David Moyes, Manager of English Premier League club Everton FC is confirmed as the next world-class speaker to join the exclusive Leaders in Performance North American Summit, June 4 and 5. The two-day networking platform will bring together 300 elite coaches, club owners and senior level executives from around the globe to review best practises in high performance. Moyes will join Director of Pitching Development, Baltimore Orioles, Rick Peterson; High Performance Director, Red Bull, Andy Walshe; and NASA engineer, Adam Steltzner, among many.

Moyes is the third longest serving manager in the Premier League, behind Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson with over 10 years at Everton. The former footballer won EPL Manager of the year in 2003, 2005 and 2009 and is one of the most respected managers in the industry, receiving praise across the world of sport for his achievements at Everton.

The legendary Everton Manager will share his story of maximising performance and rejuvenating a team to achieve sustained excellence, with Everton proving to be one of the toughest and most resilient EPL teams, consistently finishing in the top six in the League. Moyes will lead discussion on embedding team culture, preparing for a big game and building a winning environment, despite operating with limited budget.

If you would like to learn more about Leaders in Performance USA or to enquire about opportunities to get involved in 2013, please contact one of the team on +44 (0) 207 042 8666 or email performance@leadersinevents.com.

In January 2013, Leaders in Performance introduced the inaugural masterclass to their fast-growing portfolio of exclusive, educational networking platforms. With detailed presentations from leading industry figures and comprehensive group discussions, they are designed to focus on individual disciplines and yield deeper insights for the top experts in sport.

The first masterclass, led by the NY Knicks, took place in January 2013, delivering unique insight into team building principles at a leading NBA franchise. Including topics such as player profiling and the recruitment process, it was attended by top performance professionals from elite organisations such as the Premier League, Chelsea, Manchester City, England Rugby, British Olympic Association, Arsenal and the Lawn Tennis Association.

Jean-Pierre Meersseman, the founder of AC Milan’s ground-breaking medical facility, MilanLab, led the second Leaders in Performance masterclass in February 2013. Jean-Pierre is a true leader in sports science and brought advanced science to the football field, while providing a detailed account of the structural, mental and biochemical tests that were carried out with AC Milan’s senior and youth teams to really impact performance.

The foundation of the Leaders masterclass is to provide a unique, intimate environment for the most senior names in sport to help nurture thought-leadership communities across the industry. Sessions with world-renowned McLaren F1, led by Geoff McGrath and Cricket South Africa, held at their HQ in Johannesburg have proved highly successful, with discussions focusing on athlete management, building winning environments and embedding team culture.

Leaders have a reputation for bringing new ideas to the industry and exploring performance from unique perspectives. They are currently lining up a series of masterclasses for 2013, with proposed sessions led by San Antonio Spurs, Coach to Andy Murray and the Royal Marines already in the pipeline.

To find out more about the Leaders masterclasses, click here.

Dr Andy Walshe, Director of High Performance, Red Bull is announced as the next top speaker to join the Leaders in Performance world-class panel at Bloomberg L.P. in New York, June 4 and 5, 2013. Bringing together an exclusive audience of 300 elite coaches, club owners and senior-level executives, Walshe will join Chief of Sport Performance, U.S Olympic Committee, Alan Ashley; top NASA engineer, Adam Steltzner; and Director of Pitching, Baltimore Orioles, Rick Peterson, among many at the leading sports performance summit.

Red Bull coach hundreds of international athletes, have run the championship winning Formula 1 team for the last 3 seasons, train the world’s top extreme sports stars and in late 2012 put a man on the edge of space for the world’s highest ever sky dive, in the now famous Stratos Project. Their overall program design is aimed at “de-mystifying talent” by researching and actively supporting the development of world-class performers in sport, culture and business.

As director of Red Bull’s athlete development programme, Walshe will share unique insight on achieving peak psychological and physical readiness, human potential and elite performance direction. The high performance expert will also reveal his experience of developing exclusive sports performance models and supervising a team of industry-leading sports scientists, biomechanics experts and sports psychologists, offering practical frameworks to the field of talent management.

The summit and networking platform will be limited to an exclusive audience of 300 of the world’s leading practitioners with 50% of attendees from North American sport and the other half from the rest of the world. It will be the first ever international gathering of performance professionals across multiple sports to take place in the world’s largest business market.

If you would like to learn more about Leaders in Performance USA or to enquire about opportunities to get involved in 2013, please contact one of the team on +44 (0) 207 042 8666 or email performance@leadersinevents.com.

The issue of player safety has been a burning issue in North American sport in recent years, with even President Obama weighing into the debate at the 2013 Super Bowl pre-game show, and there have been a number of recent research program announcements including the NFL’s $60m project with General Electric and a group of leading neurologists into brain injuries.

The panel at Leaders in Performance USA brings together the Chair of the NHL’s Concussion Working Group, Dr Ruben Echemendia; Co-Chairman of NFL’s Concussion Committee, Dr Rich Ellenbogen; the NBA’s Chief of Medical Affairs, Dr Jace Provo; and MLB’s Medical Director Dr Gary Green. This unique line-up is set to reveal how North American sport is collectively tackling the challenges of player safety with massive implications for world sport.

