every football game that he plays and strategy to him is what he does when his model is not working now that's a very different way of thinking about it it's more a kind of that's more kind of war you know war approach what you'd expect on the battlefield and that's obviously where his mindset is but i see it for you know business for academia whatever it might be what are you trying to achieve and then work out the strategy for me is like i call it the big how it's the big how it's not the little bits it's the it's like russian in in politics new labor modernization that was the strategy it wasn't just a slogan it was the strategy everything had to be about modernization and the tactics all flow from that that makes sense yeah it does make sense so if jose mourinho is someone you've looked at and thought wow that's kind of totally different to my thinking who have you met over the years where they've spoken about how they marry strategy and tactic and you think they've got it absolutely bang on the one that pops into the mind straight away as you said that i'm afraid was lance armstrong oh no but and i'll say he said this thing i said the book he i interviewed him a few times and i'll be honest i was such a fan that i was blind to what i should have been the signals i should have been was their signals then because i've often looked at journalists and thought how have they not spotted oh yeah well they're only signals when i see them in retrospect so i'll give you the best example i was talking so like you see something like him and you know david miller another cyclist who i spoke to and he said the problem with you and me he said is we're kind of like we're natural alpha males we see somebody like lance armstrong we want to like that guy because he kind of reminds us of what we want to be right so i see lance armstrong and i asked all the right questions i hope you know but i believed him yeah so when he said i'm the most dope tested athlete in the history of any sport you know i can't go for a pee without a drug a drug tester following me you know if there was anything to find they'd have found it and i thought yeah you can buy that anyway so then we got into mindset and i said um see when you had cancer were you scared of dying he said oh yeah i was scared to die i was scared of time and you see right now you're about to go into the tour i think it was his fifth tour you're about to go into the tour and you're up against january who's like a beast right you're scared of losing to him he said i'm scared i'll i'm scared of all right yeah i said which of those two fears is greater and he said he said elsa losing and dying it's the same thing right now i went wow i should have gone ah right so you're a cheater it matters that much to you you would do anything but i didn't i thought oh wow so he he's so his his strategy and tactics i mean you have to analyze it from what he achieved yeah but obviously there was a flaw in there that's subsequently been exposed so if i think of other people i think bill clinton strategy and tactics um i think because i think he in a moment of crisis for him the whole monica lewinsky thing he never lost sight of that ost right and he defined it in those terms he so i asked him how he managed to get he i did an interview with him where he said it wasn't specifically for the book i've done it for a tv thing and i said how did you cope when you know and i could we could see because when he and hillary were coming over here we were going over there and it was just obvious he was in the deep freeze with hillary right absolutely if the cameras were there she could paint on a smile she could be the first lady as soon as the cameras were gone it was like deep freeze and he said at the time i'm the president of the united states i'm supposed to be the most powerful man in the world i was sleeping on the sofa right and i was he was right out of favor so how do you cope with that and he said objective survive stay president strategy focus on the things that only i can do because only i'm the president tactics make sure the american people know that's what i'm doing and if you go back and look at what he was saying and doing during that time he never talked about monica lewinsky unless he was asked about it he'd get up every morning he'd go out he's about jobs he'd talk about you know diplomacy talk about military stuff he'd never he'd only engage in it if he had to so where did you learn about those three pillars and alistair in your own story about the objective the strategy and the tactics and it's important well possibly from possibly from him i can't remember right when but i used to have i mean i'd less so now but i i'm still a very pen and paper paper person and inside my notebooks i've got a notebook the first thing i write in it is ost now i've done that for a long time yeah and i've got i'm big on post-its on the wall and stuff like that ost has always been a big one when i first started doing that i just don't know but it's interesting that it was clinton who he defined that in those terms it might have been that but i think also instinctively it's sort of what we did as new labor because of a better story i don't know if this is true that quite early on bunch of won the election in 97 that there was a story of tony blair asking how do you make things happen now it was almost like you got into power and then pulling the levers of power to make it translate into tactics it's hard because you you you you know mario cuomo governor of new york he said you know you campaign in poetry but you're governing bros so you're out on the campaign trail and the thing about i think definitely me and to a lesser extent tony because tony obviously is having to think about you know we're not deaf we knew it was like we're going to win but every day we had a discussion what can we do today to stop ourselves winning every single day we had that so by the time we got there it was almost like and i can remember i mean i said in my diaries i was like i was a bit depressed because i was really tired and i was slightly daunted by the prospect of what we're going into and then so we get into it tony's got a much more kind of positive outlook about everything than i have and he's i think he's ever had a day's depression in his life but he goes in there and it's like right we know what we want to do how do we do it and going from campaign mode which is a sort of i mean clinton said it's the only form of life that makes everybody look like their passport photo you're full-on it's exhausting and then you win and you get in and suddenly it's more important and harder so yeah he did that he did say that and but what it was what it was was a way of getting galvanizing the the machine right into working for him and working for us and what we wanted to do but the reason i ask is that where where do you think a leader needs to focus is it on all three of the ost well funny enough i think the other when you said i've got two most important letters yeah sets off the other is slt and slt is strategy leadership and teamship which for me have to work together in a in a kind of never-ending circle i don't think you can have one working without the other two so you can have you can