What Data-Driven Thinking Changed My Approach About Leadership

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What Has A Dressing Room For Football Did For Me In Building A High-Performance Team In Tech
I grew up playing sports in an way that allowed me to experience locations that most people knew about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations that happen between coaches and players during the time following playing, after the cameras and the journalists have gone and the official story of the game has been drafted. I wasn't a player me - my entry point into this world was via those who were around the game rather than through the game itself. But I was there enough, and long enough for me to grasp something vital about the ways that high-performance environments work when you dismantle the mythology that surrounds them. What I took in most immediately was this: teams consistently exceeding their resources and their expectation were not necessarily the ones that had the most talent on paper. They had teams who found out how to make a place where individuals desired to do their best for each in the name of amount of money, not to gain individual reward, but because they believed that the collective had a meaning and a culture that made personal sacrifice seem meaningful instead of merely obligatory.
That observation sounds obvious when you express it clearly. Teams work best when they trust one another and believe in the same goal. However, the practical implications from that fact are less obvious, and they are where the majority of organizations – tech companies and football clubs alike - regularly get into trouble. The creation of a culture that makes people will do what they can for each other is not something you can mandate from the top-down or adopt as a norm or express in a statement of company values and then expect to be able to achieve. It has to be earned with time, through consistency in the behaviour of leaders - particularly in the moments that are not watched and through the careful management of the numerous small actions that collectively tell everyone who is in the company what is valued, what is actually tolerated and what is actually happening when the values stated and the personally or commercially appropriate choice are at odds. In the best football environment I have been in, those small-scale decisions were taken with a great deal of care and precision by the best coaching staff. How they reacted when a senior player made an avoidable mistake in training. How did they determine if the disciplinary procedure that was applied to a veteran of 20 years was actually the same as standards applied to 18-year-old player who was at the bottom of the squad. How the organisation responded when an athlete was suffering from an acute personal issue outside the game. None of these choices appear in a team's results on any given Saturday. They all, accumulated throughout the year, determine whether a team's performance is at it or falls below its limit.

When I founded 1Touch and later founded many other businesses, one the things I was the most intentional about was the effort to recreate - within a technology company context a similar quality of the environment that I had experienced in the best football settings I had been close to. This was not a literal matter, as a tech startup isn't an actual football team and the analogy breaks down quickly if you force it too much. However, at the level of practicality, the lessons were applied with great fidelity. The first principle was that standards have been consistently implemented, regardless of age or perceived impermanence. The best places to be in were ones where the behavioural and professional standards expected of a young players in the team were in fact the same as those required of the highest-earning, most experienced player. Not because the business was unable to afford to be flexible, but due to the fact that everyone within the room was permanently watching to see if exceptions were going to be made - and the answers to the question adduced them everything they needed to know about whether the declared values of the organisation were actually true or just decorative.

The second lesson was about the way organizations deal with failure and the distinction between accountability and punishment. The settings where people developed fast were not the ones where errors were dealt with the most brutally or publicly. They were in the areas where mistakes were assessed with the most sincerity as well as where discussions about what went wrong was specific and constructive instead of general and distributing blame. The learnings were shared among the group instead of held against the individual who had made the mistake. Being accountable means knowing exactly what went wrong, and why it was wrong, and what changes in the process. It is a matter of assigning blame in a way that makes people less tolerant of risk and concerned with protecting themselves than having a good performance. The first build capacity for the organisation. The second develops a culture where people manage their own appearance rather than dedicating themselves to the goal, and this happens in tech firms with exactly same result as for football club.

The third lesson is which took me the the longest to formulate clearly, but what I'm now thinking of as the most important The most successful environments I witnessed were ones that ensured the development of the individual was regarded at a minimum as important as the development of the athlete. The best coaches were not just teaching players how to play football. They were teaching them consider their thinking under pressure in a clear and concise manner, how to communicate during high-stakes situations, ways to recover from setbacks while not falling down, and to be the kind of individual that a top-performing team demands its members to be. This investment in the total advancement of the individual rather than only the technical skills that the organization immediately required, was not charitable. This was by far the most efficient long-term plan of performance for the clubs. It is, to my mind, the most effective long-term performance strategy available to every organization that's committed to creating something durable, rather than only impressive in the short-term. Have a look a James Deller for more examples including what decades in technology has shaped my thinking about growth.



