James Kerr: Leading with legacy

There are some core principles right at the heart of all great teams and the way they work. They tend to be very values based, a very clear idea of where they're going and have a driving purpose and they set standards and hold themselves in each other to account. If you can create that environment and an environment of kind of care and compassion, but challenge, you create the conditions in which, as I said, you type people from potential to pick more consistently. Jude, who's steering this thing? I have no idea, Martin. I thought it was you. Well, today we have a fantastic guest who's steering for us. I'm Martin Osler. And I'm Jude Lane. And today we're joined by James Kerr, best-selling author, cultural strategist, who spent years working with elite teams like the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, special forces and companies like Google. He's worked in Formula One, a real expert in leadership. James wrote Legacy, one of the most influential leadership books of the last decade, about what makes the All Blacks such a high-performing success machine. And how we can apply all of those lessons, whether we're running a global business or we're just trying to keep our Monday meetings on track. James, you're a real expert in leadership. It's fantastic to have you here. Thank you for joining us. There's a lot we'd like to talk to you about, but we'll start with our signature opener. If you had to sum up what leadership means to you in a 30-second elevator pitch, what would it be? Oh, just an easy one to start off this morning. I think, if we think about culture, if we think about leaders as sort of custodians of culture, stewards of culture, I mean there are many different slices and ways to do it. And culture means to cultivate, comes from the same Latin route. How do you create the conditions in which humans flourish? How do we create the conditions in which human beings grow, develop, become what they're capable of, connect, find a cause to contribute to? All of those things are sort of the domain of culture, I think. And I think the domain of culture is the domain of leadership. I think you need to create the space around yourself in which humans flourish and lift their performance, really, from potential to peak more consistently, would be another way of looking at it. How do we take people sort of playing within themselves, not beyond themselves, because we can never go beyond, or we're good at, but certainly to our optimum. So you know, that's a start of a 10. Great. And I love that bit around that connection piece. I think it's really important when you're talking about teams and the environment that you're working in to get everybody galvanized into that space of flourishing. And just thinking about that in terms of, you know, working intentionally on your culture, whether you're a CEO, a rugby player on the pitch, can you share with us, how you first gain that access into that world of rugby and working with the all blacks? And what drew you into exploring that in the first instance? Well, my first foray into a genuinely high performance team was actually the Australian rugby league team, the Kangaroos, to do a book with a friend of mine. And the story I'd tell about it is, the first day I turned up, that lost, was in the UK. They lost at Wembley and they never lose, or very, really lose. So the team weren't very happy, and I hadn't really met them at that point. I met management, but I hadn't really met the team. And so I met them on the bus on the coach, we were about to drive from Wembley to Manchester, and they weren't happy. And I was right at the front of the coach, and they kind of trailed onto the bus, and most of them just ignored me. But one guy I go called Blocker Roach, Steve Roach, stopped in front of me, and I can't really repeat it, but it's like, who is this guy in Australian? And Anna was, you know, I was more fired, I was like, oh, this is not going to go well. And he kept going, and the bus took off. And a few minutes later, I got a tap on my shoulder, and I was like, Bobby Fulton, who was the legendary coach for my play, legendary coach, and he just tapped me on the shoulder and he jumped up some, and I stood up, and he didn't say anything, but he gave me a team tie and a handshake, and I was in. And we talked about connection, and being connected to the moment, I guess, and being connected to what was needed in that moment. I thought it was just an exemplary form of leadership, and I was intrigued by that ability and great coaches tend to have that connective ability, I think. And I kind of went from there, I did a couple of books with the Orblacks, and really used that story as a case study of what I've observed on my work. Though it's a book about the Orblacks, it's really using them to illustrate, I think, the most important principles I think that exist within a high performance environment. I don't really believe in analogies. The rugby is different from business, or education, or whatever. But there are some core principles right at the heart of all great teams, and the way they work. They tend to be very values-based, a very clear idea of where they're going, and have a driving purpose, and they set standards and hold themselves in each other to