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David Brailsford: You built teams and developed teams that won over and over and over again, in the same way that Sir Alex Ferguson did. I'm a Manchester United fan, so I was lucky enough to watch our team win over and over again in that era. It's not going so well lately, but in that era, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing I find amazing now, when I look back on it, is how he managed to reinvent those teams but also to get the same team to win again. I thought that was normal growing up, that my team wins all the time. But this idea of where your motivation comes from after victory, and how you get a team that's just won and then wins again, and again, and again, where do they find the motivation? They've stood on the podium, they've had the moment. Where does that come from?
David Brailsford: That's a great question. I think credit to Sir Alex and the work he did. Looking back, there are those long-serving, successful managers, and once it's happening it's an era, and nobody really thinks too much about it; it's just the norm. But then when you realize it's not actually the norm at all, it's something very, very special going on. I think success is interesting in terms of what it does to people. In sport, we're more geared to failure really. You lose more than you win, normally, and you recalibrate the goals, dust yourself down, redo your plan, and off you go again. But when you succeed, all of a sudden, not many people have a plan for success. Do you know what I mean? You succeed, nobody's got a plan for it, nobody wants to tempt fate, I guess, but not many people have a plan for success. And it impacts people massively in terms of their expectations of themselves, and their hunger going forward. It impacts people in different ways. Of course, you probably get financially better off, your position in society changes, you become a celebrity, whatever, and all of that can change and impact your drive and your hunger. Fundamentally, that's the incredible bit about people who stay at the top for a long time: it's not really the reward, what they're getting financially, or the other trappings of success. I don't think that's what's driving them. There's something else, deeper down, driving those people forward, and they just keep going and going and going.
David Brailsford: What Alex Ferguson did very well, there's always a challenge with teams when you've got a generation who grow together, who come together, and you'll have two, three, four years of amazing success with a group who've bonded and are on a journey together. Then you start to get towards the end of that, and at what point do you bring in young talent and let some of the more established talent go? There's a transition, and he did that very well. We met and chatted a couple of times about that. When I was younger, up at The Vome in Manchester, he'd pop over to The Vome and we'd sit and chat, and that was always one of the big things I wanted to ask him: what are you watching, what are you seeing, why are you doing this, what have you seen that makes you think that's the right time to change and bring this youngster in? He'd often say that people get a bigger voice, they get a bigger standing in the dressing room, they might start to second-guess the manager, and they have influence, and there's the media and other things going on. Sooner rather than later, that would be right, okay, off we go, and he'd change it. Listening to him talk about it, he knew exactly what he was doing, and to be fair to him, he was a master at it.
David Brailsford: You've had moments like that in your career where you see the culture at threat, or at risk, because of an individual. I've had that in my business too. In those moments, very early in my career, I would try, when I was a bit more naive in business, to look past it, or put things in place to try to mitigate the negative impact that one individual was having on the overall culture. As I got older, I realized I just needed to address the situation as soon as possible, before it spreads like a virus.
Interviewer: What do you do in that situation, when you see an individual in your company who is a problem?
David Brailsford: It's a tough one. It's an easy one to talk about and a very difficult one to do, particularly when you know that might be your best player, your best performer, and all of a sudden they're hitting the numbers but the behavior is not great. Then you have to ask yourself: we've just won, and it doesn't really matter, just win? Or does behavior, conduct, and culture matter? You want to make sure you actually have some cultural values that you're going to stand by, come what may. When those real moments arrive and you have to address it, they're very, very stressful. I get very introspective, look at myself in the mirror, and think it through, and everybody who works for me will tell you it takes me time to make a decision, because I think of every permutation and I think it through so much, emotionally. I'm so engaged with these things that I really have to think carefully about them. I've had to make a couple of pretty big decisions along those lines, and in the end I thought, right, what do I believe in? Is it a popular decision, or a performance decision? In my world we're trying to win here, or do we want to keep people happy? Where do we go? You need to establish your own: what do I believe in? Without figuring out what you believe in, you're always going to be caught in the storm, and it's always going to be mentally excruciating, because you're never quite sure. So I like to anchor myself: what are my values, what do I believe in, and how does that apply to this situation? Then, if it goes wrong, I always want to be able to look back and say, I made decisions based on my principles, not on that particular moment, however difficult it was, and I'll stick to that. I've had one quite recently, or two, in the last two to three months, which were pretty challenging decisions, and on both occasions I'm right back there. I tend to, which is probably not a good thing for the people around me, but I have a few people whose opinion I really value. I'll chat away to them and ask them questions, and sometimes I think, okay, I'm going to make that decision, or he's asking me to make this decision, and what I'm trying to do is run through my thought processes and sound it out, sound it out, sound it out, until I'm really anchored: no, I know what I really feel now. Then I make the decision immediately, I don't hesitate. But getting to that point takes me a bit of time, and I need to talk about it with somebody. I need to express it vocally to really make sure I understand what I'm thinking, because if I can't explain it to somebody, I'm maybe not quite there. Just thinking about it in my own head, or writing it down for myself, on big stuff, I like to be able to explain it to somebody so I fully understand it. If I can explain it to somebody, I pretty much have it. If I just explain it to myself in my head, who knows what I'm talking about? So it's quite an agonizing process, but in the end you need your principles, and you need a decision-making framework based on those.
Interviewer: Everyone can relate to that, even if they've never been in your position. We all face really tough moments where we arrive at that pass and have to decide which way to go. The worst possible thing is making no decision, or making a decision you thought was right because you thought it was the right thing to do, but it wasn't actually what you thought. We're always fearful of the consequences of our decisions. I often say to our guys, imagine we've got a problem, we're going to have a group discussion about something, and imagine all of our riders didn't have emotions, they were just robots. What would you do? They say, simple, you just do this, and this, and this. Okay, now put the emotions back in. What is that doing to you? Why is that changing your thinking? Then, of course, you've got people's feelings. You might have conflict, somebody might not be happy, and that impacts us, because we're trying to second-guess the emotional response of a group, or how somebody might feel, or whether they're going to come at you, or whether it creates conflict. Every now and again I go, right, okay, let's just have the robots. What would we do, what's the best thing to do? They say, simple, we just do this. That's one thing I think about: if you think, right, the consequence of whatever you decide is nothing bad happens, nothing bad happens at all, you can make any decision you want and nothing happens. What would you do? People's minds free up immediately, and they probably make a good decision. But it's fear, or the consequence that this might happen, or that might go wrong, or they might not be happy, or they might not be, and that impacts your decision. You're getting all these biases, these emotional biases, all the time. Don't get me wrong, sometimes a gut feel is a good thing. But if you strip out the consequence, the idea that nothing bad would happen, and strip out other people's emotions, most people get pretty quickly to where they'd want to be. I think about some of the big decisions in my life that way: if I were working with robots and could just shuffle things without consequence, what would I do?
David Brailsford: Exactly, and the answer you're seeing there is probably the right thing for the objective. But you could also say there are emotional consequences, which might hinder the objective. If I really annoy this person, or if I upset the balance here, then the objective is compromised. Yeah, exactly. It helps a little, I think. In the end it's like if you've got a bad tooth, you have to take it out, you might as well take it out quick. It's going to hurt just as much in a couple of months' time, so you might as well take it out now.
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