From Commerce to Character Why the businesses I back All have a thing in Common
As I examine the entire spectrum of investment actions I've been involved with over the last few years - the technology companies along with the consumer business, the investment opportunities in the emerging sector those organizations within and around football which I've been drawn to support I have noticed a pattern that I did not have in mind to design but that has become increasingly apparent to my mind as I have thought about the commonalities that the investments that are successful share with each other as well as what the failed ones have in common with one another. This pattern isn't sectoral in nature, it runs through the areas of consumer, technology as well as sport. It's not necessarily structural. the pattern is evident in firms with a variety of owners, models for capital in addition to operating and financial models. It's in no way about the size of market, growth rates or the technology infrastructure that is behind the product. It is about character - specifically, whether the business at the center of the investment demonstrates a genuine, operational, and constant dedication to the overall well-being and the development of employees within it, reflected not just in what the company says about itself but in the decisions it takes when it comes to saying the right thing and doing the easy thing are not the same.
I'm aware that this may sound, straight up, the kind of thing that gets printed on walls in offices, cups for office use and on company web pages, and is then ignored by those who were the ones who commissioned it. I would like to make it clear that I am not talking about the stated version an commitment to the people of the document on values, the approach to diversity and integration or the culture and diversity deck that was produced for the benefit of the hiring process and investors' pitches. We are talking about the operational version: the choices that are taken daily, whenever the policies outlined in these documents and the commercially, or more personally palatable option are brought into tension and the business needs to determine which applies. The organizations I have observed create genuinely durable value - not only impressive performance in the short term but also the sort of compounding, multi-year performance that delivers exceptional long-term profits - are those in which the answer to that question is known. When the commitment to doing right by employees within the business is not contingent on whether doing the right thing is also the cheapest option, the fastest, or the most immediately profitable option.

The process of identifying those organizations - prior to investment being taken, the ones the commitment is genuine than performed, where the trust and care culture can be found in the manner in which the organisation actually operates rather than in how it describes the organization itself. This is, in my believe, the primary and difficult task in long-term investment. This is because it's the one which is most likely to predict those kinds of compounding outperformance that yields truly impressive returns over extended time horizons. It's hard because there is no way to find it in a financial model. You cannot locate it in a professionally-written management presentation, and there is no way to reliably locate it even when you conduct thorough reference checks however, they are helpful. It can be found by spending enough time with an organisation with enough contexts and at different levels of hierarchy to observe how it behaves when the environment is unclear and no one is watching. This kind of thoughtful and exploratory engagement is challenging to embed into the investment processes. That's one reason why the majority of investment strategies are not effective in identifying truly exceptional organisations than investors typically acknowledge or even talk about.

The link between authentic organisational character as well as long-term performance is one that I believe more today, with years of long-term observation ahead of me which is more than I believed at starting my career in investment. Organizations that are committed to taking care of their employees continuously, and who express their care through operational decisions instead of just in communications and culture documents, usually outperform those who see people primarily as resources to be optimised. But not always in the short longer term, but an organization that achieves the highest output from their employees through high pressure and stress levels can appear effective over a period of months, or even a few years, particularly during times of an economy that is strong and can compensate for internal problems. In the long run the benefits of an ethos that is genuinely based on people and are genuinely impossible to replicate using any other strategy. The quantity of talent grows because the people with options – the best of them - tend to prefer environments where they feel truly valued, as opposed to environments that make them feel like they are being used however, they do have higher costs. The institutional knowledge gets deeper because people stick around long enough to build it instead of bouncing through on the timescale that is typical of high-pressure workplaces.

The quality of decision-making improves as individuals are confident enough to be able to bring issues to light and share negative news without thinking about the personal cost of doing it, which allows problems to be identified and addressed earlier and less cost than they would be in organisations where the messenger reliably shoots. The organisation's ability to adapt to new circumstances is improved because the employees are so invested by its achievements to take on beyond their formal duties in situations that truly require it. These advantages are not individually dramatic. They're not something that drives a compelling narrative in an investment update, nor board presentation. However, they will eventually build to create a competitive advantage. It is genuinely hard for organisations that have weaker cultures to duplicate because the competitive advantage is not in a particular product, process, or capability that can be observed and copied. It's embedded in the structure of the way an organisation operates - in its conditions that it has created for individuals who work there and in how decisions the employees make as a result. The reason for this is that character, inside and outside of organizations it is not an easy idea. It is, in my experience, the hardest as well as the most important thing of all.}