Alex Ferguson offers a textbook example of the ability to maintain a clear sense of direction while innovating. On the one hand he had views and principles that were pretty much unshakable. On the other he was always open to new thinking if it didn't contradict or undermine his fundamental stance, values or principles. Sebastian coe’s experience with his father Peter coe Someone without fixed preconceptions. my father had one great advantage over most other coaches who practically without exception were all former runners in that he brooked no specious or imagined thresholds simply because it was commonly held belief or being personally experienced. And while he discounted nothing out of hand, set in stone dogma and old wives tales got very short shrift. If it made no scientific sense it was consigned to the bin. I suspect that Campbell has had to have a tough word with himself from time to time, has learned lessons from the success of others as means of personal survival, and that 'Winners' is in fact the fruit of that very extended, hard-won and probably rather painful harvest. It's about the attitude you take to a challenge and how you use and develop the qualities you have to maximum effect in meeting that challenge. Technical skills take you so far . Mindset is what comes into play through other qualities required of a winner: mental strength determination resilience the ability to handle pressure and the ability to respond in the right way to failure.

Winning is about not being satisfied with anything less than winning. A winner is happy under pressure and doesn’t fall into a comfort zone. In any team, there can only be one leader. Tony Blair understood that perfectly which is why he appointed John Prescott, someone with no leadership qualities, to be his deputy. Winners also need to be resilient, have a good command of the facts and be good in a crisis. Who’d have thought it? I have been involved in a few political crises in my time and have always come out on top by bullying people, shouting a lot and being entirely economical with the truth. A winner always remembers that his own survival is more important than maintaining the integrity of the democratic process. Superb book with loads of interesting insights although the three that I want to remember are these: Most people spend most of their lives in this preliminary stage of wanting. They say they want something, but they really just want to want it.What does this mean?

You can have the greatest strategy going, with a perfectly capable leader and team, but without the right mindset these are nothing”. This part of the book explores what mindset is needed to win, the power of visualisation and then discusses the mindset of boxer Floyd Mayweather (a boxer who never lost a match in his professional career). The starting point, it seems was the key appointment of the business supremo, David Airlie as Lord Chamberlain to overhaul and rebrand the royal household in 1983 bringing a clear sense of purpose within a far more efficient business model. Critically though the strategy was underpinned by reference to long established core values: identity; continuity; recognition of achievement and service. I would say person who is a good leader is a person who has ideas and has a vision of the world. To have a vision of the world you have to have a philosophy of the world and values that are important for you so I must say that the first work a leader has to do is to analyze what he wants, what is important to him and the second stop is to make it real.

O.S.T. - Objective, Strategy, Tactics - the structure used to define your plan to success. The objective is likely to be fixed and very simple to define, strategy is what approach you'll take and is generally long term but must be communicated and brought up frequently to get everyone pulling in the same direction. Tactics on the other hand are the actions required to implement the strategy at any given moment in time, they are likely to change quite often and must take changing factors into account. Firstly, the power in the leader in finding the way to the right question at the right time to find the right solution for success. 2002 and Sir Clive Woodward was struggling to understand why the England rugby team started each game on fire but, despite intense conditioning programmes came out sluggishly for the second half. The first comes from the opening section on the ‘Holy Trinity’ of Strategy, Leadership and Teamship with a useful clarity on the differences between Objectives, Strategy and Tactics. What is it, he muses that enabled a deeply conservative institution to not only survive its ‘annus horribilis’ but go still further to reinvent itself and win the hearts and minds of generations globally? Even into the later chapters, the book still proves to be a consistently well written and occasionally very touching read. The discussion of the early life of Australian surfing champion Layne Beachley and how a challenging upbringing can develop characteristics essential to success certainly resonates with my personal challenging childhood, and yet when you see Beachley’s reaction when she finally reaches the top, you can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed at her reaction. But winners are never satisfied.

