Professor Alex Hill, the Centre for High Performance

Leaders Performance Podcast

Alex Hill has spent 13 years studying organisations that have out-performed their peers for over 100 years, including the All Blacks, Eton College and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The result is his book Centennials: The 12 Habits of Great, Enduring Organisations.

“If you want society to support you long term, your impact has to be much broader than just creating role models,” he continues. “Why don't you take the learning from being at the cutting edge of mental and physical performance and share that?”

Hill believes that the British national governing bodies competing at the Olympic and Paralympic Games could feed those lessons back into the community in the form of a “spin-offs division” similar to that of NASA (another centennial).

“This spin-offs division [could be] designed to take that learning and feed it into all of society so that the whole of our country develops.”

It is just one idea Hill shares during the course of a conversation full of advice for sporting organisations. He spoke of the New Zealand All Blacks and their readiness to embrace failure [40:20]; finding smarter ways to attract money and talent [10:45]; and why a diverse talent pool can make an organisation more relevant to a broader swathe of society [17:15].

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