Welcoming top practitioners from around the globe to share philosophies and extend networks across the world of sport performance, Leaders in Performance will be limited to an exclusive gathering of 300 leading practitioners.

It will be the first international conference for performance professionals, with a world-class speaker panel that includes Michael Phelps’ coach Bob Bowman, NASA engineer Adam Steltzner, Team Jamaica Track and Field Head Coach Maurice Wilson, and Baltimore Orioles pitching guru Rick Peterson.

If you would like to learn more about Leaders in Performance USA or to enquire about opportunities to get involved in 2013, please contact one of the team on +44 (0) 207 042 8666 or email performance@leadersinevents.com.

When the charismatic Portuguese, José Mourinho, was appointed as manager of Chelsea FC in 2004, he marked his arrival to English football with his usual self-promotion, balancing between being charming and arrogant. As he famously declared at his first press conference in England: “I’m not one who comes straight out of a bottle – I’m a special one”

“The Special One” had arrived and he performed from day 1 by leading Chelsea to the club’s first league title in half a century. On Tuesday this week, Mourinho was back in England leading Real Madrid to a win against Manchester United in the Champions League – and again “The Special One” managed to position himself in the center of the spotlight when, two minutes before the final whistle, he hugged Sir Alex Ferguson and shook his hands almost apologetically, right before leaving the field whilst being filmed by every camera in the stadium. However, Mourinho’s self-promoting live show does not change the fact that the match at Old Trafford will mostly be remembered for the highly dubious red card to Manchester United’s Portuguese Nani in the 58th minute of the game, when United were in total control and leading 1-0. The sending-off changed the rhythm of the game completely, and Real Madrid ended up winning 2-1, whilst Old Trafford was about to boil over with rage because of the crucial refereeing error. But actually it was far from the first time that a referee’s error gave José Mourinho a decisive advantage in the Champions League, and it was not the first time that it had happened at Old Trafford. 10 years earlier, his career kicked off at Old Trafford sparked by a gigantic refereeing error when the young José Mourinho led FC Porto to a quarter final win in the Champions League against Manchester United. The first leg in Portugal ended 2-1 to FC Porto, and deep into the match at Old Trafford, United led 1-0 and were cruising towards the expected win. When Paul Scholes made it 2-0 it looked like game over for Mourinho and FC Porto, but the goal was incorrectly disallowed for offside. Costinha made it 1-1 in the final minute and FC Porto went on to the semi-finals with a comprehensive 3-2 victory. José Mourinho celebrated the goal by sliding on his knees on to the pitch and racing down the touchline to his players. As we know, FC Porto went on to win the Champions League that year with a 3-0 win against Monaco in the final, and a few months later José Mourinho was introduced as the new manager of Chelsea FC at the legendary press conference in London. The rest is history.

Mourinho in Valencia?

Over the years, “The Special One” has again and again been highlighted as an excellent team builder, a tactical genius and a hardworking coach far out of the ordinary, but the fact is that José Mounrinho’s career is built on much more than just “hard word, pride, effort and sweat”. Obviously he has benefitted from several wrong refereeing decisions at critical moments along the way. We are not just talking about small coincidences. We are talking about decisive, lucky events totally beyond his control. What happened on Tuesday this week, as well as in the game in 2003 at Old Trafford seems to have nothing to do with superior coaching skills. It was luck in its purest form, and it leads me to ask the question: What is it really that Mourinho’s success is built on, and what makes him so special? Is it luck rather than skill? Think about it! Where would Mourinho be today if Paul Scholes’ goal had not been disallowed in 2003, and Manchester United, as expected, had beaten FC Porto in the quarterfinals? Then he would probably not have been at Old Trafford this week, and would never have been presented as manager of Chelsea FC in 2004. This does not mean that José Mourinho is incompetent as a manager, but instead of coaching Real Madrid today, he might have been the manager of a club like Tottenham? Or Valencia? Or maybe he would still be in Portugal? With Tuesday’s win, José Mourinho now has a unique opportunity to win his third Champions League trophy with three different clubs. If he succeeds, he will be a living legend, and we will probably have forgotten that what really made “The Special One” so special was not only great skills, but first and foremost a lot of career-enhancing luck at crucial moments.

Ferguson was lucky too

My intention with this article is not to belittle José Mourinho and reduce his success solely to a matter of luck, but I believe that “the luck factor” is often underestimated when trying to explain success. So it is generally in life. We do not appreciate the luck that allows us to survive. We do not recall all the incidents when we nearly died, where our continued existence depended on toss of a coin – heads you live, tails you die. The same is true in football. Wrong offside decisions, disallowed goals and fouls that were never called are among the most decisive career moments for a football manager. Much of the success that we experience is built on a solid base of good luck, and the failures on bad luck. This is true not only for José Mourinho, but also for his opponent on Tuesday, Sir Alex Ferguson, he too has had good luck on his side at crucial times. When Ferguson was still a young Manchester United manager in 1990 his job was reportedly on the line at a FA Cup game against Nottingham Forest. In the final minutes the United striker Mark Robins scored the winning goal and saved the career of Ferguson. Watch the goal here:

United went on to win the Cup and Sir Alex never looked back. Had Robbins not scored that very late goal and had Nottingham Forrest’s equalizer a minute later not been disallowed Alex Ferguson would probably have lost his job. The question is: Where would he then have been today? It is hard to say, but at least he would not be the manager of Manchester United. This of course raises many questions: When we believe that what we see is unique talent, what we really see might just be the least unlucky managers so far. But how do we manage the luck factor? Can we even create our own luck? And if so how do you do it?