look i could look at some i mentioned cameron i can look at cameron and think well yeah he looks a bit like a leader i don't it doesn't sound ridiculous when he's described as the prime minister he had quite a good team people like osbourne around him that lot and but on strategy i think he was weak so unless you have those three all going together i don't think it works i think you know your world you look at sport you look at you can see managers i can spot man i love watching managers have to match interviews and stuff because you can spot the ones who are good at that right but it's a very different skill to what you need to motivate a team of players who don't give a damn what you're saying on the telly because they're probably not even watching it yeah you know and and so how you do those three things together so i think strategy is the most important right um and in a well-functioning organization you won't have got to the top unless you're good at that but sadly i think a lot of organizations people do get to the top who aren't good at that and i think building the team is you know it's fundamental and you were a key part if we talk about that team that won three consecutive elections you were obviously a key part of that what would you say that you brought in in that teamship element that was unique that nobody else was doing well tony's nickname for me was kino uh so i think i think box-to-box and absolute focus and yeah not letting anything hard in the tackle quite hard yeah hopefully with a a bit more of the humor that keen shows these days yes so we're talking about big things here we're talking about elite level sport running countries doping your way to more tour de france wins than anybody else being the president of the united states and sleeping on the sofa can these letters apply to anyone in any walk of life should all the people listening to this podcast no matter what their job or their career or their plan should we all be thinking in the mindset of ost yeah i think so because if you think about you know um if you have a kid you have a child objective keep it alive yeah but raise the child to be healthy and happy yeah right strategy uh what sort of parent you're going to be um now it's bloody hard and i'm not saying that you can stick to a certain style but i think having those discussions in your own mind and with your your family i think is a good thing to do um you take something really simple i'd describe this in the book you know you want to lose weight objective well you want to lose weight strategy diet exercise what's a tactic write down everything you eat put a picture of yourself when you're overweight in the fridge you know these are just tactics so i think i think you can do with anything and i think it is a use and i think even the strategy leadership teamship thing you can have if you're like you know in your own life going through struggles well who are the people that you really trust to talk to they're your team uh your strategy might be to be open with them about a problem that you're facing so i think that i think these are yeah readily applied to everyday life and how well do you think they can overlap so like the example you offered of being a parent is one and then having a professional career as another how well do you think they can overlap or how do you manage conflict then well they can manage they can overlap well and they can also overlap very very badly so you know if i think about my own kind of life um i think i think we kid ourselves that you can do really full-on intense high-profile pressured traveling around the world working around the clock jobs and not lose something from your role as a parent and now it's very hard to admit that to yourself when you're doing it but retrospectively you know i look back and i think yeah well you know we're talking to you earlier about one of my one of our sons who's you know recovering alcoholic now he might have been anyway he might have been anyway but there's a little part of me that will always think you know we weren't there enough for him when he was growing up and no that may be right or wrong but i think we i think in the modern age i think we try and kid ourselves we can have everything so i think they can overlap look i always try to involve the family even to the extent of fiona my partner who didn't want me to do the job in the first place she eventually came and worked with cherie tony's wife and and that kind of was a way of trying to involve her more involved family more but you know if i'm being absolutely honest i don't think it really worked and we've been a lot happier since since we stopped um after you know quite a long period after i left of you know finally finding a real struggle because the other thing i find and this i think is another thing that you'll probably i'm sure you'll have come across loads of times with the people you talked about this high performance team i sort of do feel if you're doing something really really difficult you do have to be on it 24 7. you do have to think about it when you're asleep you do have to be you know waking up with new ideas and and i think it's hard to do that and be a normal person well i mean one of our previous interviewees alistair was stephen hender who was the first one that would have that was really explicit about the importance of selfishness to be high performers he admitted that his snooker career came above his wife and children in his priority list how important do you think it is to be explicit about about the dark side of high performance i think that's a very personal thing i didn't realize he said that um i mean i remember peter adelson once said of tony blair he said oh i do love tony i don't know he said he's so selfish it's a high performance trait though sadly isn't it it was like you know it was just like i can't remember what the circumstances were but it was like you definitely have to have that ability i mean you know i think i think sacking people is quite hard and i you know i saw as time went on that tony you know without losing his humanity he definitely found it easier as time went on he found it easier to you know something that he would agonize over suddenly it wasn't that it became perfunctory but he found it easier um now you've got to be a bit selfish for that you've got to say right well this person is no longer useful in the way that they were and the way i wanted them to be i'm moving them out and i've got somebody over there that i'm bringing in and of course sport you know i mean that's sports kind of made on that's built on that well didn't alex ferguson give you some advice on it when you reach out to him once about conflict in the cabinet and that was the advice he'd passed on he he gave me a lot of advice at different points but the one thing that fiona my partner will never forgive him for if the one that i really remember was in 97 on the campaign trail and he was obsessed about the election he was because he doesn't like the tories and he was desperate for us to win he was phoning up the whole time he phoned up and i'll never forget it we're arriving at this it was in leicester on this bloody i hated this campaign bus right i just hated being on this bus i felt trapped