account. And if you can create that environment and an environment of kind of care and compassion, but challenge, you create the conditions in which, as I say, you take people from potential to peak more consistently. And there's a lovely phrase from Bill Walsh, former coach of the San Francisco 49ers who said, you know, it's a paraphrase, but if you can get the kind of cultural conditions right, the score will take care of itself. You get great results, but you focus on the environment, the culture. And so that's what I really became interested in and pursued and worked with over the years. Do you think the Orblacks knew they were exemplars for leadership, or do you think that your book told them something about what they were doing? Did they realize it was something special? Oh, I mean, you just, you know, the score took care of itself. You can see the numbers, you know, I'm sitting in Scotland, and our Scotland have never been in the Orblacks, not a fence. I've seen it on YouTube, but it's been up to a long time. Yeah, you know, Walsh last beat them back in 1953. They've got a near 80% win ratio over a century and a quarter. They're clearly pretty special. And in answer to your question, no, I think they were very deliberate about understanding the power of culture, particularly, you know, I think culture comes and goes and you need to be organically, you know, kind of reactivated. And I think the leadership group, with the time that I sort of spent with and studied the team, were extraordinary around that Graham Henry, the boss, but Wayne Smith and maybe particularly Gilbert and Noca, the mental skills coach, were very, very, you know, seminal, I think, in understanding the kind of impact of kind of cumulative character, if you like. But I really, you know, we're very deliberate about creating that culture. Yeah. I think what I'm trying to get at is leadership is often not given that deliberate attention in businesses. Do we need to make it more of a technical competence, you know, people will do their audit training, they'll do their tax training, but often they don't do leadership training. Do you think that we need to be more deliberate about that? You're asking the right guy, maybe yes, I do, of course, you know, the soft skills deliver hard results, you know, and depending on your, you know, what often happens, obviously, is competence is promoted, if you're really good at something, you get promoted, but competence in, I don't know, you know, litigation doesn't necessarily make you a great team player, often, you know, in a legal mindset, having a, having a mind that looks for fault or problems, you know, or challenges or as disputations by nature. doesn't necessarily create the connection that you want in a great group. And so if you do what you've always been doing, you don't necessarily step up into a different role. And there's a difference between management and leadership. You know, management can be, you know, well, we've done the hours and we've got the billings. Great. But leadership is a much longer term, human-focused activity that's about creating those work connection. You know, you know, the worst feeling that human beings have in the world pretty much is that life is passing you by. You know, and they are antidote to that as to have a meaningful role and something meaningful, phrase I've always laughed. You know, and how do leaders create meaning for their people? And that's not something that always comes naturally. So I think, look, I think in some ways, high performers are trained. They have coaches. They're commitment is to get better every day. You know, you can do that, you know, by understanding the latest and regulatory practice. But what's the latest in leadership? You know, I don't say them as compartmentalized, I think. I mean, there's an element of that expectation versus where their capability is at as well. And actually, drawing that out, but meeting them where they are right now, quite often we can set high targets with those expectations on the technical front, but not necessarily in that human space, seeing actually where is this person? And what do I need to do as a leader to bring that person along with? Absolutely, you know, there's a wonderful man who's a coach, a rugby coach, and he has a pyramid. His performance at the top right at the tip, player kind of in the middle section, and person at the bottom. Now, if you focus just on performance, but you're into pretty thin slice of a human being. You know, most coaches, let's say, all managers or leaders focus on the player. You know, there's a second layer down. And that's fine, but that's about competence and it's technical and it's still there. But actually, if you focus on the person where they're at, then the rest sort of, again, takes care of itself. And an example he used was a player who wasn't performing, they wasn't getting their numbers. And it turned out to be an issue, a family issue that the player was traveling to kind of take care of health and the family. You know, many hours every morning and every evening back again and so forth. And that was taking a toll on performance. But if you just focus on performance, you never find that out. And you can't help. And so again, that word, and I think it's the right word, connection. There's