‘Winners are losers who evaluate themselves fully’

As we would expect from The Marketing Society, we helped Advertising Week Europe kick off on its first day with a session on inspirational leadership. Our event saw Alastair Campbell being interviewed about his new book ‘Winners’ (which shot to No 1 in the book charts in its first week) by Richard Kilgarriff @Bookomi. (Fittingly for the man who worked hard to turn New Labour into a religion our session took place at St James’s Church in Piccadilly - a large wooden cross perfectly poised on the stage next to him.)
 
Campbell eloquently and endearingly delivered the packed church with stories and insights from his inspirational leadership travels from Merkel to Mourinho, from Wintour to Branson, from Obama to Blair, from Huffington to Brailsford and beyond. His new book forensically details these interviews and observations and he then draws his lessons in how the great winners win. Every delegate was given a copy of the book, which could also be signed by Campbell, if wished.

We may already know many of the lessons, but Campbell has not only spoken to the most powerful and most famous across all walks of life and across the world to deliver his very thorough findings but he has also executed these findings in a thematic way. Here are just three lessons he highlighted from his investigations and which particularly resonated with me and our work at The Marketing Society:
 
1. Strategy is everything
Most people in politics and business and sport are often driven by a series of tactics (we must make sure we send him our Marketing Society Manifesto for Marketing!).Successful leaders always have a clearly defined strategy and importantly have worked out the steps to get there – allowing for appropriate adjustments along the way of course. He cites Merkel as someone who is unwavering in her strategy regardless of the constant turbulence around her (maybe not surprisingly he considers Cameron not to be quite as consistent in this regard!)  He rightly points out that the best strategy – such as New Labour’s ‘modernisation’  - is also simple and succinct.

2. Winners only ever think about how they are going to win
He cites Branson and Mourinho in particular here. However they are very often driven on by the fear of losing or being left behind as others innovate around them. As he says ‘winners are the losers who evaluate themselves fully when they have lost’. He claims that even when New Labour were 30 points ahead they started every morning meeting interrogating how they could lose – it was this lack of complacency that helped drive them on to success. He says he never actually enjoyed the winning of the three elections as he immediately went onto focus on to how they could win the next.
 
3. Individual winners are actually a team of winners
He again tells us about Merkel here and how she has a personal stylist so the media focus is never on what she is wearing but on what she says and does. Wintour, he says, claims she has no idea how to put on a fashion show or design a garment but she knows how to put a magazine together that her readers will love. He also warns against leaders becomes too detached from their teams and refusing to take criticism and challenge – he sees one of Blair’s greatest talents was in avoiding this.

Campbell is an entertaining and intelligent speaker and the perfect way to kick off a week of inspiration and lessons in the art of brilliant communication. He is also a man who, as we all know, does tend to have a very clear opinion on most topics. However, when we tried to get some intelligence from him on who will win the next election...

Stephen Maher, chairman of The Marketing Society and CEO of MBA reviewed Alastair Campbell's appearance at the first of our Legends series at Advertising Week.