and it was it was it wasn't well equipped and high performance by the way dave brailsford once phoned me up said what's the best coach you've ever been on there you go we'll talk about him in a second right so so the phone goes and it was alex ferguson and he said we chatted away he said listen i saw you uh earlier in the day you were getting off the bus behind tony at somewhere where we've been he said you're looking really really stressed i said well i'm feeling stressed they said what's going on then i said well i said you know what i think it is the closer we get to the election we're so far ahead in the polls now people are already starting to treat tony like he's the prime minister so people who would normally think it's okay to go to him were not doing that they were coming to me or to one of the other people who was around him so in addition to doing all the stuff that i had to do which was a lot i had a lot of stuff that i was kind of in charge of i was picking up more stuff and i was getting really really stressed and he said well do you know what i do in those circumstances he said i kind of imagine i'm a racehorse i'm not into racing the tourism and i've got blinkers on and all i'm i'm looking out there and all i can see is a tunnel i can just see a tunnel and people are coming at me and they'll come and they'll do that thing which is what people are doing to you now and they'll say only you can resolve this only you can deal with this and he said i give them i give them five seconds and i make a decision like that whether that's right or wrong and it might be true and i've i've pretty much done that ever since and if you if you're joining my partner she'll say you know you're in i can tell you're in your tunnel you're not so when you're in that tunnel you very quickly tell people whether they should go to someone else you mean yeah so remove that one from you taking on everything i'm taking everything yeah and and it being a kind of almost instinctive thing and accepting that sometimes you might be wrong um but yeah he was great like that he and the other one he said which we didn't take on he said you've got to get massa on that bus quite good well yeah but i'm not sure given that we had another bus just behind us full of you know press and things yeah talking of matters on buses and dave brailsford i'm really interested to get into the conversation about what dave taught you i mean one of the things you said right at the beginning your secret to high performance is is to think big and if anyone shoots for the stars in terms of their thinking it's dave brailsford so does he do the ost does he create the objective huge objective and work out the strategy and the tactics while at the same time or does some of these really highly successful people do the oh and then kind of spend a lot of time and speak to a lot of people about how the strategy yeah i think i think he's a bit of both actually i think he said i think he said in the book that um when he he said when he first said i'm going to lead the team that becomes the first british team to win the tour of france ever he said he got home that night and he said to his message you can't believe what i said today and so it wasn't like he'd i mean he planned it yeah and he used he believed it and he believed he could do it but when he said it i don't think he had anything like the full plan but i think his strategy was it was to put together you know i mean i know people focus on this thing about marginal gains but it was actually to say well what are all the things that i'm now going to need to do what i've said we're going to do and how do i make them just a little bit better than everybody else and that's what he did and how many of these really elite high performance people are working in silos are able to compute and work it without themselves and how much like dave brosford are able to put a brilliant team around them i don't know anybody who can do it all themselves right i think it'd be impossible i think even if you're a golfer you're going to need people who advise you up here and the swing and all that so i think it's i think i do think putting together the right group of people is as important as i mean obviously if you're particularly in sport if you're the athlete you're the most important person if you're the coach but i think you know you look at the great coaches if they were to put into one room all the different people that are really important to their success if they're being honest a lot of them were people you and i have never heard of um i mean i always remember it used to be became a sort of huge laugh in our household the fact how often alex ferguson when united scored would would hug the kit man albert because as far as he was concerned albert was absolutely fundamental to the to the culture to the ethos to the success yeah and i think that's and i think the other thing about about dave that's um that's really interesting is his absolute restlessness never really happy and one of the questions i asked virtually everybody interviewed for the winner's book was whether they were more motivated by a love of winning or a hatred of defeat and most of them it was a hatred of faith and what would you say for yourself oh totally yes yeah definitely well if i tell you for example 1997 the first election which should have been one of the happiest days of my life i was i was honestly i was miserable and i think it was partly you've worked on this for years and years and years and years and now it's gone and what you can do next and i knew what i was going to do next but i wasn't you know that thing at the not far from here down at um on the you know county hall when everybody was tony blair goes out new dawn is it not there's this sort of everybody defined as euphoria i didn't feel that at all on any level and do you think that's what made you successful at your job then so i've wondered this in terms of you've spoken quite publicly about your mental health challenges over the years do you think that in many ways that was a blessing than a curse because it made you good at your job in terms of never being happy maybe looking for the worst in situations but yeah possibly i mean i am happy most of the time and i really like having a good laugh and you were asking what my role was i think one of my roles was the sort of i was definitely the black humor guy who was trying to keep people laughing and what have you but yet i i think that sense of looking for the stuff that can go wrong um and worrying all the time and never ever accepting that perfection exists and and yet trying to strive for it that's definitely i i i you know we won with the sort of mass that landslide that we got in 1997 but part of me was thinking you know we could have done better than that you know we could have done better do you worry all the time uh yeah i'll worry about something most of the time yeah yeah i'm the same and i've always been like that but i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing i almost think it's kind of like um it's a bit of a protective orb that i'm i mean my wife takes it to the extreme i remember her once said to me i'm worried i haven't worried enough like that was going to change