a wonderful concept in the Pacific region, called VA, and it means the space between. So in a team or a relationship, there are two people, but really, or many more people. But really, the team, I feel like, is the connections within the team, the interconnected. And then, Mara culture, the leader is the rangatera, the weaver. The weaver together, the connector. And so human connection is hugely important. It creates belonging, sense of belief. It opens communication. Because people are meaningful role and something meaningful. It's right at that heart. And it creates, for a team, probably the most important competitive component, which is cohesion. You know, cohesion, a team that has clarity of intent, knows where it's going, knows why it matters, and everyone's got each other's back. That's a winning combination in any environment. I'm going to play devil's advocate, not. And just look at-- if you take that off and scale it up, quite a lot of the organizations around us, are metrics organizations, all right? So you get a lot of subcultures built within that. How do you get them moving in that same direction? Yeah, well, I understand the need often for an economic level for matrix organizations. But from a human level, it's some real challenges. Humans for hundreds of thousands of years have worked in small groups. You know, it's in one way it's kind of our competitive advantage. You know, we've got opposable thumbs and abstract ideas, and we can communicate those ideas. But really, our competitive advantage is the ability to come together to execute, you know, to kind of form an ambush to capture the saber-toothed tiger, whatever it is, or to build a building, or to build a firm. You know, it's that. And so when you create these relatively boundary lists, and sometimes not as accountable cultures around structure, matrix, it can become really problematic. You know, it can become difficult to enjoy the benefits of that kind of cohesive connected culture. So I think the antidote to it, or the answer to it, is, you know, we're creating teams around ourselves all the time. You know, we're relatively speaking. It just met. But we come and we've got a pretty clear mandate here, which has tried to do an interesting podcast. It's going to hopefully provide insight in an inspiration maybe to people. And so we've come together as a group, and we're trying to, I hope, make each other better and deliver something there. So these teams form and unfold. I think what can help in a larger organization is, you know, I think there are two ways that character forms. One is kind of proximity. You spend a lot of time together. And the other one I just call story, or ethos, or kind of, what are we doing here together? And I think increasingly and larger sort of matrix organizations, leaders need to be storytellers. They need to be, they need to sort of tell and sell the vision, if you like. Like, what are we doing here? You know, what's important to us? What are the standards? What are we holding ourselves accountable for? What behaviors do we want to see? What do we reward? - Yeah. - You know, and I just, I've sort of talk about the ours. You know, if you want a great culture, the first hour is recruit. You want the right day and day. - Yeah. - You know, not necessarily, but somebody put it really well. A rassi-arasmus, South African coach. The best people are the right to people. You know, recruit not just on capability, but on character one. And recruitment is how do you onboard? How do you set people up for success? How do you kind of have them understand what you're about and the way you do things? Then review, you know, when you're reviewing quarterly, monthly, yearly, whatever, you're cyclist, are you focused on values and standards or are just numbers? Then, you know, another, how do you reflect your ethos, if you like, within the environment? And that can be posters on the wall or mouse mats. But it can also be the kind of the rhythm of a day, you know, but do you break for coffee? Do you have a drink after work together? All of those sort of things. And then kind of reward and recognition. Do you just reward performance? Do you only recognize the gold scorer? Or do you recognize the assists? If you use the sporting analogy. And what you reward is what people tend to move towards. So if you can align those liars, if you like, into some sort of vector, your, as matrix as you are, there's a consistency of who we are and the way we do things around here that at least it's clear and people can hold themselves to and communicate. And how do you find that balance between having frameworks and rules with giving people the space to do their thing? Yeah. I don't think that can't be rules. I think they need to be principles. OK. I think you, or self-determination theory, says the three things that we really want to work, or in a group, mastery, sort of paraphrasing, but mastery, the opportunity to be good at the thing we want to be good at, autonomy to do it on our own terms, according to our own values, and relate that connection. So the autonomy thing, I think, is really interesting really important, that no one wants to be micromanaged. To be micromanaged takes the wind out of your sails and the hope out of your life. There's nothing worse as a