num_pages: 352
description: From the founding editor of The Wall Street Journal's sports section comes a bold new theory of leadership drawn from the elite captains who inspired their teams to achieve extraordinary success.Named one of the best business books of the year by CNBC strategybusiness Forbes and SI.comThe secret to winning is not what you think it is.It's not the coach. It's not the star.It's not money. It's not a strategy.It's something else entirely.Several years ago Sam Walker set out to answer one of the most hotly debated questions in sports: What are the greatest teams of all time? He devised a formula then applied it to thousands of teams from leagues all over the world from the NBA to the English Premier League to Olympic field hockey. When he was done he had a list of the sixteen most dominant teams in history. At that point he became obsessed with another more complicated question: What did these freak teams have in common?As Walker dug into their stories a pattern emerged: Each team had the same type of captain--a singular leader with an unconventional skill set who drove it to achieve sustained historic greatness.Fueled by a lifetime of sports spectating twenty years of reporting and a decade of painstaking research The Captain Class tells the surprising story of what makes teams exceptional. Drawing on original interviews with athletes from two dozen countries as well as general managers coaches executives and others skilled at building teams Walker identifies the seven core qualities of this Captain Class--from extreme doggedness and emotional control to a knack for nonverbal communication to tactical aggression and the courage to stand apart.Told through riveting accounts of some of the most pressure-soaked moments in sports history--from Bill Russell's legendary Coleman Play in the 1957 NBA Finals to Barcelona's Figo Game against Real Madrid in 2000--The Captain Class doesn't just bring these events to life; it presents a fresh counterintuitive take on leadership that can be applied to a wide spectrum of competitive disciplines.The men and women who make up the Captain Class were never the most skilled athletes nor were they gifted orators or paragons of sportsmanship. They were often role players who were allergic to the spotlight. In short the seven attributes they shared challenge your assumptions of what inspired leadership looks like.
language: English
title: The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams
publisher: Random House