|
Interviewer : |
Well,
I've read Crocodile Charlie, and now I'm curious about the two of
you. Can you tell us exactly what you do when you aren't writing
books? |
|
John : |
(laughs)
Well, that's a bit of a puzzle. We were both doing very well in our
own jobs and businesses before we met, about ten years ago. Pete was
already working with teams, and I was looking for answers as a senior
corporate manager. My original interest was what the difference was
between teams with good resources and big salaries - who can still have lousy ethics and a lot of
unhappiness - and other teams with
no resources, no status and no rewards, who can sometimes still create a fantastic environment
with a lot of spirit. Pete had been looking into this for a while
with his own work, and he had the same need as I did to discover the
Spirit of the Game for his own use and for use with others. So we started to
investigate further. |
|
Peter : |
We
have very different backgrounds but we'd both seen a lot of leadership in
the world that was all in the intellect and didn't work. And of
course we'd faced those problems in our own lives as leaders, like
everyone else. John brought along a work team for a program, and we got involved. We had some mentors along
the way and we became very passionate and curious about what it is that
creates the human at work and in life generally. By this stage both
of our lives were pretty much on hold, because we decided to work together
full-time and look into it. |
| John : |
Sounds crazy, doesn't
it. But we quickly discovered that other people shared our passion
to find the answer too, and that a lot of them were very senior people in
top companies, and that they really needed it for their businesses.
So we had help and support from day one. |
| Peter : |
What was different about us
was that we didn't pretend we had the answer. We really wanted to
find out. So we concentrated on ways of finding out, and we just
kept getting clients who wanted to be part of the Quest. We had to
give up our day jobs. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
Is
that how you got into this line of work? |
|
Peter : |
We were working
with street kids. One of the fathers
was a CEO. One day he rang me and said "Whatever you did to my
son, can you do the same thing with my management team?" |
|
John : |
So that was really the first
team and leadership program. And there were a lot of other people
involved too; some at the time, and some who had a critical influence on
both of us long before we met. In some ways we just got the right
influences at the right time. We were steady in our purpose and we
got a lot of help and pushes we both want to acknowledge. |
| Peter : |
And our purpose was not to make
money or make ourselves important. We think people mostly have their
own answers, but what they need to do is reflect consciously and
deliberately on these and unify around what they already know. So we
set out to help teams find their Spirit and hidden strengths... |
| John : |
...without getting stuck in the
intellect in a classroom, or carried away doing a high ropes course when
what they really need to do is, say, find some effective team strategies
that help them keep their spirits high and at the same time crack a
deadline, or make cost savings... |
| Interviewer : |
And it worked, I take it? |
| Peter : |
Yes, it definitely
worked. We've been flat strap ever since. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
What
sort of clients do you work with? Are they all in suits? |
|
John : |
Well, let's see. Some of
my recent leadership programs have been with scientists, shop floor
supervisors, board Directors, floor workers in a tannery, senior managers
in a foam company, people in China who spoke Mandarin, medical
staff, park laborers and police officers. |
|
Peter : |
Some of my
recent ones were top people in a government department from the
Secretary on down, a
road construction company, an international team of top-line financial
analysts, grain workers in a silo, top military brass and dock workers. |
| Interviewer : |
So what do they have
in common? What do they want from you?
|
| John : |
What they have in
common is that they're all dependent on having some kind of picture
together, and they know it. What they want is not lectures or
textbooks but the chance to get some simple answers and strategies that
really work for them and help them every day. The devil's often in
the detail.
|
| Peter : |
They want to
have
good Spirits, feel their role is important to the team goals and be
happy at work. |
| John : |
I think we are all on a Quest
for our own Holy Grail. But we vary in how much we acknowledge that
consciously and deliberately. We've found that the best companies,
people and teams know they are on a Quest and are always looking for help
and ways to pursue the Holy Grail for everyone involved. There's no
doubt that that's what separates the elite organisations from the merely
good ones. |
| Interviewer : |
Can you give me a specific
example? |
| Peter : |
One team came back from a
program and found a way to save $660 000 a year; they saved all their
jobs. Another team got an $11 million project delivered on time, on
budget and to spec for the first time in the company's history.
Another team resolved some issues that had been "untouchable" in
the business for about twenty years. |
| John : |
And sometimes they just
fine-tune and preserve an already good picture. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
How
do you know that you get results? |
|
Peter : |
Well, we might give slightly different answers on that!
Right from day one, we have always been told by our clients.