leader to take care of the power points and then at 10 o'clock a night before they jump on as a white sails, a white knight, save the day. Well that was a waste of my week. And disengagement to that creates. The opposite is that if it's snow, this is on you, I gotta adjust you. That's when other leaders grow. And Tom Peters I think has a great quote. He says, "Leaders don't create followers, they create other leaders." And the way you create other leaders is by passing the ball, handing over responsibility. You've got this, no, you've got this. What would you do? How would you do? And so you need a framework that lets a principle based, values and principle based. But it's both tight but loose. What would you do in this situation given this framework? There's a much better way of looking at it. And you will have noticed as I'm saying this, I start framing them as questions. And I think that's a good leader's ask a lot of questions. Wayne Smith from The All Blacks told me he goes to go his working week without telling anyone anything. Because questions allow people to access themselves. If you're told something, it goes in one area and out the other. Or you might hear it, but you might secretly disagree, so you'll go out and do the opposite or do whatever you're going to do anyway. But if you ask a question, "Hey, what would you do? What about that?" So you thought about that. Then you're accessing a different part of yourself, internalising it, vocalising it, you know, articulating. Once you've done that, you kind of feel a sense of ownership. It comes from you and of you. And then you have developed that skill, that muscle, but also that sense of ownership. And from ownership comes accountability. In Dacada, Smithy has this other great phrase. He says, "There are two kinds of people in a team. You've either got your hand out or your hand up." Hand out is what can the team do for me. Hand up is what can I do for the team. Accountability counts. And so as leaders, how do we develop that kind of autonomy and accountability? Because if you get that combination of autonomy and accountability with this flexible framework, you get a real sense of agency. You know, all right, I've got that. It's an initiative and all of those things that really want to unlock another human side. You spoke about the leader telling stories, which requires some charisma, I think, we fear to say, which opens up this question that we get asked a lot about more introverted individuals as leaders versus people who it comes more naturally to. Where do you stand on that? I mean, in sporting teams, it tends to be the more extrovert people or maybe not. I don't know. Well, a lot of, there's been studies done around Premier League players and there tends to be quite highly extrovert and low on neuroticism. It's quite interesting as a sort of profile, this is the big five. And you know, it plays well together. So there's definitely, there are definitely some personality characteristics that are helpful, but I don't think they're, it's limited to that. There's another quote. I love General Slim, Phil Marshall Slim, who ran the Burma campaign way back when. And one of his phrases is that leadership is just playing you. So you, it is sort of, you are painting with your personality in one form or another. So it begins by knowing yourself, knowing your strengths and your weaknesses and developing your own style of doing it. There are plenty of introverted, introvert leaders. There are plenty of introverted storytellers. And you know, you can learn skills, you know, and I have a phrase which, you know, mindset as a skill set. It's not something you're necessarily given all the time. You get to develop it. It's a skill set. And you go, well, if my natural thing isn't to be the rack on tour, but I know that I read my kids a bit time story and they love it. Oh, that's the beginning of something. And how can you develop that? And maybe you have to work a bit harder. Maybe you have to be a bit more deliberate. Maybe you need to find opportunities to, to go to toast masters, you know, or to stand in front of a mirror and practice your Oscar speech, whatever it is. You know, you, you know, find ways to develop that because it is a skill. Some people, it's a skill that comes more easily, sure. And there are a lot of different ways of telling stories as well. You know, I talked about, you know, Bob Fulton tapped me on the shoulder and give me a, give me a tie and a handshake. That was a story. He was telling a story to everybody else and to me, but really to everybody else. So, you know, a lot of the way we tell a story is about, you know, there's another phrase lead by date about how we do things and how we show up, really shows others how they're expected to show up. So it isn't just how, you know, a funny thing happened to me on the way to the pub kind of story to me. It can be small gestures, it can be a handshake, it can be a gift, it can be a pattern on the back. But how do you communicate that kind of really recognition often for people? You know, recognizing that they're kind of on track or they're contributing or whatever, you know, the, the, another old, almost cliché from psychology, you know, really what people deeply need is to be seen, heard and remembered. You know, are