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I was hungry to talk to some other great winners. In football, there are few managers whose team has so consistently underperformed in the Champions League than Arsène Wenger, so I was keen to get his views. “Er ... the referee missed some key decisions ... er ... we should definitely have been awarded a penalty ... we were definitely the better side,” he told me. “Now why don’t you ferk erff and talk to José Mourinho. “Tactics and strategy mean nothing,” José said. “All you need to win the Premier League is a Russian oligarch to bankroll the club and a manager of my brilliance.” The main gist of Campbell’s work, as it says on the tin, is to identify the traits and qualities from the real life stories of winners across the worlds of sport and business. Including, as you would expect from Tony Blair’s communication guru, a fair number of ‘inside’ stories from his political experience. Objectives are the definition of your success – for Dave Brailsford and Team Sky this was to be the first British team to win the Tour de France. Strategy is a succinct statement of how you will achieve your target. For Apple it was quite simply, simplification which Campbell argues as the ultimate in sophisticated strategy and responsible for putting design above engineering that revolutionised the way we look at computers forever. For Sir Clive Woodward and England’s rugby team it was ‘excellence in everything’ that was the driving force for world cup glory in 2003. Alastair Campbell's foray into motivational writing is good enough to leave all such self-limiting prejudices floundering in its wake. This is an excellent book.

If you're an ambitious individual, looking forward to enhancing your approach to your goal, this book suits you. If you're an arrogant person, bursting with confidence, on the edge of thinking all other people are fools, this book even suits you better. Because it will slam you to the hard truth of reality, that there are plenty of winners with extraordinary qualities you can't even imagine. I still hold a paper clip and press it into my palm. That was taught to me by a lawyer in a libel case when he said the other side's only hope was to get me to lose my temper. He said it was a simple diversion strategy moving irritation caused by someone else to pain caused by myself. Another one taught to me by McCann is just to rub both thumbs and forefingers together and smile. This works because we are taking control of something we can control, those little actions and enjoying the fact only we know we're doing it Does 'Winners' give an insight, however indirectly, into what Tony Blair got from Alastair Campbell during those long-ago days of refulgent Labour success? Certainly, it feels that way. Reading 'Winners' is rather like having a trusted, plain-speaking, sometimes pretty merciless friend standing by my side, telling me to get myself together, think strategically and act purposefully. It's all good advice. It also works. Another major focus of Part 1 of the book is around leadership and teamship. In sport, politics and business, great leadership is vital. There are lots of people who dream of being a leader, but I loved the fact, Alastair mentioned the downside of leadership – “Big decisions are likely to be controversial. All leaders go through periods of being popular and unpopular.” Whilst being a leader is glamourised the fact is that leaders have to make unpopular decisions and it can be very lonely at the top. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington anticipated the impact digital technology would have on newspapers and decided to create an online platform for good journalism that was free and available to all.Overall, this book didn’t live up to my expectations. I am a big believer in cross-discipline/industry learning and I was excited to see how Alistair would highlight the lessons of winners in business, politics and sport and then explore how they could be applied in other contexts. However, whilst there were glimpses, such as when the F1 team helped the toothpaste factory, overall the cross-learning opportunities were slim. The book is split into sections, with each section starting off discussing different parts of the skills Alastair sees as essential to any sort of success, which then proceeds into a case study of an individual who Campbell feels shows the perfect example of the winning trait in action. For example, the first section of the book focuses on the holy grail of “Objective, Strategy, Tactics”, followed by chapters on how effective leadership and teamship is essential to carrying out a winning OST blueprint. After this, characters from the world of business, sport, and politics are given as examples to study, from Ana Wintour of Vogue fame to Jose Mourinho, possibly the most infamous non-player figure in the world of professional football right now. Campbell opted to go for themes first, then to fit the profiles amongst them, and his key themes could pretty much be boiled down to 'OST' and 'work hard'. OST is 'objective, strategy and tactics', and an interesting approach to succeeding, but Campbell tied himself in all sorts of knots to prove the validity of this theory, especially when challenged by Mourinho. This was quite revealing, as Mourinho is famously a reactive manager, whose tactics are his 'strategy', and as Campbell tried to fit this to his threory he contradicted his earlier claim that strategy has to come before the tactics. Without a shred of irony, Campbell later discusses how winners are always prepared to learn from their mistakes and challenge their misconceptions. We also learn you have to 'work hard' which obviously is needed to succeed, but the implication is that with hard work and a clear objective you too can win - when surely rivals of Team Sky also had the objective to win the Tour de France? Surely the Conservative party also had the objective to win the 1997 General Election? He would take small breaks during which he stood or sat in silence in between shots. When Haney asked him what he was doing Tiger Woods replied I'm just thinking about what we did. This would usually occur when they were working on something uncomfortable for woods and it represented his willingness to concentrate on weaknesses: he didn't just want to play better than everyone else he wanted to practice better too: it was like his “church”. If you still feel like you’re too comfortable, like life just feels too much like you’re winning already and that losing isn’t a threat, get yourself under pressure.