Sir Clive Woodward: The business of winning

There has been no shortage of rugby titles since the triumphant return of the England team from Australia last winter. But while players including Martin Johnson and Matt Dawson--and come September, Jonny Wilkinson and Will Greenwood--put down their life stories, their head coach has taken a different perspective of the path to World Cup glory.

Sir Clive Woodward stresses that Winning! The Story of England's Rise to Rugby World Cup Glory (Hodder&Stoughton, 13th September, h/b, £20, 0340836296) is not his autobiography. That may well follow, but for now Woodward has plenty to say on how he transformed the England side into the best and most professional team in the world.

Woodward is still finalising some of his book's contents, but he wants to make it very clear that this is not a quick cash-in on the World Cup. "Over the past few years I've been offered plenty of opportunities to write books--but I always said 'No', as I didn't think I had a story to tell. It was only after we won the World Cup that I sat down with Roddy [Hodder sports editor Roddy Bloomfield] and got excited by what we could do."

The result will be a blueprint for sports success drawn from the story of England's triumph. Part business book and part memoir, it certainly offers a good deal more than the conventional sportsman's story: Woodward uses business analogies to outline how to build a winning team and handle the challenges of both setbacks and success.

"Business has a huge fascination with sport, but my mindset has been the reverse: I think sport should be fascinated with business. England has some outstanding businesses, but we don't really have a great track record of success in sport."

As a player in the days when rugby union was still an amateur pursuit, Woodward juggled the game with a career at Xerox and the running of his own successful leasing company. The lessons he learned were hugely important in helping him to professionalise the sport when he returned to it as the head coach of England in 1997. "Very few people have been exposed to both worlds," he points out.

The book sketches three factors for success: a winning mindset, a winning organisation and what Woodward calls "winning core behaviours"--getting the small things right to make winning the bigger prize easier.

"You've got to find the little things you do better than anyone else--and if you've got enough of these then they all add up and you win."

Woodward overhauled the England team from a side that had grown accustomed to defeat by southern hemisphere teams to one that was the envy of world rugby. The book offers glimpses behind the scenes at England's camp, showing how Woodward re-evaluated the entire set-up from the players down to the coaching, touring and back-room teams, taking in every last detail of the organisation.

"When I arrived in 1997, I chucked all the traditional ways of doing things out of the window, and then brought them back in one by one and examined them."

Preparation is the key to success, Winning! stresses. "All our hard work culminated on 22nd November when Martin Johnson lifted the trophy in Australia. But while that was an incredible moment, what I'm even more proud of is England arriving at the World Cup tournament as favourites, and as the best prepared team in it. Sport is fickle--we could have made a mistake and lost the game. But for us to arrive in the position where we were equipped to win the cup is the real story."

Woodward also taught his players to be unafraid of making mistakes and to know that they could win from any situation--another lesson learned from business, where positive thinking is key."You'll never be successful in what you do unless you've got your mindset right, and that takes time," he argues. "It's also a very un-English thing to do."

Anyone expecting Woodward to settle old scores in the book will be disappointed. "There are no negatives--that would have betrayed the trust of the team. The England team set incredibly high standards for themselves--higher than any team or any business I have ever been involved with."

Meanwhile, a final chapter--"Beyond number one"--brings England's story since the World Cup up to date. After a couple of defeats in this year's Six Nations tournament, Woodward has tried to show how dealing with success can be as big a challenge as dealing with failure.

Winning! is written with business consultant and writer Fletcher Potanin--an old contact of Woodward and, ironically, an Australian. He has been in the UK since February to work full-time on the book; Woodward has maintained close involvement and will be actively promoting Winning! in September--in between games. "I've enjoyed writing it," he says. "It's been a great chance for me to take stock and learn the lessons of what we've achieved."

Hodder will be pitching Winning! to a wide audience. Woodward says: "I hope it will attract not just the rugby fans but any businessman and any sports fan. I'd like to think that any sports coach or businessman will be able to use it to make a big difference to their work."

Tom Holman