you connection again? Are you connecting enough so that they feel seen, you know, recognized, you know, acknowledged and significant? That's an act of storytelling, I think. Yeah. So there are a lot of different ways to do it, but I think you have to discover, kind of, lead from within, understand your own style and your own way of doing it. And another phrase, I'm sort of full of phrases, but as, you know, be yourself plus 20 percent. It's an old, for, for, for orators. Be yourself, but just put it out there, just that little bit more, rather than playing with, and I think that can be a useful mantra. Yeah, it's a great one, especially when you're practicing. It's uncomfortable. You know, you know, it's uncomfortable. It's, it's, well, I'm not comfortable with that. Well, make yourself uncomfortable with that because that's where learning happens. That's where growth, you know, you go to the German and it hurts. You're going to push yourself. You've got to break muscle down in order to build it up. And it's the same with everything. It's not, you know, I know I give a lot of speeches around the place, and I'm more comfortable with it, but, you know, for the 10 minutes before, and my heart's still beating and I'm still going, don't stuff it up, all of that sort of thing. You've got to go through that zone of discomfort because that's where growth happens, to take you to that next level. Yeah, we talk a lot about that struggle and that pain, especially in that leadership space as well. So, you know, from your own personal endeavors, can you share with us one of your biggest challenges and what you've kindered and how that's helped to shift your approach to leadership? On a personal level. You know, I think the biggest challenge most people face in their life is health and one way or another. And in my home, we've had some pretty significant health challenges. And I think what I've learned around those kind of intimations of mortality, we're all, hopefully, in a good place now, but is life is pretty fleeting. And it's a good thing to know that. You know, the story of the Roman emperors come in and they're great tributes to them, you know, as they come and have in conquered emperors and they come into the gates of Rome with all the spoils of war and they're in their chariot. But there was always, I think, a slave behind them, but going Bemento Mori, remember you will die. Yeah. Because it achieves a number of things. One that keeps your feet on the ground. You know, however, well things are going, you Let's go. yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' yw' nga ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni ni o sehau o sehau o sehau. I think probably health challenges and recognizing that the worst thing that can happen can't have. And will anyway. So step into it and make the most of what you've got. Be grateful. Stay humble. Connect all of those things. And that reflection, we talk about reflection being the rocket fuel of leadership. You know, if you're not reflecting, I think it's the same of life. That takes EQ. I think the Bobby Fulton examples. An example of someone who clearly had the EQ to see, I need to deal with a situation. Is EQ something you can develop? Is that reflection? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think there's some kind of natural settings that people have. You know, generally, and there are a lot of things that can interrupt that. From sort of, you know, sociopathic behaviour to narcissism on one thing, to injury, to tiredness, to hang over. There are a lot of things that impact our state. But I actually think the interesting phrase is around state. What state are we in? And I'm really, I'm writing at the moment and I'm really interested in this culture. You know, we're talking about culture, really. And if the way I like to put it is, a school might have a culture. I might have had a great culture for 100 years. But every classroom has a climate. Right, as a particular frequency, emotional condition state. That condition, that climate is really often most affected by the leader. Or someone who is very difficult in that environment would change the climate of a room. And climate of a room matters a lot because it kind of sets our dopamine, actually. It sets where we are on that. And that impacts us physiologically. Now, there's a very simplistically, there's a couple of systems within us, one the behaviour activation system, the other behaviour inhibition system. Behaviour activation system is reward oriented. It needs high dopamine. It needs a happy positive state. And then we play to win. We look for, we're reward oriented. You know, we go for the gap, we risk a little bit, we're a bit more enterprisey. The opposite of that when dopamine is low serotonin is high. And I'm simplifying a lot, but you play not to lose. You become much more risk-averse. There's a threat, you're an increased threat state, more vigilant, more paranoid, more defensive. So I think it's beyond empathy in a way. It's like, are you aware of the state that you're in? And the impact that the state that you're in has on the state of play, if you like. On the room. And do you walk into a room, kind of angry with the traffic, and bring that into the first meeting of the day? You know, are you aware? So