Return on luck

A few years ago the American management professor, Jim Collins, completed a nine-year research study of some of the most extreme business successes of modern times. He examined entrepreneurs who built small enterprises into companies that outperformed their industries by a factor of 10. The very nature of this study led him to the question: What is the role of luck in success? Could it be that leaders’ skills account for the difference between just meeting their industry’s average performance (1X success) and doubling it (2X)? But that luck accounts for all the difference between 2X and 10X? In his pursuit to deal with this question, Jim Collins faced a tough challenge: How on Earth could he go about quantifying something as elusive as “luck”? The breakthrough came when he started seeing luck as an event, not as some indefinable aura. He defined a “luck event” as one that met three tests. First, some significant aspect of the event occurs largely or entirely independent of the actions of the enterprise’s main actors. Second, the event has a potentially significant consequence — good or bad. And, third, it has some element of unpredictability. Jim Collins systematically found 230 significant luck events across the history of the study’s subjects. He considered good luck, bad luck, the timing of luck and the size of “luck spikes.” Adding up the evidence, he found that the best companies were not generally “luckier” than the comparison cases. They and the control group both had luck, good and bad, in comparable amounts, so the evidence led him to conclude that luck does not cause a superior business success. The crucial question is not, “Are you lucky?” but “Do you get a high return on luck? ” – what Collins ended up calling ROL (return on luck). Jim Collins uses Bill Gates and his journey towards building a great software company in the personal computer revolution as an example of this. Through one lens, you might see Bill Gates as incredibly lucky. He just happened to have been born into an upper-middle-class American family that had the resources to send him to a private school. His family happened to enroll him at Lakeside School in Seattle, which had a Teletype connection to a computer upon which he could learn to program — something that was unusual for schools in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He also just happened to have been born at the right time, coming of age as the advancement of microelectronics made the PC inevitable. Had he been born 10 years later, or even just five years later, he would have missed the moment. Bill Gates’ friend Paul Allen just happened to see a cover article in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, titled “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.” It was about the Altair, designed by a small company in Albuquerque. Gates and Allen had the idea to convert the programming language Basic into a product that could be used on the Altair, which would put them in position to be the first to sell such a product for a personal computer. Bill Gates went to college at Harvard, which just happened to have a PDP-10 computer upon which he could develop and test his ideas. He was really lucky, right? Yes, he was, but luck was not why Bill Gates became an outlier, Jim Collins writes in his book “Great by Choice”. For example, Gates was not the only person of his era who grew up in an upper middle-class American family. He was not the only person born in the mid-1950s who attended a secondary school with access to computing, and he was not the only person who went to a college with computer resources in the mid-’70s? Thousands of people could have done the same thing that Bill Gates did, at the same time. However, they did not. The difference between him and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Gates went further, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. This is the important difference. Luck, good or bad, happens to everyone, whether we like it or not. But when we look at the outliers, we see people like Mr. Gates who grab luck events and make much more of them. Bill Gates did not just get a lucky break and cash in his chips. He kept pushing, driving, working — and sustained that effort for more than two decades. This idea leads us back to Tuesday night when Nani was sent-off and Real Madrid took the lead. What did José Mourinho do just after the red card? He promptly sent the Croatian creator Luka Modric on to the pitch, who ended up making the difference with a goal and an assist. That is not luck – that is return on luck. Perhaps it is in fact precisely what makes “the special one” so special: He seems to have a unique ability to capitalize on the luck he gets. That is a truly special skill.

Rasmus Ankersen is an ex-footballer, a bestselling author, a speaker on performance development and a trusted advisor to businesses and athletes around the world.
The Gold Mine Effect

THIS WEEK’S ARTICLES:
GARY ANDERSON: CONSISTENT SYNCHRONICITY – THE ITALIAN COFFEE EFFECT
TONY FAULKNER: HOW NEUROSCIENCE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO DEVELOP COACHES AND PLAYERS
PROZONE: FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY – CAN UEFA’S REGULATION CHANGE THE GAME
BLAKE WOOSTER: REDEFINING THE PLAYER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM IN FOOTBALL

The views of our regular columnists are independent, and as such do not represent those of Leaders in Performance.

Last month, tributes came flooding in for Bobby Moore, as the football world paid homage to one of football’s greatest ever players on the 20th anniversary of his passing. Moore of course led England to World Cup success on home soil in 1966 and Bobby Charlton recently described Moore as “a born captain, a leader”.

I’ve only ever had the pleasure of watching (on video) Moore play one game – the ’66 Final against Germany (more on that in just a moment) – but it seems to me that he was the type of player who led by majestic example.

