The world is round

I was on a flight from Manchester, UK to Atlanta on the day that the USA were playing Portugal in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. On the tiny screen jiggling around irritatingly on the seatback in front of me, I was following the game. USA scored and went ahead and all around me the whole plane erupted with cheers. Suddenly I realised that I was surrounded by American ‘soccer’ fans following the game as passionately as any in Manchester itself.

I began to compare notes with my neighbour who turned out to be an ex-US Army colonel who had then embarked on second career with a major oil and gas company. He was clearly a sports nut – it hardly takes one to recognise another.

‘C’mon,’ the colonel muttered to his players from 30 000 feet, ‘stay on offense.’

‘Attack,’ I correctly him mildly, ‘in football we say ‘attack’.’

‘Same difference, buddy, our wide receiver is playing for too deep.’ I peered at my bouncing screen. He had a point. Maybe he didn’t need my help understanding the beautiful game.

By the time Portugal had levelled the game 2-2 and we had both ripped off our headsets in disappointment, we could agree that the game provided us, if not with an exactly common language, then certainly a very useful set of shared metaphors. We quickly got into how the role of a sports coach differs subtly from code to code around the world and yet how fluidly the lessons of any successful coaching seem to apply in running a business.

I told him of a colleague of mine who had once opened a corporate training workshop in Saudi Arabia by asking who supported Manchester United. Half the room cheered wildly and the other half booed equally spontaneously. From there on a potentially tricky workshop simply hummed along. Football had provided us with a sure kick-off in the unlikeliest of arenas.

He told me all about his final football game for the Army and a never to be forgotten touchdown. I got it in a heartbeat. Sport can so easily be the container for our most precious memories.

Throughout the current World Cup I have heard American sports fans using the rich and expressive language of their own embedded sports vocabulary to help analyse their ‘roundball’ team’s strengths and weaknesses. They should be playing ‘man-to-man defense’ not ‘zone’. Their ‘playmaker’ is killing us ‘box-to-box’. Look at that great ‘pick-and-roll’ get right round the ‘perimeter D’. And so on right down to the agonising wire of those last minutes against Belgium – a state about the size of Maryland for crying in a bucket. In all sports there is the exquisite agony of heroic failure.

In the next two weeks this visceral pain will be felt in seven different countries from all around the globe. One winning population will bask gloriously in the fleeting euphoria of victory and then wake to a world that has rapidly moved on. However, what every sports glued to the World Cup will share is a renewed sense that great emotional well spring of globalisation, ‘we are all connected, we are all in this together.’  

The Prince

I met a prince yesterday. Not a royal one as it happens - more self-made. Geoff Prince is his name although it is his will to work rather than his surname that marks him out. 'Will to Work' is the charitable trust that Geoff has built which offers anybody in his town the opportunity to do an afternoon of carpentry, painting, sewing, fiddling with electrics or even just pottering about making tea in his community workshop - on one condition - you need to be 'feeling a bit poorly' as Geoff puts it.

His business model (not a term that Geoff bothers with much) is based on the fact that every day somebody clears out an old draw, cupboard or garage full of useful tools and materials that somebody else no longer needs. Will to Work accepts these items as donations and puts them back to work in Geoff's workshop housed in an old school building right alongside the town's health centre - with its handy rows of disabled parking spaces. Sensible doctors have begun to prescribe an afternoon's occupational therapy for many of their patients with a range of conditions which might be making them 'feel a bit poorly'. And from there good-hearted volunteers, donations, referrals, grants, goodwill and word of mouth does the rest. Oh, and endless shifts of time and love and tea put in by Geoff, his wife and their small core team.

Now I have designed and led and run hundreds of workshops myself. Most of them end up looking like an explosion in a Post-It factory with scribbled flip charts scattered everywhere and a tired facilitator gathering up evaluation forms - or 'happy sheets' as they are known in my trade. The Will to Work workshop doesn't do happy sheets - it just does happiness instead. And proves that every man can be a prince.