I think the thing is it's about awareness. And I think yes, awareness can always be, and should always be developed. And you go, how self-aware can I be? And awareness is about reflection, inner work, breathing, meditation, quiet moments, walking a dog, you know, being in nature, not jumping on your phone straight away when you wake up, but being with the day, a little bit, being present to yourself, and therefore being able to be present to others. And that's connection again. And so I think it is the beginning of learning. You don't learn unless you reflect. And if you look at an elite team cycle, the first thing that happens after the intensity of performance is reflection. And the military could be called an after-action review. When comes together, what went right, what went wrong, what can we learn? What are we going to do better next time? But if you think about that, you know, I just had an argument with my husband or my wife or a difficult conversation with a client, you know, rather than going, "They were like this. Are you going, how was I?" Yeah. Just simple, self-reflective stuff. And it's uncomfortable back to that comfort zone. It's not necessarily easy work. And so we avoid it. But actually that's where growth is. And I think good leaders have done that work in one way or another. If, you know, Maslow talked about, you know, a will to self-actualize, to become what we're capable of becoming, or to become more truly us. And that's really the task of beyond. That's the task of leading a life, I would say, not just leading a team. And how would you encourage somebody to refocus after a setback, whether it's health issues, or, you know, family, staff dying, or we've got that road rage? Yeah. Yeah. I think there are different aspects to that. I think breathing is the most. I don't know if it's the only, but it's pretty much the only way that we can consciously affect our physiology around stress. You know, if we do deliberate deep breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, we can regulate our heart rate. So we can hack our own body by deciding to do something in a certain way. And so in terms of the road rage thing, you know, a breathing would be the skill set. There are other skill sets around. To go through a setback, on any size, the first thing we can come back to awareness, you need to process it. Change only happens through process. You take a whole bunch of awful, and you turn it into a sausage. It takes a process. You take a whole lot of bad stuff that's happened, and you want to get into a good place. It takes a process. And you go, well, what is that process? And I actually had an interesting conversation yesterday with a colleague of mine who. I'm sure he won't mind me talking about it, but the schooled his kids went out of business. And we were talking about the impact on his daughters. And, you know, suddenly all of that, their world is gone. All the expectations for, you know, for the end of your party, or the being a prefect, or all of that stuff gone. And you go, well, you know, they've adapted quite quickly, and they've got into a new school, and all of that stuff. But is there a process you can put in place to enable them to not wake up in 15 years' time and feel that loss? And, you know, we were talking, saying, well, first, you know, write down all the little bits of paper, write down everything that you've lost from this. That's not going to happen. And be with it, you know, and experience that loss. Don't park it somewhere, but experience it a little bit. And then maybe, richly, ceremony-only together, go out in the garden and bury it or burn it. So that you've at least taken yourself through a process of acknowledging. Now, a lot of us go out, and we go to the pub, and we drink to forget. Or we pretend it doesn't matter, and we bottle it up. And the bit it leaks out, and one way or the other. And that's the old, you know, Japanese thing. ni tuu ni tuu ni tuu ni tuu ni tuu ni tuu ni tuu ni tuu ni. spills. It's the tea in the cup that spills. You know, so if we build up all of this better tea in ourselves that we haven't really processed, it's going to come out somewhere. So, you know, the biggest story, a friend of mine in Australia, he's a deputy head of a school and during COVID, there were a similar lot of loss. You know, they didn't have the sort of first 15 game or the ball or whatever it was. And so, they made a sand Mandela, you know, a Tibetan Mandela, a sand sculptor. And as a group, as a leaving group, and they brought the stuff that they had lost, similar, and put it in there. And then, of course, the idea of the Mandela is impermanence and they're destroyed afterwards. So, they go months and months of work and all of this, but it's the same sort of process of acknowledging what is and then being able to let it go. And, hype of intense, high performance, you know, the defining factor is your ability to bounce back, but you've got to experience it down. We're human. You've got to go, I can't believe it. That was match point and I just blew it. You've got to go, I'm not going to swear, but, you know, you got to swear. You've got to acknowledge that's a crappy thing to have happened. And your ability then to get back on the horse that just threw you and refocus and come back