Sam Allardyce recently commented that Moore…
“almost seemed to play the game in slow motion. When everyone else was rushing around, he was cool, calm and always had the time to do what he wanted.”

In the modern game, however, we tend to associate leadership with tough characters – gutsy players who roll their sleeves up and never surrender. Flashback to Terry Butcher with blood-drenched shirt and head-bandage – or more recently the hard-knocks and verbal dressing-downs handed out by the likes of Roy Keane and Jamie Carragher – and you get the idea.

When teams are flying high, we look to such characters and praise their ‘natural leadership’. Similarly when teams go through a rough patch, we cite the lack of ‘tough leaders’ in the ranks as the primary shortfall – Arsenal is often the example cited in the post- Tony Adams and Patrick Viera era.

Back to Moore for a moment. Below is the Prozone pass map distribution of Moore and his centre-back partner Jack Charlton during the ’66 World Cup Final:

NB: direction of attack = left to right, blue arrows = successful passes, red arrows = unsuccessful passes.

The visualisation tells its own story about the type of players they were on the field and perhaps their own unique style of leadership. Even more glaring is how football subsequently defined Moore’s and Charlton’s respective leadership capabilities after their playing days. While Moore was essentially shunned by The FA (he apparently didn’t even receive a response after applying for the England manager’s job in 1977), ‘Big Jack’ – seemingly a natural leader – went on to manage for both club and country (and pretty successfully too it should be said).

Leadership is essentially the ability to inspire performance through others to reach a common goal. In which case messrs Keane, Carragher, Butcher, Adams and Big Jack would seemingly qualify as great leaders.

But what about other less likely candidates who perhaps lack the physical stature, but arguably stimulate teammates through their own ‘superstar’ performances – Bale, Suarez, Cazorla? Jack Wilshere’s recent virtuoso performance against Brazil at Wembley – where he took the game to the World’s most successful national team with a display of creativity, intelligence and spirit – is case in point. Surely such talents will inspire performance through others in their own inimitable way?

A cautionary word however… In his best-selling business book ‘Good to Great’ Jim Collins warns of how the charismatic leader can be as much a liability as an asset. The same can be true in sport.

In basketball, ‘Ewing Theory’ is used to describe when a team’s results improve after their ‘star player’ leaves the team (in the 1999 NBA playoff series, the Knicks lost Patrick Ewing to injury, yet go went on to win three of the next four games and advance to the NBA finals).

Similarly in football, there have been examples where teams have actually produced better results without their so called talisman being on the field. The paradox being that because – in this case – Gerrard is such a brilliant player, teammates will invariably seek out the ‘Gerrard pass’ rather than the best pass in a given situation.

Having studied and observed leadership in its many forms over the past few years, there is little doubt that no one style offers a holistic winning formula. Football would do well therefore to move away from the stereotype of a leader as only someone who shouts the loudest in the dressing room and sweats the most on the field.

Maybe they’re sweating from having to recover from being out of position – something that Moore rarely ever needed to do owing to his composure, anticipation and game intelligence.

Can we measure true leadership in football? Any takers?

Blake Wooster is Business Development Director at Prozone Sports.
@BlakeyGW

THIS WEEK’S ARTICLES:
GARY ANDERSON: CONSISTENT SYNCHRONICITY – THE ITALIAN COFFEE EFFECT
TONY FAULKNER: HOW NEUROSCIENCE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO DEVELOP COACHES AND PLAYERS
RASMUS ANKERSON: THE LUCKY ONE
PROZONE: FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY – CAN UEFA’S REGULATION CHANGE THE GAME

The views of our regular columnists are independent, and as such do not represent those of Leaders in Performance.

Dave Richardson interviews Gary Anderson Performance Director of British Bobsleigh

It turns out that we’re not only quite good at bobsleigh, we actually invented it!

Now that’s a great way to start an interview. Back in 1890 a few English gents holidaying in Switzerland were credited (in some quarters) with inventing the sport of bobsleigh. We’ve come a long way since those early tobogganing years with Britain being one of the lead nations vying for medals at the forthcoming winter Olympic Games in Sochi 2014.

Gary Anderson is at the helm. Gary isn’t a former British Bobsleigh great but he does possess a sporting pedigree in track and field and volleyball. So how does a former track and field athlete with a few outings for Great British volleyball end up as the performance director for British Bobsleigh?

His performance days were culled early due to knee problems but a sports science degree provided him with an entry point to work as a ‘rehabilitation and conditioning’ coach in professional football. He describes the ‘inevitable sacking culture’ of football as a place that he didn’t want to hang around in, even if he had a choice.

After a short stint in academia Gary soon realised that he was more suited to coaching and returned to track and field. His time within the circles of UK Sport and subsequently the British Olympic Association exposed him to an array of different sports, people and environments.

This experience eventually led to him taking up a post with the British curling team, “I was called into curling to manage a process rather than have anything to do with the sport. It was more about setting up an environment for athletes that was a full-time Olympic environment.”

Eventually, the British Bobsleigh team came calling (and calling). They called about 5 times before Gary, despite the warnings of others, decided to take the job in 2010.

