Great Britain again dominated the World Track Cycling Championship at the Manchester Velodrome this weekend. I watched only briefly, taking a break from the Twitter stream to see an interview with team psychologist Steve Peters.

Peters is something of a phenomenon, if not a genius; Undergraduate Dean of Sheffield University, much in demand in a variety of UK sports, he’s a sometime visitor to the England rugby training camp here at the Sports Training Village in Bath — which, by the way, seemed to be a secret he did not want told on national TV.

But most interestingly, perhaps, he is a former forensic psychologist, who spent many years working in Rampton Secure Hospital, exemplifying our own belief here at Knackered Towers that the study of that which is broken yields useful lessons if you want to succeed.

If that were not enough, the unassuming Dr Peters is a highly competitive Masters M50 sprint champion (that’s running fast for old folks). His training regimen, discussed here, would likely pass muster with that most eminent of critical thinkers on all things sporty, Professor Art de Vany. It’s very unorthodox.

Now, recently I’ve been tempted to comment on Reuters’ CEO Tom Glocer’s blog, but held back. Tom was talking about national character, negativity and optimism. If I understood his point correctly, he was saying that if only you think positively, good things will follow (that was the post title in any event). He referred to the need for an optimistic outlook, drawing on the athletic coach and the self-talking salesman as examples.

You can’t really argue with that. Except that, as Ed Smith painted in his book, the truth is a lot less certain and requires a more subjunctive qualification: think positively and good things might happen. The corollary being, think negatively and it ain’t gonna happen, not now, not never. And that’s more my own experience; as Woody Allen would have it, 80 pct of life is about turning up.

But, in my own corporate experience, positivity and negativity tend to be understood in very binary terms. And because of that, useful information about how products could be improved (or an organization better configured) does not flow freely up the ranks. With tools like wikis, of course, it now flows much more freely across reporting lines, if managers take the step to encourage their use. And it flows pretty freely among the folks who stand outside the office smoking, but let’s not go there.

Returning to individual and team confidence, what Peters had to say was quite brief but highly nuanced. What was clear was that positive thinking, and the psychological tools needed to create it, were not straightforward: they were specific to the individual, but also situational depending on the person, whether a team was involved, the type of event, the coach, championship and location. What mattered was educating athletes into how their minds worked, what trigger points led to negative emotions, and how those could be turned around.

Vicky Pendleton, the diminutive and self-confessed “girly girl” who won two gold medals and a silver over the weekend, had lacked confidence, according to Peters, when he started working with her. But he described how she had been able to train herself to turn her mood around within 10 minutes of a setback.

Peters explained how large events, such as the Olympics, create a huge range of distractions (from transport to security) each of which will affect each athlete differently, and for which all need to be prepared if they are to secure their own best chance of success.

What makes sport an interesting crucible through which to understand performance these days is that there is just so much of it, it is so professional, and there is so much research (physiological, neurological, psychological) . And it produces characters like Peters, Martin O’Neil and Ed Smith.

Sportsmen and women are dealing with the most intense of situations in which their vulnerabilities are very public, even on a day-to-day basis in training. They have a lot of complex information to understand, and failure to self-manage can quickly lead to injury, loss of form, loss of a place on the team, loss of funding, denial of access to quality coaching, etc. And that ignores the consequence of a random fall or illness at a critical moment in a training schedule. This cascade gathers its own momentum because at each stage the athlete finds him or herself increasingly isolated, so the reversal becomes commensurately difficult to effect.

It should not be forgotten, and if you have ever trained really hard you will know, that resulting sharp mood swings can affect motivations and relationships outside of the sport as the body and mind adapt and recover from the process of extreme exertion. Indeed, a protracted bad mood is a sign of over-training syndrome which is very hard to pinpoint in oneself until it’s too late, and takes a surprisingly long time to recover from.

There don’t seem to be enough Steve Peters to go round sport, let alone international business. I wonder how we should go about making more?

Photo: British Cycling

Welcome to the Knackered Hack. If you're visiting in search of my paleo lunch with Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, you'll find it in three parts here. If you enjoy what you see don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, so you don't miss an important update and can more easily forward those salient posts to your friends and business contacts, sign up for my regular email service. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here. Thanks for visiting!

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In 2005, I came 9,405th in the London Marathon in just under four hours (3:55:36, to be precise). Last year I had a plan that I would do better, and would cover it as a freelance journalist too. The organisers obliged, and I realised I’d better start a blog. The Knackered Hack was born to track my exploration of endurance fitness, and some of the issues sports can reveal to us as amateurs: something like the professional lessons of Ed Smith’s book, which I reviewed only the other day.