into the prison. The all blacks talk about redhead and bluehead. Redhead is when your future focus, you're thinking about the consequence. You know, match point and I blew it. What are the papers going to say tomorrow? But the difference, but bluehead is being on task. What's next? You know, horizon opens up, time slows down, I execute the technique, if you like. I know the plan and I work the plan. And so, the ability to shift from that red to state to that blue state, state change again, becomes vital in terms of performance. And you know, it happens all the time. You have a moment. You're having a very nice dinner with your partner and somebody says something about tactless. There's a moment of flare up, a little bit of a jab. Now, you can safely go, hey, I didn't like that. And if that can be acknowledged from both sides, then you can get back into what a wonderful restaurant. But if you don't kind of treat it, you don't acknowledge it or you just go, you don't really let it go and then suddenly it comes out and translates. So we have to process our emotions and the ability to do that effectively and relatively quickly to manage our state will manage the climate of Rela and that level of connection. You're working on a book about main Everest and a disaster at Base Camp. Can you tell us a little bit about it now? Yeah, I'm in theory working on it. I'm actually working on another one in the meantime, but it is sitting in a draw waiting to be the next cab off the rank. I was researching a book on military leadership at Sandhurst. And the Army put out a thing called the Army Leadership Code, which is a way of defining leadership for them. And there was a launch event. And during the launch event, they had a bunch of Sandhurst graduates, so officers in the British Army telling the story about whether we're leadership really happened for them. And one major there told the story of leading an expedition of Gurkhas up and Everest to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Gurkhas in the British Army. Gurkhas of the Nepali contingent who are attached to the British Army, who are part of the British Army. And when they were up there, it was in 2015, there was a major earthquake, you know, a kind of a hundred-year event. And it was the worst day in Everest history. I think 22 people died in Base Camp. Basically, an avalanche came from one of the peaks and swept through the camp. There were Gurkhas stuck all over the mountain, climbers all over the mountain. And I thought, I think, oh, that's the story. And so I sort of started chasing the story. And in 2017, I went up to Base Camp, they went back to kind of get back on the horse that threw them again. And so I went up with a team and spent about four or five weeks living in Base Camp in a tent and kind of tracking their reattempt, if you like. And also it was really the first opportunity to speak to everybody who had been impacted by that moment, because very international plays are on a gone back to their country of origin. But many of the same people were camp, so I was able to interview. But it kind of got a bit bigger, because of course, Base Camp is a first-world problem. But 10,000 people died in that earthquake around Nepal. You know, half a million people lost their homes, or more than half a million people lost their homes. So I suddenly realized it wasn't a small, small, climbing story anymore. So I extended out and I kind of called it sort of valleys and peaks. I went into the foothills and to different places, to a place called Baapak that was the epicenter. You know, in the epicenter, these flagstones were being popped like popcorn, feet in the air. And most of the village was flattened. Camp and do interview people who had been buried. Some extraordinary stories of survival and of loss. And so the book is a narrative of nonfiction, I guess. But really exploring a lot of those ideas that we've been talking around, kind of aspiration and trying for something. What happens when things go sideways? How do you get back on the horse that threw you? And in some ways, without giving it away. But in some way, the power of love, actually. In terms of you know, for the gerkers, brotherhoods, for the families and factors, you know, loss and love go together pretty tightly. So I really wanted to explore those ideas. Of course, it became a much bigger project and then COVID happened. And so I took on another project. And that's just been sort of sitting on the back burner, which I think in the end will mature it. And it'll be better for it. But books take, well, they certainly time me a long time to ride into kind of just state. So what's the spice, but not too intently, because there will be a little while. James, we can talk for hours. We've got so many questions. Unfortunately, we will need to start bringing things to close. But I want to ask you, which individual or which team would you really like to work with? Or if it's a team from the past, a person from the past, and when you're late to have worked with and maybe written it out. Yeah, I like a challenge. And I think the, you know, what I think what lights me up is how do you turn a team around? You know, so my first thought is Manchester United at the moment. There you go for your United fans. You know, you know, there