they'll solve the problem but i do think there is something healthy about worrying not to an unhealthy degree but having that i just having the edge of that all the time just kind of plugged into the potential issues without them overruling you i mean i think anxiety as a kind of medical condition is horrible and i've had a bit of that um not as much as i've had the depression but i know what anxiety is but worry as in ruminating and fretting and thinking through a problem i think i think that's part of performance why do why do athletes get more nervous before an olympic final they do before a you know a book standard diamond race in wherever yeah because it matters more and i think the worrying and the sleeplessness and all that stuff i mean obviously not sleeping is really bad for you but i if i think of really some really really high pressure moments i've had like i remember the the night before the i've had to give evidence of the hutton inquiry which was massive pressure for me um and i just re i realized come about 4 30 i there's no way i was going to get back to sleep so i was kind of i was thinking right that means i've got a few more hours that i can try to get get properly might get my mind properly in shape get my attitude properly in shape so i think even using something like sleeplessness as a kind of positive worry yeah i think when it gets really bad is when it when it does trip over to you know anxiety that as an illness but i can worry honestly my worries can go from worrying about uh how warm would it be in the studio should i wear you know something warm to how many shirts should i take on a trip to somewhere next week to why aren't i doing more to stop the world from destroying itself through climate change the work the intensity is just the same when you're in that kind of ruminating mode but i find it very not therapeutic but cleansing but what i'd be fascinated to understand alastair is that you're somebody who has taken steps to understand the workings of your mind you've spoken about sort of linking up with psychiatrists and coaches in that way for anyone listening to this podcast what's the most valuable tip you've learned from your work with professionals in that area that have helped you keep it on a manageable level as opposed to getting going too far i mean there's lots really but i don't know whether they'd apply necessarily to my previous self because i do part of what i've done is to lead a very different sort of life right i'm still very busy and i do loads of stuff but i've very carefully and deliberately prevented myself getting sucked into doing just one thing i think doing the job i did for tony blair is probably the last just one thing that i'll do and now i do lots of different things i think even that's helpful for people to hear because there will be people listening to this that have anxiety and mental health problems and don't necessarily know which way to turn and looking for your own answers is yeah but you see when i i've i'm really when i was a journalist and then when i worked in with tony blair i always thought i was a full-on you've got to have a job you've got to have you just got to do one thing and now i've developed in something very different i'm not saying i don't know which is right or which is wrong and it may be for other reasons to do with being older to do with my kids being grown up whatever i'm definitely mentally in a better place now however i still get depression and i still get you know i still have a quite troubled mind and the thing about i mean there's lots of little tips and big tips i can kind of pass on i'll give you i'll give you a tiny one uh the thing about pressure leading to an and um was it dave brownsford or there's another guy in the book andy mccann who's a sports psychologist in wales yeah he said uh pressure good stress pressure good pressure this this matters that makes you do it better stress you're worrying about things you shouldn't your mind's going in a place you can't control you lose the plot and i i once had a situation where i was doing interviews and i was i was having like out-of-body experiences one of which you can google it google me and andrew marr right and it will come up top and guarantee it and it was an interview where he asked me a question and i'm just i'm not there i'm kind of i'm over there at one point i'm thinking i'm going to hit him uh and i didn't speak for quite you know you you listen you do tell me right yeah it's only a few seconds but honestly it was like a long time a long few seconds and i didn't say anything because i didn't know what was i didn't know where i was so i went to see this guy andy mccann because i knew him through a friend of ours he was a golfer who was helping him because he had the yips and he couldn't pop properly and andy told me this thing he said well all that's happening there is i can't remember the medical term he gave me the medical term and it's a sort of fight or flight thing and he said the thing you've got to do is find your own thing that works for you i said well like what i said well you know the all blacks if you see the all blacks playing and you see them do that and look at the sky it's a centering yeah that's their centering thing they're losing concentration just go go like that and it just gets them back other people they might do that so nobody notices if you do that you're just doing that but that's their thing so i developed this thing so my thing is that i do that i just rub my thumbs so if i feel and this this is like if i get it doesn't happen as often as it you know i don't want to make it sound dramatic but if somebody attacks me in the street which occasionally does happen right you know just shouts at you or has a go whatever i just do that and i don't know why but two things happen one i feel centered and secondly i smile it makes me smile and i do i'll tell you if i'm feeling under pressure an interview or something to do that and the thing is that i do have a temp i do have a bit of a temper and sometimes particularly out on the speaking circuit you get people if it's an after dinner thing they've had a few drinks there's always one who wants to have a little go and make a name for themselves and and it's funny i do that and i just start laughing at them and there's nothing they can do to get near me so that's a kind of yeah that's a sort of micro thing and then a bigger thing which i got actually right in the book and making the film about depression was was my jam jar which is this woman who told me that look at your life as a jam jar so down the bottom of the jam jar is the sediment that's your jeans and the rest of your jam jar is your life and it's most of the time you can manage it it's good and bad and it's mixed up remember stuff you don't but when the jam jar gets full it means you can't cope the lid explodes and your life explodes and you're ill okay and she said what you need to do is rather than think about undoing everything inside the jam jar is grow the jam jar right add the layers that allow you more space to put more of your life so i didn't honestly not she was talking about but then i ruminated a few days later i got up in the middle and i woke in the middle of the night about four