But I lost eight weeks of training from the first 10 of 2007 to two viruses. Thus my hopes of running a marathon were in shreds. That was a lesson in itself. And it was about that time that Nassim Taleb contacted me so that his publishers could send me a copy of The Black Swan to review. The rest, as they say, is path dependence…

Last week, Guy Kawasaki listed The Knackered Hack as one of the web’s leading journalism blogs at his newly-launched aggregation site: Alltop.com.

Not all of you will be familiar with Guy. That’s OK, because the patron saint of us uncertain folks is Herbert Simon, who some will know coined the term “bounded rationality”, which incorporates the idea that you can’t know everything. Admitting as much did not stop Simon from winning a Nobel Memorial Prize.

But I digress. Guy was one of the early Mac team, he is a venture capitalist, and renowned speaker. And Alltop.com is aimed at us head-scratchers, who don’t quite know where to start sometimes. His company is also called Garage Technology Ventures. QED.

I’m bound to say that Alltop.com is a great site, and if you start using it you’ll be an early adopter because Guy and colleagues only really announced it a few weeks ago. Although I’m no expert in these things, some of you may find that the concept is broadly similar to popurls.com. What Guy is doing is taking a non-Google, non-quant view at the web, looking for influencers and connectors, especially through the prism of Twitter and the trust networks it is both generating and reflecting.

Here is what Guy said about it on his blog:-

A good metaphor is that Alltop is an “online magazine rack” that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page. Think of it as ‘aggregation without the aggravation.’”

If I’m allowed to say one thing I really like about it, it is the clean way that the first few lines of each news or blog entry open up as floating text (see above) and allow you a quick preview of the contents. There are other technologies that try to do something like that, but this reminds me of something I wanted way back in the 1990s as a way to allow the reporter to mask explanations of complex terms that would get in the way of readability or the patience of cognoscenti. Like many bloggers, I use Wikipedia for that these days in most instances, but it does involve opening up a new window/tab. So it will be great when that technology finds its way into more general use.

The week before last was Annie Hall week at home here, which contains Woody Allen’s paraphrased reference to the Groucho Marx joke: “I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member”. It was not my intention to start a journalism blog, and I’m not doing this for the brethren, but I’m grateful for the recognition. Of course, I do think journalism is important, and I do write about journalism frequently on this blog. And just so that there’s no doubt that this IS a journalism blog (amongst other things), I’ve decided to celebrate my Alltop accolade with the introduction of a new category on the right there: “journalism”. As I’m learning more and more, there are two certainties in this new world of ours: death and taxonomy.

And before we get carried away that we’ve reached the A-list, Guy shares some interesting ideas about influence from different sources on his blog here and here, that further explains perhaps our apparent non-linear rise out of the Long Tail’s long tail.

Of course, for regular readers of KH, especially those who’ve subscribed to the email, or feed or follow the marginal entertainment of my Twitter service, you can feel especially vindicated for your loyalty and encouragement of this tired soul . Thank you.

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In 2001 I was faced with a choice.

Sit quietly on the sidelines of a corporate collapse while hell was freezing over, find a new job, or attempt a management buyout.

The latter involved some breaking ranks: never a comfortable path, as Gerd Gigerenzer has shown. But in the circumstances, and in Schumpeterian terms, it would seem to have been honest and right to try. In a Chapter 11 auction, you need bidders quickly. They need to come from somewhere. With my colleagues, I decided we were as worthy as any. After all, we had been pretty neat in creating social networks, so we knew how to operate at high levels of productivity without the need for as many staff as most news companies. Remember, we had to operate in Reuters’ backyard — probably the reason we were so resourceful, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

Bear Stearns played a small but disappointing role in this MBO attempt, as investment banker to the wider company sale, appointed by the company’s creditors. Surprisingly, as a thirty-something editor, this was the first management buy-out I’d attempted. So I needed help. I was pointed toward the bankers as I needed to prepare business plans and locate potential investors, but I was also still doing my bit trying to find a corporate buyer in London for the whole firm. As I recall, emails, calls and voicemails to Bear Stearns went unreturned. All I got for my efforts was a solicitation document pdf that I already had, and to which I’d made some contribution as a general manager, in any event.

Where Bear Stearns were too lazy to venture, I had to go find other help. It materialized in the form of London bankers Cazenove, who were systematic and supportive. Time worked against; all sorts of clocks are ticking in these sorts of end game, (although not as quick as must have happened over this past weekend).

