There are more books than ever out there to inspire and instruct. Alas, there are also many others that are more, shall we say, humdrum, and which do less to repay the time spent reading. Sometimes it’s hard to do the wheat/chaff sort, so I’d like to recommend one that I came across recently, which I found informative and thrilling in equal measure.
It’s called “Will it Make the Boat Go Faster?: Olympic-winning Strategies for Everyday Success” and it’s Ben Hunt-Davis’ story of how the British Men’s Eights Rowing Team navigated the long hard journey to finally winning Gold at the 2000 Australian Olympics.
Ben describes in lively detail the trials and tribulations of achieving his lifetime ambition, and more importantly the strategies the team used to achieve their long-thought-impossible dream. He then lays out simple techniques that teams of all sorts, sporting or otherwise, can use to achieve their goals – though it’s worth bearing in mind, “simple” does not necessarily mean “easy”.
In the end, says Hunt-Davis, teams only need 2 things to send them off on the road to success…
- an agreed common goal
- a code of conduct – an agreed set of desirable and undesirable behaviours
…and everything else after that, all the hard work and commitment, becomes much easier to keep in focus.
You can find details of this book, and a dozen more that I have found incredibly useful and inspiring, on my Recommended Reading page
Teamwork
An effective and efficient work team powers through chores because everyone is committed to the bigger team goals. A team-building day from Let’s Talk can be the springboard you need to enable your team to really fly. Click here for further information.
Then contact me.
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You will be delighted to hear Jon that we recently had the pleasure of hearing Ben speak (I think now for the third time) and introducing him to one of our favourite clients. He was great as ever and we also used the book and many of the key messages to help design an effective event.
Regards, Alan
ps I still intend to make the impro!