Yes, we were good a bobsleigh, we even have a gold medal from Nash and Dixon, 1968 and a bronze from Olsson, Ward, Attwood and Rumbolt in 1998, but when Gary took over we were in a bit of a state.

He felt differently, “there was something about the sport that I felt we could turn around… in order to do that, a culture change had to happen… athletes had to want to adopt a system. The first 6 months in the sport I found it very, very, difficult. I had to make some very tough decisions and change things. People had to re-apply for their jobs, certain athletes probably saw that their future was not in a system that I was proposing and so there was some reluctance of acceptance at first.”

As we know culture is an immense beast and (typically) resistant to change, but Gary surrounded himself with good people, people he could trust. He explained that the early days were tough, really tough; resignation was a daily thought but having the full support of Sir Andrew Ridgway, Chairman of British Bobsleigh, and the board was critical in his ability to move the sport forward.

At the time, the funding for British Bobsleigh was poor yet the target was to be in the medal zone in Sochi 2014.

“We needed investment from UK Sport, so we had to get some quick wins, a bit like football… so we looked at the athletes we had, we looked at the upcoming competitions and we looked at the criteria that UK Sport wanted in order for us to be an investable sport. Anything or anybody that didn’t fit within that remit were surplus to our requirements. So, that was the tough course we had to take.

It sounds ruthless but I tried to be compassionately ruthless throughout. Everybody had a job to do. In our first year, we targeted the World Junior Championships in order to illustrate to UK Sport that we had the potential to perform on another level and in Paula Walker, one of our junior female drivers, she made her debut in the World Cup just prior to the Olympics in Vancouver, we knew that we had a chance of medalling at the World Junior Championships.

It went even better than that when she became World Junior Champion, which ticked one of the boxes for UK Sport and suddenly we were on their investment radar. Throughout the years leading into that we set these small targets for all our crews and gradually we enhanced the performances which attracted more investment that now gives us the resources for us to compete with the best in the world.

It was small steps, but it was about understanding the criteria to get this investment rather than trying and go out and win world medals straight away. It was the building block process of putting it in place.”

The model is pretty clear, a vision, followed by the appointment of people that fit, share and believe alongside a recognition that, like it or not, you are a hostage to the funding criteria. The equation is simple, no funding equals no progression.

Gary equates success and progression to the quality of his staff and his athletes. His staff are afforded a high degree of accountability, they need to be resilient and understand that they have to take knock backs to move forward.

“We know it’s not going to be right every time so I need staff that accept that. I also need staff that share the philosophy that we are a filter to the athlete… We can’t bombard the athlete with all this information. We need technical experts that can interpret data from sports scientists and strength and conditioning coaches.

We need to make everything we do athlete friendly so that when it gets to the athlete it is a simple, but very clear, message and the athlete undertakes it knowing it’s going to make them better. So all the staff have to sign up to that philosophy.”

British Bobsleigh, as with many of our Olympic sports, is surrounded by a complex array of support staff including coaches, strength and conditioning staff, physiologists, biomechanists, sport psychologists and physiotherapists etcetera.

Not all of the staff are full-time or even based in England or at Bobsleigh headquarters in Bath. As with sports such as sailing, cycling and Formula One bobsleigh is also reliant on technical and engineering expertise.

Indeed, the modern day bobsleigh was fashioned by engineers based in Leeds prior to the 1980 winter Olympics and subsequently copied worldwide. The links to Formula One go even further than this analogy as British Bobsleigh now works very closely with McLaren in the development of their sleds.

McLaren were at Leaders the other year and presented a clinical approach to the examination of the minutiae of car technology and driver characteristics in order to enhance performance.

The margins of success and failure in the bobsleigh are similarly miniscule, “Every 1,000th of a second we can gain is of benefit to us and we use McLaren’s philosophy in that all of the technology we put into our sled is important to us. Technology is just as important as all the other areas. My job is to bring all of those areas together so that when you get the equals sign at the end of the equation the output is greater than the input… we look at aerodynamics, we look at vibration, we look at the ice and runner relationships…”

The recent World Championships saw the British team finish 5th; missing out on a bronze medal by a mere 700ths of a second.

Gary and his team work closely with the athlete and the team within the sled. He explained that bobsleigh is a gravity sport, so the start and the subsequent weight distribution in the sled are critical. Boblseigh in the UK, as in most countries, with the exception of Germany, is a talent transfer sport. Specifically, strong and fast athletes from other sports find their way in to bobsleigh. The push track at headquarters in Bath allows for the assessment of speed and strength tests for both individuals and the team.

“We then have a permutation of having to work out who our fastest, strongest crews are because it’s not necessarily the 3 fastest athletes together that will produce the velocity we require at the start.”

The combination of the team has led Gary and his colleagues to examine the synchronicity of the athletes during the starting run.

“We are working on the synchronisation of striding when we are pushing the sled with a view to developing a similar balance of athlete either side of the sled… In the past it’s been a case of let’s get the 3 fastest and the best driver together and that should make the best crew.

I call it the Italian coffee effect; you know in the UK you can have the best coffee maker, the best coffee, have the best water quality, the best pressure in your coffee machine, but it never tastes the same as what it is when you drink it in Milan!