It is just possible that, as an internal player, the rules put you at a disadvantage from the get-go. You feel an unwelcome visitor at the poker table — everyone else is expecting you to be clearing out the ashtrays. But I spent enough time at the table to lay down a couple of hands and get the chance to explain a little about the productivity benefits of social networks within the firm to a few of the great and good, who I guess might be grateful now for having had a little of that accumulated knowledge.

And one of the biggest ironies of it all: as we re-modelled our various news business lines to reflect an independent future, our strongest business plan identified that there was an untapped news market in a rapidly growing sector called credit derivatives. And we had the people who knew how to and wanted to cover it.

As we wake up each morning with the scale of the credit crunch appearing ever larger, I’ve wanted for a while, so long as you won’t think me a Jeremiah, to coin that old cliché from the Jaws movie for the sake of our central banker friends, uttered by Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) to Quint (Robert Shaw):-

• “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

And I wonder if, before too long, anyone is gonna get to say:-

• “Smile you son-of-a-bitch.”

Unfortunately, we may all now be in the same small boat.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, it goes something like this. As one YouTube commenter said: the shark still looks fake:-

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With it’s playful green and red cartoon dust jacket, Ed Smith’s What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman’s Average, Zidane’s Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons (Penguin Books, £14.99) could easily be taken for a belated Christmas stocking-filler, destined for a long stay in the bathroom’s literature section. But it deserves to be taken seriously. As the inside cover says:

Sport is a condensed version of life — only it matters less and comes up with better statistics.”

I realised this myself some time ago, and periodically spend more time following sports science than business and finance. And it was one of the thematic reasons for starting the Knackered Hack in the first place, to explore what could be learned from sport in general and my own participation in it in particular, without being glib. The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions…

Smith, who is captain of Middlesex County Cricket Club, offers up sport as an under-used analytical resource from which can be drawn a number of intellectual and practical lessons about education, business, politics, the study of history, etc. The book takes the form of a series of essays, each kicking off from one sporting theme and following where any beam of light is usefully shed.

Smith takes in some of the old chestnuts such as: are our sporting heroes what they used to be? (the golden age hypothesis says no) or are our sportsmen and women getting perpetually better? (evolutionary theory says yes); is sport too commercial? — you’ve heard these discussed in the pub no doubt. He also covers some remarkable new ground for me, making some startling and insightful connections.

Before we get into cricket v baseball, as Smith himself explores, know that Smith understands both games well, and bigs up baseball as a crucible for pithy life observation, just as obsessive fans would claim. And he critiques the Moneyball strategy of the Oakland As from a player’s perspective. He also reveals baseball to be most likely a French invention, overtaking cricket for popularity in the Civil War (American of course) because of rough pitches, and then being gamed by some 19th century spin doctor called A. G. Spalding, who touted it that baseball championed the egalitarian, in contrast to the effeteness of cricket. Yes, he was just trying to sell more gear. And it worked. Despite the fact that cricket had enjoyed wide social acceptance in the US earlier in the century, it fell into terminal decline as a national pastime.

I’m no expert on Schumpeter’s oeuvre — though I’ve lived through one or two creative destruction episodes. But after 87 pages of What Sport Tells Us, all I could think of was Schumpeter, Schumpeter, Schumpeter. Smith elaborates on the fluctuating fortunes of sport, not just in terms of games and spectacle. He shows how at an industry (and at a national cultural) level the individual sporting disciplines are so rich themselves in creative destruction, confounding the stereotypes that fans, commentators and team owners all too frequently apply. On page 88, Smith finally drops the great man’s name. For the reader like me it was a back-of-the-net moment, as they say in soccer. Well-scored, Ed! When Penguin offered me the book for review, I hadn’t expected to find a discussion of how the free market has worked its invisible magic to raise the salaries of “left tackles” in American football. These hulks go unwatched on the field of play because all eyes follow the star quarter-back; but their presence determines whether the star player makes the goal or ends up face down in the mud. It all made sense to me. Schumpeter, he the man!

Someone should get Russ Roberts at EconTalk to interview Smith for a podcast. Smith is a broadcaster himself, having fronted a BBC programme called Peak Performance, which is sadly no longer in their online archive. In Roberts’ podcast with Schumpeter biographer Thomas McCraw, he highlights that when we observe an economic phenomenon like income inequality, the dominance of particular corporations (or, I’d suggest, the current credit crunch) we tend to see only the present snapshot in time; we miss the continuum. This can be both positive and negative. Bad news and bad money can drive out the good. But, Smith shows us that in the larger sweep of sporting history as well, so much of the hand-wringing of the short run is misplaced.

