With the Rugby World Cup coming to its final blows I thought it might be worth a trip back in time to learn some lessons from the coal face of the 1987 World Cup. To do this I am reviewing some sections of David Kirk's 1997 book ‘Black and Blue’. I recommend this book to anyone who loves sport and would like some genuine insight into the mind of a world champion athlete and a successful businessman. I will relate each excerpt from the book directly to business.
1. Page 22, on being good enough
Why wasn’t I being selected? I certainly wanted it bad enough. I was ambitious enough, I was playing enough, I was training enough, the only answer could be I wasn’t good enough.
That’s a conclusion you avoid as long as you can. But if you succeed in avoiding it completely you never get any better. So I finally came to it and asked the next important question: why wasn’t I good enough?
In your business you'll have moments when business does not go well at all. You will have the ambition and you will have the will and you will think you're doing the right things but it's just not happening. You need to ask the question, why is it not happening for me? It can be difficult facing the fact that you might not be good enough. The great thing is you can actually turn it around, because there are no limitations. It just takes time, energy and determination. Are you up for it, David Kirk was, he became a world champion.
2. Page 71, on doing your best
If the kick was to long - as it frequently was - Kirwan would have run down the pitch for nothing. The fullback would have cleared the ball with time to spare. But every time, JK faithfully chased the ball as hard as he could because it was his duty to do so. That I’d made a mistake didn’t in the spirit of the team absolve him of the necessity of chasing the kick. In some way he was doing it for me - to try and turn a bad kick into a good one; but also he was doing it for himself, his own pride, his own compulsion to do the best he possibly could.
This lesson is a simple one, do your best for your business, your business partners, your team and your clients, period. Your compulsion should be the same as JK – to do the best you possibly can. By doing this you become a leader by example to your team and you become someone your clients can trust.
3. Page 110 - on preparing to win the world cup.
Rugby changed for me at this time. We had always played to win. That was our constant purpose, our strategic objective. But then, in training, in discussion, out of our collective spirit, another aim evolved. Our ambitions increased. There had been a goal of winning the world cup. It changed to become a larger one - the goal of playing the best rugby in the world. This distinction may have seemed slight at the time but ended up becoming a whole new philosophy of play. We stopped playing to win; we stopped playing against our opponents. We began to play against the game itself, pushing back the boundaries of what was considered possible. The opposition simply became the means by which we brought our vision of rugby into the world.
It was a reincarnation of the amateur ethic. Winning was not the most important thing anymore. Winning wasn’t the point. Playing the best rugby was the point, and winning was the by product. The distinction is real.
For years I have been telling people in business that profit and growth are by-products of playing the best possible business game you can. As an Olympic coach I fully understood that any medals we won were simply the outcome of 180,000 minutes of training every four years. We aimed to do our training better than any other athletes on the planet and it worked. In your business you can do the same, you can push the boundaries of what is considered possible. No matter what the market place is like you can still do business! It comes down to acknowledging the situations and then pushing against it delivering something special, something that others have not thought about. It is about generating a collective belief within your business team that they can be successful. Getting the deal is not the most important thing anymore, getting the deal isn’t the point. Providing the best service and outcome possible to your client is the point. By doing this you make a distinction between an average mortgage broker and a professional mortgage broker and getting the deal is the by-product.
Go the All Blacks
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