And that’s similar to athletes you can have the 4 fastest guys but unless they work in synchronisation at the right time on the sled you might not get the best velocity. The coaches that I’ve brought into the programme understand that and work to that.”

The biggest compliment for Gary is that the Germans, one of the leading bobsleigh nations, have started to watch the British team on the track and appear to have adopted a similar synchronisation strategy. It seems that, in bobsleigh, everybody copies us!

The competitive season for Bobsleigh runs from November through to February with pre-season starting in October. As with Formula One and cycling, the season is a tour based model that, in bobsleigh, repeats itself eight times throughout the season.

The staff and the athletes do ‘the tour’. Every week sees a different venue with a fixed timetable of events. Race day is Friday; Saturday and Sunday are travel days with Tuesday and Thursday set aside for training.

It’s a gruelling period of time; time away from home and time way from the family. Gary finds himself in different parts of the world assessing the quality of his teams. He continually monitors performance and performance markers. The selection criteria for athletes cannot just focus on strength, power, speed and the ability to cope with the fear of hurtling down the ice at 90mph.

Athletes need to possess an ability to cope with the emotional drain of being away from home for 10-12 weeks at a time. Inevitably there are casualties, but this is the culture of the sport.

“We don’t have the luxury of drip feeding people into it. They have to go out there and immerse themselves in it. We have a strong sport psychology and lifestyle programme which helps our athletes and our staff cope with this.”

Gary requires his athletes and staff to accept and cope with the lifestyle that comes with being involved with bobsleigh. The culture demands that his athletes, and staff, are hardy, flexible and adaptable.

Whilst British Bobsleigh is not blessed with the budget of say Team Sky, Gary still tries to ensure that, whilst on tour, everything is in place to enable optimum performance.

“We do it within the budget we have. Unfortunately, we don’t have the big budget, but that’s no excuse, we try and do everything right. We’re not able to send people forward to prepare the next venue, but we go and visit these places during the previous summer period. We have a look and assess the venue, accommodation etcetera.

This summer I’m going to be looking at various venues in Russia for operations and also for a holding camp so that we are fully prepared before we go to places. We would never go to an untested hotel or anything like that. We would always have either been there before or sent someone there prior to have a look.”

At the time of writing, Sochi 2014 is just over 300 days away. McLaren have developed a 3D map of the Sochi track and the team have already been there for a training week, “…our drivers like the Sochi track, so that’s a big box ticked. Forget about all this sport science, forget about all the engineering science etcetera, the biggest box for me, was did our drivers like it?

I mean, did they feel comfortable. The start profile of the track allows us to be the fastest in the world and the set up of the track suits our pilot’s style of driving. For one reason or another, drivers like certain types of tracks and this helps us go there with a heightened confidence… we still have to qualify!

So we can’t say right we’re going to concentrate on Sochi it doesn’t matter about the other results because we still have to qualify. The men have to be top 20 in the world and the women top 14 in the world. So we do need some results along the way.”

The sentiments here suggest that it’s not just the athletic ability of the team, the synchronisation of the sprint, the sports science support or the technological preparation that needs to be right; Gary wants more.

The team ‘liking’, suiting or fitting the track, however you want to put it, is a welcome bonus.

“If all my athletes and staff do the best that they can and we go to the games with optimal preparation that’s all I can ask of them, because that’s all we can do. What I do know is, given the landscape at the moment, if they do go the best they can then they will bring medals home… we can’t control what the Russians do, what the Americans do, what the Germans do, we can’t control that. All we can do is what we do and do it the best we can and if we do that we’ve got a chance.”

The future of British Bobsleigh is in capable hands. Gary’s vision is supported by his staff, his athletes and the board. He’s in an Olympic cycle which, unlike other sports, affords him time to influence and shape the culture of British Bobsleigh in line with his own ideology; to create a resilient, can do mentality. His message is clear, understandable, believable and unfailing.

“Be consistent with your message. I think that’s the key. What I have found when managing athletes is if you’re consistent with them they might not like what they’re hearing but they understand what they’re hearing and it’s a consistent message. As soon as you become inconsistent athletes get confused and that’s unfair because you give the wrong message. If you believe in something that much just keep being resilient and just keep on working at it because if it is destined to work it will do.”

Other sports would do well to embrace such sentiments. The bravery of the chairman and the board, Gary, his staff and his athletes to carry and action such a philosophy bodes well for British Bobsleigh’s future, Sochi 2014 and beyond.

Dave Richardson PhD is a specialist in youth development, organisational culture and community and the assistant director of the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University

THIS WEEK’S ARTICLES:
TONY FAULKNER: HOW NEUROSCIENCE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO DEVELOP COACHES AND PLAYERS
RASMUS ANKERSON: THE LUCKY ONE
PROZONE: FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY – CAN UEFA’S REGULATION CHANGE THE GAME
BLAKE WOOSTER: REDEFINING THE PLAYER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM IN FOOTBALL

The views of our regular columnists are independent, and as such do not represent those of Leaders in Performance.

There has been much discussion about the introduction of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations, but how exactly will the new legislation impact football on a practical level?