He also despatches sporting cliches all over the ground like loose bowling. He sends the concept of professionalism for six, hits a homerun against the notion of talent’s primacy, but saves his best shot for the role of luck and our contradictory and mistaken attitude to how it operates both in games, and also how it influences entire career paths.

Believing that ‘you can be whatever you want to be’, on the other hand, is actually a rather easy doctrine. (At least until you realize the idea has led you up the garden path.) The fallacy that desire and determination hold the keys to all success appeals to the inner adolescent in us that cannot bear the thought of hard work going to waste. I try, ergo I succeed; the world is just, so I will prevail; there is a fair distribution of justice, so I will be lauded. Such a shame that it isn’t true.

Of course, that logic is not reversible. Sitting around waiting for luck to come your way is as misguided as thinking that good things always come to those who ‘want it enough.’ The truth is that determination and desire are necessary but not sufficient. We have to try like crazy; we have to retain a relentless sense of determination; we have to make sacrifices and take the road less travelled. And yet still there are no guarantees. Even after all that, we may come up empty-handed. That is the bleak but unavoidable logic of anyone who has deep ambitions.”

But before we get too depressed by the potential tragedy of it all, he has a whole chapter celebrating the need to retain a sense of amateur love for the game, but not in the long out-dated Corinthian notion. Quoting Simon Barnes, quoting Brazilian World Cup Coach Felipe Scolari:-

Scolari said: ‘My priority is to ensure that players feel more amateur than professional. Thirty to forty years ago, the effort was the other way. Now there is so much professionalism, we have to revert to urging players to like the game, love it, do it with joy.’

[Barnes continues] This is not romantic twaddle. It is a fact that the more important something gets, the harder it is to do it well. We can all walk along the kerbstone in safety, but if the drop were not six inches but six miles, how then would we walk? Football matters too much; it matters to the players too much. As a result, the mattering gets in the way of the playing.”

In Smith’s own words:-

All professional sportsmen battle with their fears and anxieties. And by no means do they always conquer them. We live on the brink of disappointment, of failure, of being dropped, of getting sacked, of retreating back into civilian life with our dreams unfulfilled. That is the parlous state in which most sportsmen usually find themselves. All of us have experienced downward spirals of anxiety and introspection - I am losing form, my place is in jeopardy, my career could be in danger. Often you deny the problem, which secretly increases your anxiety - you are scared of admitting your fears even to yourself - and your form worsens still further.

He continues:-

Remove the obstacles to playing well. Anxiety is one of the obstacles. Worrying is one of the obstacles. Failing to focus simply and only on the job in hand is one of the obstacles […] Dreading failure is one of the obstacles. Now you are thinking like a player again that is usually a beginning of a return to form.

The exposure to failure that really loving your sport entails is painful. The following paragraph(s) sang out particularly plaintively to the Knackered ears:

Trying desperately hard and not getting what you want is decent summary of what almost all sportsmen go through. The more deeply you compete and the greater the quality of your caring (to lift a line from Larkin), the more it hurts when you lose, or fail, or fall short. Each time a competitor taps into the essence of his personality in an attempt to win a sports match, he takes a risk. The risk is that he will get no reward — in the sense of a win or a personal triumph — for exposing himself to that degree of psychological rawness. It is easy to resent having tried so hard in the first place.

On the other hand, being too disengaged isn’t the answer, as the next paragraph elaborates:-

If it didn’t get us anywhere today, why should I bother to care so deeply next time? One answer is that being prepared and able to experience such deep emotions, and being exposed to that degree of disappointment, is a privilege not open to many. It doesn’t feel like a privilege at the time. It feels like hell. But it makes for a life more fully lived. After ten years playing professional sport, I have come to the startling conclusion that a big part of me actually enjoys caring about sport, even when that caring expresses itself as pain at losing. I wouldn’t rather life was more pallid. It sometimes reminds me that I am not wasting my time — and protects me a little from the resigned emptiness we all dread in sport.”

So don’t be put off from ordering a copy from Amazon.uk or Amazon.ca to steal a march on any US publication plans that Penguin has. He is good on this stuff, you know. He read History at Cambridge, and because he is younger than me, has been more exposed to counter-factualism, which he uses quite devastatingly to examine some rather controversial sporting triumphs, like England’s unexpected win in the 2005 Ashes cricket series against Australia.

And to show that someone has already deftly combined sport and philosophy, a re-run of one of my favourites. Schumpeter didn’t make the team on this occasion, but then… that was the story of his life.

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