Legacy by James Kerr Book Review

Our Highlights from Legacy by James Kerr:

1. “Successful leaders balance pride with humility: absolute pride in performance; total humility before the magnitude of the task.”
2. “The challenge is to always improve, to always get better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best.”
3. “A collection of talented individuals without personal discipline will ultimately and inevitably fail. Character triumphs over talent.”
4. “Only by knowing yourself can you become an effective leader” – Vince Lombardi.  For him it all begins with self-knowledge, with the great ‘I Am’; a fundamental understanding and appreciation of our own personal values. It was on this foundation that he built his teams and his success. From self-knowledge, Lombardi believed we develop character and integrity. And from these qualities comes leadership.”
5. “Winning takes talent’, John Wooden would say. ‘To repeat it takes character.'”
6. “Another remarkable man was American football coach Bill Walsh, who also considered himself a teacher first and a leader second.  Between 1979 and 1989, Walsh coached the San Francisco 49ers from an underperforming bunch of also-rans into one of the great dynasties in gridiron history by employing a similar philosophy. He believed that, “You get nowhere without character. Character is essential to individuals and their cumulative character is the backbone of your winning team.”
7. “Create the highest possible operating standards, develop the character of your players, develop the culture of your team and, as the title of Walsh’s book proclaims, The Score Takes Care of Itself.”
8. “Walsh knew,” Stuart Lancaster, the current England rugby coach, told rugby writer Mark Reason, “that if you established a culture higher than that of your opposition, you would win. So rather than obsessing about the results, you focus on the team.”
9. “The challenge of every team is to build up a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another,” said Vince Lombardi. “Because the question is usually not how well each person performs, but how well they work together.””
10. “Performance = Capability + Behavior.  Leaders create the right environment for the right behaviors to occur. That’s their primary role… Leaders design and create an environment which drives the high-performance behaviors needed for success. The really clever teams build a culture that drives the behaviors they need.”
11. “The All Black’s remarkable success on the field begins with a very particular culture off the field and it is this culture – the glue that holds it all together – that has delivered extraordinary competitive advantage for more than a century. To become an All Black means becoming a steward of a cultural legacy. Your role is to leave the jersey in a better place. The humility, expectation and responsibility that this brings lifts their game. It makes them the best in the world. What this means for leaders in other fields is the story of this book.”
12. “I think all of those environments, whether it’s a business environment or sporting environment, are about developing people. So, if you develop your people, your business is going to be more successful. It’s just a matter of creating an environment where that becomes a happening every day. – Graham Henry”
13. “Talent was irrelevant. We carefully picked the players. We used matrices to back intuition, because there are certain stats in rugby that determine the player’s character and that’s what we were after. So we picked high work rate, strong body movers, guys that were unselfish and had a sacrificial mindset. We selected on character.– Wayne Smith”

“The great sports coaches of the past such as John Wooden and Vince Lombardi put humility at the core of their teaching. The All Blacks put a similar emphasis on their fundamental and foundational values, going so far as to select character over talent. The players are taught never to get to big to do the small things that need to be done. “Exceptional results demand exceptional circumstances,” says Wayne Smith. These conditions help to shape the culture and therefore the ethos – the character of the team. Healing begins at the level of interpersonal communication, enabling an interrogative, highly facilitated learning environment in which no one has all the answers. Each individual is invited to contribute solutions to the challenges being posed. This is a key component of building sustainable competitive advantage through cultural cohesion. It leads to innovation, increased self knowledge and greater character.”

The legendary Phil Jackson, former head coach of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, calls this the ‘group mind’ and it was the basis of his extraordinary coaching career. When Jackson first brought Michael Jordon to Chicago, he was the league’s top scorer in each of his first six seasons, far and away the best player in the NBA, yet he had never won a title.

“A great player can only do so much on his own,” said Jackson in his book Sacred Hoops. “No matter how breathaking his one-on-one moves, if he is out of sync psychologically with everyone else, the team will never achieve the harmony needed to win a championship.”

This is the struggle that every leader faces. How to get members of the team who are driven by the quest for individual glory to give themselves wholeheartedly to the group effort.

“While the country is still watching replays and school kids lie in bed dreaming of All Black’s glory, the team is tidying up after themselves. Sweeping the sheds. Doing it properly. So no one else has to.  Because no one looks after the All Blacks The All Blacks look after themselves.

“It’s an example of personal discipline”, says Andrew Mehrtens, former All Blacks fly-half (what New Zealanders call a first five eight) and the second highest All Black point scorer of all time.
“It’s not expecting somebody else to do your job for you. It teaches you not to expect things to be handed to you.”

“If you have personal discipline in your life, then you are going to be more disciplined on the field. If you want guys to pull together as a team, you’ve got to have that. You don’t want a group of individuals.”
“It’s not going to make you win all the time, but it is going to make you better as a team over the long run.”

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