o'clock i went downstairs it's on my wall at home now i drew my own jam jar sediment life and then i've got and this is personal to me right the first one's fff fiona family friends right if my key relationships are strong if my kids are reasonably happy fiona and i are getting on if i've got a small number of close friends that i totally trust that's not bad start meaningful activity which means work but it also means changing the world then sleep diet exercise which i never used to take seriously and now i do then it means the things then it's the things that are really personal to me so burnley football club bagpipes scenery elvis jackbrell abba my bike my dog yeah right these are the things that matter to me then it's the thematic stuff like curiosity never go to bed without knowing something you didn't know when you went got up in the morning uh creativity for me is important i have to write something every single day and the thing is i'm up here already with my jam jar and i haven't even mentioned medication which i take every day now the thing is if you'd have said to me the day before i met this woman in canada janine who told me about this and you just said to me how did you cope with depression i said i'd take medication every day right so it's just a totally different way of so i still take medication yeah but if you now say to me how do you deal with depression i said i've got my champion yeah and do you ever find that certain parts of your jam jar have not have not been allowed to grow enough and you're sort of aware of them oh yeah and you can yeah definitely what i do now is if i feel i'm going into depression or when i'm in it i will i will very deliberately try and do something to tick off every single one and as i do it not always and sometimes i don't do it but as generally if i do it up to an including phoning sean deutsch and saying you know why did you take gudmundsson off yesterday that's me doing burnley and he'll he'll tolerate it and patronize me and pretend he takes my view seriously but i'll do something to do with all of them um and yeah definitely it's made me feel it's just giving me a plan when i get into depression and it's some of it about re like i'm conscious of the your original training in journalism was about framing a narrative and i'm interested there that that seems like a very different way of an internal narrative of rather than seeing yourself with somebody that takes medication that jam jar is a different story you telling i think that's exactly what it is and i think we all need those look we all have them you know we all have them and you know we all we'll tell ourselves stories about ourselves all the time yeah um and sometimes we challenge them you know so yeah i think that is exactly what it is i i think that and i think there's the other thing is if you if if you've ever been in the public eye and people write about you and broadcast about you narratives get shaped for you you know you get so you know i find i find with me i think one of the most irritating things that happens to me is a number of people say oh you're not tall like i expected it really pisses me off because what it means is they've never stopped to think i'm not saying they should yeah right but they take other people's narratives now i i think you've got a it's not that you should sit around there but this goes back to your point about whether you can you can all relate to your own sense of strategy leadership teamship i think owning your own narrative is really really important because that then dictates the decisions that you make about your own life one of the decisions i wrestle with all the time literally every day this is one of the things i worry about fiona my partner she's she's much more private than i am anyway but she sort of decided she doesn't feel any need to be validated by outside people you know and that's that but that's a big decision to make when it comes to things like you know like this this morning with the super league i've got loads of bids to go and talk about it why because people don't like football and you know i might have an opinion right now and i was torn and in the end i was torn partly because i wanted to go swimming now in the end i went swimming right but fiona's got no need to be torn because she's decided i don't need that outside validation her m.a her meaningful activity is around stuff that matters to her to do with the family to do with helping out in local schools being a governor to do it you know it's a different sort of validation so and i think that's how the narrative you give yourself isn't just about it's not just a static thing yeah it actually helps you make decisions about your about your own life and is your common thread then about that like you've been close to real power like some of the characters you've described the clintons the blairs the the putin's even is there a common thread to their narratives that you think separate them from from others uh yes and no yes and no if i think to get to that level you do have to have a sense of your own abilities and i think you do have to be a little bit arrogant i don't mean that in a bad way you need to think yeah i mean you've got to be a bit weird to think you can be a prime minister or a president you know because not many people are going to do it but then i think you've got to have so like part of tony's narrative was that sense of positivity and confidence and and that played into the political narrative of you know modernization new labor new britain all that clinton had very you know very similar kind of vibe if you like um but then you you know you mentioned something like putin i'd say putin is somebody's narrative has changed i think it has got to a pretty dark place where it's really just about power and wealth and and so forth something like merkel who you know she's she's incredible because she's like i i wonder if she'd even get elected in in a country like britain or even france you know because she doesn't have that what we would define as modern day charisma yeah so her narrative is very much about being uh and not like the rest sort of politicians so they have different but i think in their heads they all have to have narrative otherwise you know you can't you've got to remember about these these really powerful positions you're making people focus on the decisions that you see every night in the tele which might be one or two you're making hundreds yeah and i think to have to be able to make them at the speed that they have to make them you know i used to watch tony blair with his you know the red boxes when might be you're at summit we're coming back from the summit you're on a plane as where's my box they bring the red box down and it'll just be you know it's it's literally split second decisions about parliamentary answers yes or no invitations you know ideas for people to hire people not to hire whatever i'd be and he's just flicking through them and he's going yes no yes no yes no see because i found that interesting because i remember like when i was preparing for this our stuff i saw a documentary once on david frost's interviewing technique that you were on yeah and there was that question that you sort of were paying homage