James Kerr > Quotes

“Leaders create leaders by passing on responsibility, creating ownership, accountability and trust.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never see’.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“Humility does not mean weakness, but its opposite. Leaders with mana understand the strength of humility. It allows them to connect with their deepest values and the wider world.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“The challenge is to always improve, to always get better, even when you are the best. Especially when you are the best. Henry”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“RED HEAD Tight, inhibited, results-oriented, anxious, aggressive, over-compensating, desperate. BLUE HEAD Loose, expressive, in the moment, calm, clear, accurate, on task. It’s what tennis coach Nick Bollettieri calls the ‘centipede effect’. If a centipede had to think about moving all its legs in the right order, it would freeze, the task too complex and daunting. The same is true of humans. Red is what Suvorov called ‘the Dark’. It is that fixated negative content loop of self-judgement, rigidity, aggression, shut down and panic. Blue is what he called ‘the Light’ – a deep calmness in which you are on task, in the zone, on your game, in control and in flow. It applies to the military; it applies to sport; it applies to business. In the heat of battle, the difference between the inhibitions of the Red and the freedom of Blue is the manner in which we control our attention. It works like this: where we direct our mind is where our thoughts will take us; our thoughts create an emotion; the emotion defines our behaviour; our behaviour defines our performance. So, simply, if we can control our attention, and therefore our thoughts, we can manage our emotions and enhance our performance.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“The fight is won or lost,’ says Muhammad Ali, ‘far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, well before I dance under the lights.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence,’ wrote Tom Peters in Thriving on Chaos, ‘only in constant improvement and constant change.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Successful leaders balance pride with humility: absolute pride in performance; total humility before the magnitude of the task.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“The training, decision-making wise, should be harder than the game,’ says Wayne Smith. ‘So you try an overlying principle of throwing problems at them – unexpected events – forcing them to solve the problems.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Just because it’s common sense,’ he says of the process, ‘doesn’t mean it’s common practice.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“In his seminal paper ‘Destruction and Creation’, the military strategist John R. Boyd created a theory with direct applicability to a fast-changing environment. ‘To maintain an accurate or effective grasp of reality,’ he argued, ‘one must undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with the environment to assess its constant changes.’ He asked himself, ‘how do we create the mental concepts to support decision making activity?’ His answer was the Decision Cycle or OODA Loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It is quick to apply, and useful for everyday decision-making.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Personal meaning is the way we connect to a wider team purpose. If our values and beliefs are aligned with the values and beliefs of the organization, then we will work harder towards its success. If not, our individual motivation and purpose will suffer, and so will the organization.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Pass the Ball Enlightened leaders deliberately hand over responsibility in order to create engaged team-players able to adapt their approach to suit the conditions. ‘Command & Control’ in a VUCA world is unwieldy and increasingly uncompetitive.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Level 5 leaders, Collins argues, ‘channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. Their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.’ Pass the ball.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Pressure is expectation, scrutiny and consequence,’ says Gilbert Enoka. ‘Under pressure, your attention is either diverted or on track. If you’re diverted, you have a negative emotional response and unhelpful behaviour. That means you’re stuck. That means you’re overwhelmed.’ On the other hand, if your attention is on track you have situational awareness and you execute accurately. You are clear, you adapt and you overcome.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“—— The key to strong peer-to-peer interaction is a high level of trust. This is trust in the sense of safe vulnerability. The leaders need to create an environment where individuals get to know each other as people and gather insight into their personal story and working style. This needs to be supported by the leader’s role-modelling behaviour around admission of mistakes and weaknesses and fears . . . This is essential for safe conflict and safe confrontation, where the most important interaction often occurs.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Marginal gain can be technical, physical, practical, operational, and even psychological. In the film Any Given Sunday, the Al Pacino character calls it ‘Inches’: —— You find out that life is just a game of inches. So is football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small . . . On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch . . . Cause we know when we add up all those inches that’s going to make the fucking difference between WINNING and LOSING.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“Most leaders who fail,’ Bill George says in an interview with Pamela Hawley, ‘really suffer from a lack of a strong identity, belief in themselves and, to be frank, respect for themselves.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“No one is bigger than the team and individual brilliance does not automatically lead to outstanding results. One selfish mindset will infect a collective culture.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“To be able to work together, communication is the biggest thing,’ says Smith. ‘And I think that comes from a team that has good links from off the field . . . a team able to spend time together and talk to one another and be honest with one another. It’s incredibly important.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“A winning organization is an environment of personal and professional development, in which each individual takes responsibility and shares ownership. It”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments,' said the Greek statesman Pericles, 'but what is woven into the lives of others.' Your legacy is that which you teach.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“First, we put ourself in a resourceful state: calm, positive, clear. Then we ‘anchor’ that state through a specific, replicable physical action – something out of the ordinary, like scrunching up our toes, stamping our foot, staring into the distance, throwing water over our face. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat – until it’s automatic. Then, when we recognize the symptoms of pressure – when our focus closes down, our vision narrows, our heart rate lifts, our anxiety increases, our self-consciousness rises – we can use the anchor to reboot. And return to our centre. Like a doctor using paddles on a cardiac arrest, the ‘jolt of recognition’ reactivates our more resourceful state and returns us to the moment.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“It should be our acts that remain after us, the whakairo remind us, not our vainglory. Humility is seen as a vital part of a well-adjusted character.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

“This questioning is as applicable to business as it is to rugby. No one person has all the answers, but asking questions challenges the status quo, helps connect with core values and beliefs, and is a catalyst for individual improvement. After all, the better the questions we ask, the better the answers we get.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“If you think of physical conditioning, technical understanding and tactical appreciation as forming three legs,’ Wayne Smith tells writer Gregor Paul, ‘the stool isn’t balanced unless you have psychological strength as well.”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“What man actually needs,’ argues Frankl, ‘is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.’ ‘Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself,’ he writes. ‘The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is, and the more he actualizes himself.’ ‘Self-actualization,’ he concludes, ‘is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.’ Of ‘getting over yourself’. Of sweeping the sheds. And it begins with the question”
― James Kerr, Legacy

“«Si me lo dices, lo olvidaré; enséñamelo y lo recordaré; involúcrame y lo comprenderé»,”
― James Kerr, Legacy: 15 lecciones sobree liderazgo

“Porque la fuerza de la manada es el lobo, y la fuerza del lobo es la manada.”
― James Kerr, Legacy: 15 lecciones sobree liderazgo