They said we got results no-one else could get and that we were
unique. And they continued to say it for years after the programs
and even the follow-ups were all over. And these are some pretty
tough people - they don't just say things to be polite. |
|
John : |
And
of course they kept re-engaging us... |
| Peter : |
And then we introduced some
measurement techniques. |
| John : |
We developed an
instrument called Team DashboardTM that
directly measures the contribution of team performance to business Key
Performance Indicators. So for example, if Timeliness is 50 percent
of your project performance and team performance deeply affects
Timeliness, then you know it's worth the money to invest a bit in
safeguarding team strategies before the project gets too busy. At
that point people engage us for exactly the same reason they buy
insurance. |
| Interviewer : |
Is there any scientific basis
to Team DashboardTM ? |
| Peter : |
Well, John used his math and
psychology degrees. And we now have a database of thousands of
responses for validity. All our clients use it almost without
exception. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
Okay,
one more question about the two of you, and then on to the book. There
seem to be a lot of “team building” companies about. Is that
really what you do, too? Or is there more to it? |
|
John : |
There's more to it. Which
isn't to say that traditional "team building" and indeed
classroom training are bad things. They can be very effective
sometimes. |
|
Peter : |
But
we tend to work with clients who have tried those approaches
already. In fact they are often quite expert with them, and sometimes
run their own classroom training and teambuilding exercises internally. |
| John : |
They come to us when their
needs go a bit beyond those approaches. Or when they see the
limitations of those approaches. |
| Interviewer : |
Which are? |
| Peter : |
Well, let me agree with John
first that traditional approaches can be okay sometimes. But most of
our clients tell us that classroom training is all in the Intellect;
people learn and forget facts and it doesn't change their behavior.
And our clients also tell us that teambuilding, ropes courses, trust
falls, pen and paper exercises, building towers out of drinking straws, fire walking,
outdoor adventure, whatever - are great for the Spirit and the Emotions
but they sometimes create no understanding and no really relevant team and personal
strategies. So the results are great for a couple of weeks and then
often tend not to last. |
| Interviewer : |
And you run
"Simulations"... |
| John : |
Yes. (nods) Until very recently
that was all we did. It's our specialty. There's more on our
website www.teamresults.com.au
. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
Why
did you write the book? |
|
Peter : |
We were kidding around one day
in the kitchen of "Silver
Wattle", about a year ago. John said we should write a book
if we ever feel we've learned enough from our experiences with clients to be worth
saying. And I said, "Why not?". |
|
Interviewer : |
And the title? I love the
title. |
| John : |
I suggested "Crocodile
Charlie and the Holy Grail" in the kitchen almost
immediately. Pete and I worked on the "Crocodile" angle a
bit and came up with the idea that it's not actually a heroic
title like Crocodile Dundee or The Crocodile Hunter, but something Charlie
really doesn't want. Maybe they call him Crocodile Charlie because
they think he's a bit of a... |
| Interviewer : |
Watch it... |
| John : |
... a drongo? A
dill? (laughter) |
| Peter : |
And maybe he spends the rest of
the book getting rid of his "Crocodile" persona and having
really big adventures. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
The
book sounds unique, but let's be cynical for a moment. If you go
into the Self-help or Business sections of a bookstore the shelves are
literally groaning with books that offer easy answers, good advice, all
kinds of things. What’s different about Crocodile Charlie? What’s the message in your book? |
|
John : |
I
think there are three differences. First, Crocodile
Charlie isn't just aimed at managers or leaders or people who see
themselves that way or who want to be. The book has something proven
and tested to offer to everyone who works for a living. Second,
the book doesn't live in a narrow world where everyone wears a suit or
everyone wears overalls or everyone works in manufacturing industry.
Charlie's experiences - even his adventures - are based on real-world
events and they have something to offer to everybody. And third,
it's simply fun! It's a great story that doesn't take itself too
seriously. It treats the reader as an equal and a smart person who
can take what they want and draw their own conclusions. |
|
Peter : |
Also
I think it's important that people know we don't have yet another
"Five Secrets Of..." or "Six Steps To..." book of
procedures and formulas to impose on their lives. We know from our
work with real clients every day that people need their own
answers, not formulas, and that all they need is a bit of fun, help and
space to reflect and to build their own "Mongrel Dog".
Which is all explained in Charlie... |
| Interviewer : |
So have you actually been to
all the locations in the book? |
| John : |
Yes, sure have. All the descriptions
are based on first-hand experience. Especially "Gunnatown". (laughter) |
| Interviewer : |
I suppose they'll have to read
the book to find out what we're laughing about... |
| Peter : |
Yep! |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
Did
you write the book jointly, or what?
How did that work? |
|
Peter : |
John wrote the actual
book, but the contents were based equally on what we had learned over many
years, both before and after we met. We planned Charlie's Discoveries four chapters
at a time, and then we talked for hours every week to improve the previous
four chapters and plan the contents of the next four. |
|
John : |
We
also dug out our notes from ten years of Team Simulations, plus all the
work Pete had done with teams before to lead up to that, plus my own
diaries from various leadership jobs in industry. We came up with 32 categories of
Discoveries that we thought were right at the heart of sustaining the
Spirit of the Game. That was too many chapters, so we paired them
up at two categories per chapter. And that's how we came up with
sixteen chapters. |
| Interviewer : |
And then what? Did it need a lot of
editing? |
| John : |
No, very little. The
people at Penguin were terrific - I can't praise them highly enough.