to him that it it was something he said we prepared to the nth degree and then he said to tony blair about do you pray for every jewish bush and look flummoxed how to answer it and what was fascinating was that what interested me was where where was authenticity in that you know in his answer rather than just tell the truth rather than you could see him almost on a second guess how it would play out politically yeah that was that was i mean listen david frost was i i missed him with us so much he was a very good friend i think he was a brilliant interviewer very underestimated because he was nice to everybody particularly in this last couple of decades and uh but he could absolutely get you right in the guts and the thing is we did pride ourselves on thinking through every question that's ever going to come up and that just that was sort of left field you know and it was the way he did it as well did he say do you ever pray with george blush what was he what was he trying to get out of tony do you think david loved getting stories yeah so he was probably trying to get he was probably trying to get something that would really make news um but also i think those questions do because the thing about the the the reason why that was such an interesting moment for me i can't remember if i said this in the documentary was because within that little exchange there's a whole back story to do with the fact that i always felt that politicians should stay in the uk should stay out of religion right i think it's a dangerous territory i don't think people like it american presidents they're expected to hold the bible god bless america i think britain's just different i don't feel that british people really like it i could be right could be wrong but and we used to argue about that quite a lot and the one time when tony sort of went his own way and he wrote a piece for the telegraph tony is a you know he's a big believer and his faith is incredibly important to him and he wrote a piece for the sunday telegraph it was what easter means to me so i said all right okay okay on your own head beer if you want to do it you do it fine okay off you go he writes the piece we send it through and i said i'm just telling you by sunday lunchtime the news will be leading with the tories accused tony blair of saying that to be a christian you have to vote labour well he said well i'm not saying that so no you're not saying that that is what they're going to say you are saying sure enough brian mcwinney tory party chairman future president of the bible society or chairman of the bible side so big believer himself and that was the attack so thereafter tony never really went for it right okay so i think that would have been all so he's but in a way it was authentic he was saying the answer is no but i'm worried about where you're coming from with this right that was authentic yeah it's a good reminder though of the challenge for anyone whether they're in political life sporting life if they're on the big stage remaining authentic is one of the biggest challenges i think for them isn't it and the people that you've met over the years the ones that have remained at the top probably authenticity is what they've managed to keep hold of do you think yeah i guess so but unless you lance armstrong well no because he was i think no lance authentically believed he'd done nothing that's believed he'd done everything the same with everybody else but he did everything better i um know why when you said that i thought of putin again this putin was the putin that we saw that the west thought was going to be a different sort of russian leader was that authentic is the putin that we see now authentic are they both authentic are they just different stages of the development the same person i don't know i don't know but i think authenticity as well i think people sense if somebody's not comfortable in their own skin um and i think that you know i mean i can't work out why anybody likes boris johnson as a prime minister because i mean i've known him for a long time i can't work it out but a lot of people do and they sense something real now i sense something real as well and i really don't like it because i think actually it's i think the whole thing's a construct but maybe they're right maybe i'm wrong i just don't know i just don't know but i feel that i feel to be authentic in i think you'll be true to yourself and being true to yourself and part of that is being just being truthful yeah and even if you don't like his politics or what he stands for or the decisions he makes do you have admiration for the fact that someone can create that world around them and get to the position that he's got to regardless of how they've done it i find it very hard to divorce it from how they've done it yeah i find that really hard you talk about worrying i mean we got called liars the whole time i get called liar every day on social media about iraq 45 minutes to dodgy dossier did it every single day and i know i didn't lie uh but that's never going to make any difference to to the people who say that um but i used to lose sleep about it now we now have a prime minister who does lie and he lies in parliament um do you think he loses sleep about it i don't think he does i don't know i don't know but i don't think so and i think that's a real problem for our politics i think it's a real problem i think once you play into that narrative they're all in it themselves they're all the same they're not all the same they're all very different and most people in politics are actually quite decent people and quite a lot of the second rate and quite a lot of them are you know you wouldn't necessarily want them to sort of lead your country but once you've got people who rise to the top in that system and i do think there's referendum you know i think winning a referendum when everybody knows whether you voted leave or remain i think we can all accept that they didn't necessarily tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth all the time yet they won and the guy who led that campaign with a lot of lying his reward become foreign secretary under theresa may and then next step he becomes prime minister i think that's a pretty bad message to it so this is an interesting skill then that i'm that i'm interested in without necessarily describing uh johnson was there must have been occasions where you had to master the art of saying no or to respectfully disagree with people without without falling out or creating collateral damage two questions really is that how important is that as a skill and how do you successfully say no to people you talk about people in in your own team or are you right yeah no sorry so it's a more in your own team now well you can fall out of people um but i think the i think it goes back to the point about strategy i think if you if you're working within a clear strategic framework most decisions ought to be fairly obvious the choices can become quite narrow but whether you want to do option a over option b or whether this is going to be your main priority or that's going to be your main priority they should be quite straightforward questions based upon the strategy that's agreed right and then the rest becomes the