Deportivo La Coruña recently became the latest club to enter administration after failing to reach an agreement with the Spanish tax authorities and revealing that it had debts of nearly €100m. It was another stark reminder of the financial fragility that pervades football today and how quickly a club’s fortunes can turn sour.

Having graced the heights of the game in the early 2000s, Depor claimed the La Liga title in 1999/00 and became a regular feature in the Champions League. Indeed, during the 2000/01 season the club reached the quarter finals of Europe’s premier competition, eventually being eliminated by Leeds United, a club that would ultimately suffer an even more dramatic financial fall.

Spanish Money Worries

Of course, Deportivo are not the only Spanish club to be suffering financially. Eight La Liga teams are now either under or emerging from bankruptcy protection. One of these clubs is Valencia, the team that eventually knocked Leeds out at the semi-final stage of the 2000/01 Champions League.

Under pressure from the authorities, Spanish football has promised to adopt stricter financial controls amid fears of an ‘economic coma’. These regulations include a collective agreement to ensure more equal distribution of the revenues currently monopolised by Barcelona and Real Madrid.

In Deloitte’s recently published Football Money League, these giants of world football ensured a Spanish one-two in earning for the fourth consecutive year, with Real Madrid becoming the first sports club to surpass the €500m revenue threshold over a single twelve-month period. Yet while Real and Barcelona revel in the riches generated by a history of success, others – including Jose Maria Gay de Liebana, Spain’s most prominent football economist – say that Spanish football will “kill itself” within five years unless the landscape changes drastically.

To combat the financial self-destruction that has become all too common in European football, UEFA have introduced their Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations to force teams to balance their books and live within their means. With financial prudence now (supposedly) a prerequisite of competition, how will these unprecedented regulatory changes affect the game at a practical level?

Investment in Youth

By 2018, clubs are expected to bring their annual losses below £8.8m, but any money spent on youth development, infrastructure and training facilities will be omitted from the calculation. In England, additional measures designed to cultivate more home grown talent include the opening of St George’s Park, the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) and the latest television rights deal negotiated by Premier League executives.

Such strategic endeavours should encourage clubs to think more long-term and create an environment that facilitates a more organic approach to the development of talent. However, unless similar patience is afforded to the first team manager (the average tenure of whom is just 1.7 years according to figures from the League Managers Association), how likely is it that managers will be inclined to give youth a chance?

Pay As You Play

The Liverpool Echo recently reported that Liverpool have become one of the first clubs to adopt a new approach to player contracts with lower basic salaries and more performance-related bonuses. Managing Director Ian Ayre commented that, “If a player performs, then he will be rewarded…that’s the philosophy of the contracts we are offering and signing.”

Similarly, the Qatar Stars League (QSL), who manage contracts centrally, use Prozone metrics to inform their player remuneration strategy. The success of such innovations will inevitably be dependent on how performance is measured – football often mistakenly focusses on quantity over quality (for example, the distance a player covers in a game is rarely an indicator of effective performance). The more accurate and efficient these measurements are, the more effective these new contractual arrangements will be.

It’s also possible to place a performance-based valuation on a player, but unless such a valuation is adopted centrally by football’s decision-makers then clubs will always be prepared to pay over the odds for a player.

Enhanced Player Trading

Football continues to modernise its approach to player recruitment and the due diligence processes that underpin it. However, sports recruitment is continually challenged by the inherent uniqueness of the industry itself. Sports are unique in that players contracted to clubs are tangible assets. Moreover, they’re depreciating assets who will lose value as they mature past their optimum player age.

With FFP encouraging clubs to generate more revenue (and not just cut back), there will inevitably be a greater focus on ‘asset management’, the process of assessing the best time to sell a player during his talent lifecycle. By better measuring performance levels of players throughout their careers, clubs can make better informed decisions around player trading and be far more efficient in their transfer dealings.

The pioneer in performance analysis, Prozone has been empowering data with meaning since 1998. Working with football’s elite, we provide expert technology and consultancy to create world-leading insights.

Analysing objective data from more than 10,000 games every season, we help 250 clubs across five continents to achieve genuine on-field advantage.

THIS WEEK’S ARTICLES:
GARY ANDERSON: CONSISTENT SYNCHRONICITY – THE ITALIAN COFFEE EFFECT
TONY FAULKNER: HOW NEUROSCIENCE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO DEVELOP COACHES AND PLAYERS
RASMUS ANKERSON: THE LUCKY ONE
BLAKE WOOSTER: REDEFINING THE PLAYER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM IN FOOTBALL

The views of our regular columnists are independent, and as such do not represent those of Leaders in Performance.

Coaching qualifications in football need to educate coaches to understand the teenage brain.

Developing the next generation of professional footballers through clubs academy programmes is requiring a greater understanding of the teenage brain and how it functions within the environment. The field of neuroscience has unearthed findings that have driven significant improvements in performance across many leadership business domains, which have the potential to cross over into coach and player development.

The brain of a child and adolescent functions differently than that of a ‘normal’ adult brain, specifically when we look at managing emotions and making decisions.