We made some tiny changes but the book in your hands really is exactly
what we wrote. It maybe helps that I've been writing for magazines
for about 20 years. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
Who
should read your book? |
|
John : |
I
say "everybody who works for a living". That's a broad
sweep but I really think that if you can set a few hours aside on the
train or in a hammock in your backyard, and if you can stand to read a story
of adventure that's really quite fun, and you have a bit of passion and
interest in the human being at work and play then I think you'll feel the twenty
bucks was well invested. |
|
Peter : |
Every client I've got has been
asking after this book. They want to see what we've written because
they know it'll be fun and practical. That tells me there's still a lot
of passion in the world for people to find their own Holy Grails and get
their own answers that work for them. Also it maybe tells me that
we're offering something that hasn't been offered before, or at least, not
in a format that really engages people as equals. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
What
can I get out of the book? |
|
Peter : |
I hope you'll get out of it a
bit of what we got ourselves from running all the years of team programs
that led to the Discoveries in the first place. |
|
John : |
I
think you'll get insight into what the Spirit of the Game is
really all about; and also some very specific ideas and approaches that you can start to
use immediately. And yet it's not artificial or formulaic because
the ideas and approaches are more to do with how to find your own answers
quickly and effectively than they are to do with serving the
"canned" answers themselves up to you on a silver platter. |
| Peter : |
It's an adventure; there's fun and a
terrific story. That's critical to success in life. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
What is the
Secret? What
is the "It"?
|
|
John : |
If
there is a "secret", it's to do with hard work and a bit of
courage and finding your own
answers to happiness and success at work and in life. I don't
believe there's any way around it. If there is, then the top
executives and line workers in the world - people we work with every day -
certainly don't know it. And neither do I. |
|
Peter : |
It certainly isn't a
mathematical formula or a dogma on a wall chart. Those things have
been tried for years and if they created the Spirit of the Game, we'd know by now. |
| John : |
That isn't to say that help,
advice, books, charts and formulas are of no use. Far from it.
With a math background I could never say that; and Pete was a fighter
pilot! We know the essential role of systems and procedures.
But everyone has systems and procedures. What has interested us for
all this time is the question of "what then?" What
comes next? When you have read the books and done the courses and
looked at the systems and procedures, what comes next? |
| Pete : |
And the book summarizes our
Discoveries from our experiences with clients about what comes next and to that extent,
it's our handbook for finding your own Secret and the "It". |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
How are you making it
work in your own life? What motivates you?
|
|
Peter : |
Finding
out more about myself. More
about how we can all create camaraderie and friendship and satisfaction
with life. More about people having personal freedom to find the Spirit
of the Game and share that with others. |
|
John : |
And
sometimes I really experience the need to have good strategies like
Charlie's to keep that vision elevated enough. When it's two in the
morning and you're hobbling in pain from an old frostbite injury and you
still have to load the trailer and drive seven hours to start a team
Simulation the next night with a brand new group and a brand new energy,
well... that's when you experience the strength of your vision. |
| Interviewer : |
That really happened? |
| John : |
Two years ago, to me in
Canberra. But that's nothing. I don't want to spoil the
surprise for those who haven't read Crocodile Charlie yet, but
there's a big accident in there that may seem unbelievable... |
| Peter : |
...but it really happened to
me, and the experience in the book is pretty accurate. I still have a left ankle that's mostly pins and screws to
prove it. The only real difference is that John didn't injure
Charlie as badly in the book as I was injured in reality, because Charlie
had to go on with his Quest. In the real world it took me a year to
recover and I nearly lost my foot. |
| John : |
And here you are, riding a bike
20 miles every day. |
|
|
|
|
Interviewer : |
So
do you still run those team Simulations, or have you retired? How
would I sign up? |
|
John : |
I'll
never retire. It's what keeps me inside reality.
You definitely can still book us for a team Simulation, and in fact
there's some information about that on the Crocodile Charlie
website. [Editor's note : Click here
to find that information.] Also we now have a small but very good
team of people who can help. We have permanent bases in Australia,
the USA, China, Singapore and New Zealand and we can in fact deliver
Simulations almost anywhere in the world. |
|
Peter : |
It's
taken us ten years to refine our approach to the point where we can do
that. We not only have a unique approach but we also have a
lot of proprietary equipment designed by some very clever people. Our
approach is hugely satisfying to the
human individually and collectively; we heighten the intrigue and
enjoyment aspects, which gives it an Indiana Jones/Mission Impossible,
Monty Python aspect that provides fun, motivation and satisfaction.
We can design literally thousands of different Simulations.
And we can get most of it in a suitcase. |
| Interviewer : |
So you can run them
anywhere? Do you have any preferred places? |
| John : |
We
can run them literally
anywhere. We do like to have a say in the choice of facilities but we can
always find something suitable. We have tried and tested
venues with who we have very good relationships and good deals in Australia, the
USA, China, Singapore
and New Zealand. You aren't compelled to use them but frankly you'd have trouble
finding better places or better value. We've also run Simulations in
the
middle of cities such as Shanghai, Bangkok, Bombay, Melbourne and Sydney. |
| Interviewer : |
John and Peter, time is
up. Thank you very much for coming in today. |
| Peter : |
It's a pleasure. |
| John : |
And thanks to you. |
|
|
|