negotiations and the tactics and what have you the only time i find it really difficult if i'm being absolutely honest was when most of the times on the policy stuff i was fine the only times i find it really difficult is when the person and the political were colliding like women for example uh like things like so i'm fiona and i both absolutely passionate about comprehensive education okay so some of the choices of school that some of our people might make where i'm the person who's going out and to defend it i find that quite difficult sometimes and the thing is again back to the whole thing about i would say not being a liar not being a very good liar when i was doing the briefings of the media they could always work out when i wasn't when my heart wasn't in it right um and then i think the other the other thing i found difficult sometimes is when people dress up what is essentially just the personality difference as some great political principle uh you're seeing that a bit in the football thing at the moment with the super league when you read that super league statement and it's all about you know we're trying to improve the women's game and we're trying to you know we know what it's about we know exactly what it's about and and that thing of you know that sense of i think the close tony blair always used to say this about any situation the closer you can get to saying the absolute truth about the situation the better now in politics just as in life sometimes you know when you've reached a compromised position you can't always say everything so the question for an external audience is how do you balance that sense of you'd saying what's true but you're not saying everything about what's true you certain things you're just not going to talk about that's a challenge though isn't it i've read a brilliant book from have you read it bob iger's book the ceo of disney corporation no well he talks about his superpower being that he got to the point where he would only make a decision he absolutely believed it totally wholeheartedly believed it was the right thing and you and then he could be questioned as much as you like because he totally believes it sometimes though you were probably in a position and people around you were in a position where as you just described you couldn't tell everything you couldn't reveal everything because it you were you're in a political climate which made it a little bit more challenging perhaps yeah for sure i think business is easier yeah and i think businesses accept that you know there's a much linear you know the prime minister the president they are at the top the cabinet is the next level but then within that there'll be other people in and around you know there's no point getting away from i remember tessa jalal once said to me that all these cabinet ministers who try and get with tony the whole time he's never going to trust them as much as he trusts you and three or four others who are absolutely his team so that's you know and i think working out that is kind of part of the navigation of any organization i can remember again you talk about alex ferguson i can remember him once saying look you know if if things are as bad between tony and gordon as everybody's saying why isn't your second and i i say well because politics isn't the same as football you know if you sack a number two or a player they have to go somewhere else yeah in politics they they stay on the pitch so that's another part of the management you've got to work out what they will do if they're not at the top table so you've seen people at the top of the game in business in politics in sport of all the areas that you've sort of investigated over all the years you've done it who gets the mindset right the most do you think which sector yeah sport early bioma why is that i don't know i mean back to dave brailsford i remember dave railsford but the last book i had was that volume 8 of my diaries 2010 to 2015. and brailsford keeps popping up right partly because i'm doing some work with team sky but every time he just says why haven't you got rid of the red miller band yet i said oh it's not as simple as that yes you know he's not going to win everybody knows he's not going to win why aren't we done and how is his mindset politics doesn't have that mindset um would it benefit from that mindset or is it just not possible to get there because of i think that's not present because there's so much involved in the politics um but i felt that i remember talking to wesley macram the fast bowler and i said this is another question i asked a lot of them what's the difference between wanting to and will to win and he said everybody wants to win will to win is recognizing what it what is needed to be done to put yourself in the best position to win and having the capacity to do it now i think a lot of politics and a lot of business don't have that sport i think the winners in sport do have that and i think maybe because sport maybe it's a cultural thing the rhythm of sport is such there's you know a game every week often two games a week real churn of personnel much faster than business much faster than politics maybe they've just they're just more accepting of that the need for that constant culture of churn and change but i find i mean at a time when i think politics should be producing the best minds and certainly the most winning mindsets i would say their third behind sport and business yeah so interesting can i sort of ask you then about your experience with the lions in l5 then because that was because that was an interesting experience for you that you've got that where you you're going into an environment where it's going badly wrong in a place where mindsets really important so being an insider to that what was it you saw they got wrong on that occasion to be fair to climb woodwind and and andy's t i don't think they got much wrong other than they were playing the all blacks at a time when the all blacks were just unbelievable um and i think so if you think about ost uh objective to win you know it's a it's the best of three series against one other team it's utterly crazy to go there thinking objective not to get humiliated yep objective to win clive's strategy i think he would have defined as best ever preparation for alliance tour i think he did that um and then you know i guess i was in the tactical expression really and i did say to him to first myself i said to clive write the word go when he asked me i said look live i'm up for this but i think it's a mistake why because i think would be too much focus on me uh i think it all i think people think it's a bit odd but i'm really up for it because just from my own perspective i'd left into number 10 in 2003 he went back for the 2005 campaign didn't want to go back and to have the i think it was two weeks between the election and leaving it was may the 25th remember because it's my birthday and it was liverpool won the champions league and um but i was up for doing it because and he said well look you know every the press say that the lions made your operation last time with rubbish i'm confident you can make it good that'll help them that'll help us and actually i think to be fair i think i i think clyde would say that