The brains primary role is to maximize reward and minimize danger. Simply put our brains are directed to engage with an emotion that we enjoy yet, due to the biological development of the adolescent brain our emotional impulses will often over ride our ability to rationalize our emotions causing behaviours to be impulsive. Research shows that the teenage brain’s cognitive and emotional systems do not develop at the same rate. During this teenage period the brain constantly changes its physical identity through developmental restructuring. This will often affect how adolescents think, feel and behave. Such change can have a significant effect on an adolescent’s ‘higher order’ functions such as decisions-making, focusing their attention, managing their emotions having an awareness of other people’s intentions as well as their own. These abilities are some of the last regions of the brain to develop and may not fully mature until well into your mid 20’s. Understanding this explains why, in uncertain or risky situations, teenagers can act impulsively with emotive decision-making both on and off the pitch. This is because the teenage brain due to the chemical imbalance, new experiences and greater responsibility expected of them to name a few, compared with a child’s and adults brain has greater levels of interference it must learn to deal with. The question that all coaches want to know is “can we do anything to train these brain skills” – well the findings coming out of the neuroscience field is producing some very positive outcomes which potentially will improve the quality of our talent development programmes.

Although the field is still in its early days there are some basic statements about the brain that can aid how we train our players. For example evidence from the field of neuroscience research in human performance will state that:

• Current ways of trying to bring people to insight are likely ineffective – relate this to how team talks, meetings are delivered, how are brains have evolved may now require coaches to facilitate such team talks differently, that is of course if the intent is for the learning to stick with the players and not the coach
• Suppressing the expression of emotions actually increases the emotion which then inhibits thinking and does not decrease the emotion. Yet suppression is the strategy of choice – A young player who has this knowledge along with the coping tools to control this response is much greater equipped to enhance performance

Brain research is providing fresh insights into how we can develop concentration, I have lost count the amount of times I’ve heard someone say to the player – “concentrate harder”, what we should be saying is do we consciously know how to train concentration specific to playing football. In order to answer this we need to better understand;

• Which part of the brain plays a major role in concentration
• Can we activate this part of the brain in order to develop the skill of concentration
• Why is this even more challenging in our younger players
• How do we implement this into our training programmes

With this understanding we can train concentration as apposed to telling someone to concentrate without giving them the tools to do so.

Another interesting finding from neuroscience is the brain is a social organ – meaning even though people fall on a continuum, some being more social than others, the brain functions much more efficiently when it feels socially excepted as apposed to rejected. It is known that social exclusion or social threat will actually cause through the brain feelings of pain.

As neuroscience is weaving its way through the business world driving human performance with significant results talent development programmes within academy and professional football potentially could break a trend and engage as pioneers.

Tony Faulkner
Founder Provelop
www.provelop.org

Tony is currently conducting a PhD study looking into the psychological characteristics for developing excellence in academy and professional football

THIS WEEK’S ARTICLES:
GARY ANDERSON: CONSISTENT SYNCHRONICITY – THE ITALIAN COFFEE EFFECT
RASMUS ANKERSON: THE LUCKY ONE
PROZONE: FINANCIAL FAIR PLAY – CAN UEFA’S REGULATION CHANGE THE GAME
BLAKE WOOSTER: REDEFINING THE PLAYER LEADERSHIP PARADIGM IN FOOTBALL

The views of our regular columnists are independent, and as such do not represent those of Leaders in Performance.

The cutting-edge sports performance summit, which is dedicated to elite coaches, club owners and top executives today, confirmed another set of world-class speakers for its first-ever North American conference, June 4 and 5 at the impressive Bloomberg headquarters in New York.

Maurice Wilson, Jamaican National Track and Field Team Head Coach (2012 Olympic Games) and Rick Peterson, Director of Pitching Development – Baltimore Orioles are announced as the next in line to join the fast-growing speaker panel at Leaders in Performance USA. Both speakers will lead discussions alongside top NASA Engineer, Adam Steltzner, Chief of Sport Performance, U.S Olympic Committee, Alan Ashley and author of New York Times Bestseller Talent Code, Dan Coyle.

Wilson, the Head Coach who led the Jamaican team to 12 medals at the London Olympics, will reveal the key performance techniques of elite runners including, record-breaking gold medallist Usain Bolt and the environment and culture behind the phenomenal success of Jamaican sprinters over the last 5 years. The renowned sprint expert will also share the training philosophies and protocol that are at the heart of the Jamaican sprint success, including unique insight on training phases and injury prevention methods.

Pitching guru, Rick Peterson is known throughout professional baseball as the leading practitioner for peak performance coaching. For over three decades, Peterson has combined athletic skills with human behaviour to help top athletes reach new milestones and achieve breakthrough results. Renowned for his unique use of biomechanical research and psychological principles to help players improve their pitching motions, Peterson will share his experience of key performance-based behaviours and the methodologies used to train the Oakland A’s, Milwaukee Brewers, New York Mets and the Baltimore Orioles among many.

Welcoming top practitioners from around the globe to share philosophies and extend networks across the world of sport performance, the summit will be limited to an exclusive, invitation-only gathering of 300 attendees. If you would like to learn more about Leaders in Performance USA or to enquire about opportunities to get involved in 2013, please contact one of the team on +44 (0) 207 042 8666 or email performance@leadersinevents.com