was this extraordinary kind of mothership of magnificent football and culture and a real winning culture that is possibly through ownership, through governance, through neglect, through whatever has seemingly been eroded from the inside out. And the score is taking care of itself and it hasn't taken care of it very well. And so, you know, a team that has been from good times and has almost, I guess, lost its DNA or lost its soul, that idea of coming in and reconnecting that word again, reconnecting its people around its purpose and with each other and the club to the team, to the academy, to the fans, to the culture thing. Really, how do you create the kind of the golden thread that ties it all together? I think that kind of challenge. You know, so a United, I've always, you know, football again. I've always been, I mean, Tottenham won at Tracey in the last 12, that went to, I think, last 12 months, but seemingly haven't been able to kind of make that final step for long time, what's going on there. You know, what happened to Brazilian football? You know, some of those, there's a GLA team in Ireland, Mayo, that has come close, and close, and never quite got there. And you know, so they would be the exciting ones. You know, I think it's really exciting at the moment what Joe Schmitz done with the Wall B's, you know, everyone was writing them off, and he somehow found something, well, he's definitely found something in there to regalvanize that group. And I think they're the great storyants and the great challenges, so it's that kind of thing. And if there's one leadership habit or mindset, you've tried that you challenge our next guest to try, what would that be? Challenge the next guest, what good luck to you. Leadership habit. I think one of my favorite ideas from the, I wrote about in legacy, I captured in a phrase that one of the players is taught by his father, which is champions to extra. And that idea of, you know, marginal, what's gets called marginal games. You know, how do you find those one percentance in anything and everything? I think it's a very powerful practical mindset, because nothing is transformed overnight. But transformation or change or improvement is usually the end result of a multiplicity of small improvements. So the San Antonio Spurs call it pounding the rock, take a piece of rock, take a hammer and it chisel, start banging away. Right? 50 blows, nothing, 75 blows, nothing, 100th blow, it breaks. It wasn't the 100th blow that did it, it was the 99 blows that took to get there. So that pounding the rock, those marginal gains, that champions do each of those one percenters, the inches, if you like, I think is a really useful way or a powerful way of starting to think about everything, apply to everything. And if you can create that as a habit and bring that, then good things tend to happen, the score takes care of itself. So that would be my challenge for the next interview subject. And it's something I try to try to do, don't always get it right, obviously, but I try to do and think, okay, well, how can I do that little bit extra just now, just to take it to that next level? It's not too much to ask, but maybe it'll take me a little bit further. James, thank you for your team. I feel totally privileged, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it, hopefully it's helpful to somewhere, somewhere, somewhere for sure, great. And yeah, just one final question, and what would be your mastermind specialist subject? Probably independent music, 1979 to 1989, something like that, possibly that, or the first series of the wire, I don't know, or maybe Godfather films, I don't know, something I don't know. Well, your first answer there brought me on to my other question, which is one of my old time favourites. What would be your carpool karaoke tune? Well, I tend to avoid karaoke, they just, for everyone else's sake. So, my sort of glib ounce of that is actually, so in football teams, as you may or may not know, often new players have the opportunity to stand up and sing a song at an early dinner in the preseason. And so I've had to do that a couple of times, a few times, quite too many times. And I would tend to do a hacker from my school, which is, because it means I don't have to sing, but also it somehow represents where I come from, and so on. So probably the only thing that I would dare to do, and don't ask me to do it now, would be a hacker, and as long as I'm on a motorway and my windows are up, I'd be kind of going full force of them. I've got an emote of that in my mind, no, listen James, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been an incredibly interesting chat, and I think it's safe to say we've all learned something new that we can take away with us. And to our listeners, thank you for joining us on this episode of Who Steering This Thing. If you enjoy the discussion, make sure you follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We release new episodes every month sharing real stories and leadership lessons. And don't forget to visit our website at johnsonchermichel.com to learn more about how we, as a UK firm, of chartered accountants and business advisors, help businesses navigate, challenges, and steer towards success. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)