i was able to add something in terms of mindset and and i and i got on really well with some of the players not all of them i've gone really well with the irish and the welsh in particular um some of the english guys but but some of them i think were just they were like they were very much in the kind of what does he know about rugby yeah which sure defeated the point yeah yeah uh i wasn't there for what i knew about rugby was therefore you about the media and what i knew about strategy teamship leadership etc and so i really really enjoyed it some of the players have stayed i've stayed very good friends with i learned a lot from watching that what the inside of an elite sports organization looks like and i really enjoyed it but i wouldn't do it again if the one personal learning i took out of that was that i can't do another media communications job why because it became about me and it would probably do that if i did it so i i'm happy i've gone i've done i do loads of media stuff right but i do it very much as always part of the team don't want to be number one just kind of hang back a bit interesting but before we move on to our quick fire questions at the end of the pod i just want to move back briefly to when we discussed your journey with mental health you think it's really important for people listening to this who maybe have had or are having similar experiences you've also spoken powerfully about the benefits of the problems that you've had with mental health and how you get positives as well as negatives would you talk about that for a second for us well i think you know i know you talk a lot on the podcast about resilience i think i'm a very resilient person and i think the resilience comes from having been through a lot of mental health stuff not just my own but family and you know you get i get resilience from i had a brother who had schizophrenia um he's sadly dead now but i got a lot of resilience from the way he dealt with that and the way i helped him to deal with that i get resilience from the fact that my my son touchwood is still eight years without a drink um so i think resilience i think for me i think a lot of my creativity comes from the mood swings some of the best work i ever do comes when i'm coming out of depression and some of the best you uh you you'll be glad i didn't bring my bagpipes but some of the best backpack music i've written comes when i'm going into a depression um so creativity i think comes from it and i think also i give myself a yardstick for everything i do and how i feel about what i do and i measure it against the worst times yeah so i can sometimes be very very depressed but even in those depressed moments i'll say well this wasn't as bad as and i've got my dates in mind and i'll say and then i'll it just gives me a little bit of a tick to kind of move back into the better side of my depression scale i think it's an important thing for people to hear isn't it because there will be people listening to this that are in the dark place and they haven't yet well listen a lot depression's uh you know i think we're finally moving to the place where people accept is an illness and that you won't have was it john gregory who said john gregory who said to one of his players just thank god what you've got to be depressed about you know you're playing football it totally misunderstands that depression has got nothing to do with your background your wealth uh it's it's an illness some people get it some people don't um and yeah i'm sure if you've got a quarter of a million people listening to this then there's no doubt yeah a lot of them will be struggling and you've obviously in your book mentioned billy bean he talks about you know extreme people dave brailsford talks about extreme people anyone that you've met who's at the absolute top is an extreme person do you think that they're genuinely happy or do you think that with extreme success and creativity there's a path funny i think billy bean's extremely happy that was my sense of him but i don't know i mean you know i've met him a few times to talk to he struck me as being a really happy centered person i think there is a trade-off between and also i think there are successful people who aren't necessarily extreme um i thought i was really interested in the day i read that thing about mick jagger sent a million quid his million quid advance back on his autobiography he decided he just couldn't face writing it fair enough yeah that's all fair enough but i also wondered whether that was uh whether that was a he's not an extreme mindset yeah i don't know i don't know but so i think i think it's possible to be successful without being extreme but i think to be i think if i look at the list of the people on the front cover most of them are extreme personalities um and can people get to the objective just by chance and luck have you met those people as well or pretty much everyone that gets to the top they use ost slt oh no i think i think luck's still incredibly important i think a lot of people still make it to the top one luck um but i think if you're looking at the people who've certainly look at people like brelsford mourinho i remember you know talking to michael phelps the swimmer and and i mean he struck me as a guy who was in pain a lot of the time you know the training was painful you could imagine the training he had to do just up and down a bloody swimming pool i mean i do 20 minutes in the lidar every morning right i'm bored rigid by 10 and the next 10 minutes is just it's a real struggle right so if you're doing that so i i think the i think most of them have got a an extreme mindset and i think they do pay a price yeah yeah quite quick far questions the three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you have to buy into uh obsession with winning and understanding that's a good thing shouldn't be frowned upon um absolute openness and honesty with each other uh and an understanding that i good ideas can come from absolutely anywhere and there is no hierarchy to them and some of the best ideas come from people that aren't paid to have good ideas yeah so what advice would you give a teenage jealister just starting out on your journey don't drink so much um i think i i think i'd i think i think i've done better with my life than i thought i would was a teenager right by so what i'd say to any teenager is don't try not to narrow your horizons and and don't imagine there's anything that you you couldn't do if you really really really set your mind to the only thing that i've thought of i should have done and could have done which i've never done is to go into electric politics myself and there's always been a good sort of tactical reason for that to do with timing and doing other things and what have you but that's that's the one bit of my life that i've not done um and i think it's too late to be honest and i i just don't see a way in at the moment um but but i think i think i i would have said to myself as a teenager i tell you no i'll tell you what it is i i didn't work hard enough at university and i wish i had right uh i think i wasted i think i think when you're in a position where you can

2021-11-06 15:07

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