215 - The All Blacks

In his Book Legacy, James Kerr studies the All Blacks, the most successful professoinal sports team of our times. They have a victory rate of 86%. It’s a great book on culture and successful team building.

He devotes an entire chapter to language. He introduces that in 1999, the team and it’s results were slipping, so the managers wrote a book that was ‘a system of meanings that everyone understood, a language and vocabulary and set of beliefs that bound the group together”

Mottos and mantras can shape who we are “Shrewd leaders invent a unique vocabulary as shorthand for communicating new cultural norms and standards, using specific words, phriass, mottos and mantras…in this way, language becomes the oxygen that sustains belief, leaders rewrite the future” pg 154 , legacy