Here, in further exclusive extracts from his autobiography, Winning, he describes how his early work experience helped to shape his coaching philosophy.
August 1979: Woodward is playing for England and working at Xerox
On walking into any Xerox office, the first thing you would see was the league table: the sales rankings of every salesperson in the country. Your name was there and the results were posted every day. You always knew how you were performing against everyone else. If you had any pride, or wanted to maintain any shred of self-esteem, you got your sales numbers.
Unlike in rugby, the pressure to perform was relentless at Xerox. The daily 8am meetings stick in my memory. If we weren’t meeting our targets, you would think the world had come to an end. It was brutal.
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But that’s why Xerox was successful. In the early 1980s the company was at its zenith. Copier and office-equipment sales were going through the roof. However, it was a no- excuses environment. If you didn’t make the sales calls, if you didn’t get the business, there was absolutely no sympathy. It was sink or swim. I couldn’t survive simply because I played for England.
The training at Xerox was second to none. I learnt that sales is all about listening and it is a skill you have to develop if you want to succeed.
Xerox was particularly fond of employing video analysis as a daily training tool. In our daily meetings the managers would video the regular sales role-play exercises. Then they would instantly play it back in front of the entire team. Everyone was incredibly nervous in front of the camera the first time. The pressure of knowing the whole room would be watching was immense.
I had been used to video analysis at Loughborough University, but this was different. It was up close and personal, right in your face. Even the simple act of listening was more difficult under that pressure.
But that was the point. When you watch yourself on video, you always see what you are doing wrong. It needed no explanation. It was a good system that gave instant feedback.
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If only the cultural environment I had experienced at Xerox had been present in the set-up of the England squad, everything could have been completely different.
But there was no motivation to change anything. Tickets for the international matches at Twickenham were sold out at every game, seemingly regardless of whether England won or lost. The organisation was well funded, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) being the only sporting body to own its home stadium outright.
There was no need to change. There were no World Cups to be won or global rankings.
In September 1997 Woodward is appointed England coach
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When I started as coach, I was determined to run the England rugby team like a business, so over the years I’ve canvassed hundreds of sources for new business techniques in line with all my experiences in the corporate and small business world.
I (started) my newly created company, Sales Finance & Leasing (in) the converted garage of our home in Pinkney’s Green near Marlow in early 1990. It had been a big risk, given a young family and a new mortgage.
Sales Finance & Leasing was a good business and was growing quickly. To put it simply, we were winning there, too. For the first time ever, and only a few years after I’d given up on the idea, I was winning in both my work and in sport. Of course, keeping this going would prove difficult, and when something did have to give, it was the business.
I’m sure if I had concentrated all my energies into just my business it would have been even more successful, but winning in rugby had a firm hold. I have brought together hundreds of business concepts in a totally new way. After many years in business and coaching, I’ve found that the principles that apply to coaching successfully also apply to business.
Consequently, the story of how we built a world-class team is also an account of all the business ideas that we have brought to our sporting set-up, for it is our off-the-pitch systems and processes that have created the environment of preparation for our country’s best players to be victorious in Sydney Without really realising it, I began thinking about England rugby as I would about my small business. Indeed, now England rugby was my business, or at least the elite international team. My small-business mindset would soon prove vital.
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In commerce you learn to be very clear about managing outcomes. If you don’t align your resources, deliver your product and put more money in the bank than you spend, your business will end in misery. It’s a simple equation.
For most businesses, including my leasing company, the biggest pressure is the time it takes to produce results.
Office space, equipment and people — or overheads — all cost the same to run each week whether you are earning the revenue or not.
The trick is, then, to keep your discretionary costs low, hire the best people within your budget and maximise your financial returns in the shortest possible time.
In larger companies, where there is more money, executives have more tools and better people at their disposal to plan new enterprises and manage them.
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However, in a small business like my leasing company, starting on a shoestring from a garage in Pinkney’s Green, the owner is often the only resource the business has. Success is generally built on raw determination and the smell of a good idea.
The mindset of a small-business person is an enthusiasm for starting from scratch with just a few resources to pull off minor miracles.
Turning my thought process to England rugby, one thing I quickly learnt was that I had scarce resources with which to work. I began to examine them.
First, time with the players. We had a good group to select from, many of them senior and experienced campaigners, but over the course of a year I didn’t have much time to work with them.
In addition to days during Test weeks, the RFU had negotiated with the clubs to release the players for an additional seven days during the year for training sessions at Bisham Abbey. Doing my maths, here’s what I discovered:
11 matches × four days of Test week = 44 days (three days’ preparation plus one day for the match)
+ seven training days in the year = 7 days
Total number of days with players in a year = 51.
That meant I would have 51 days in the next calendar year — on average one day per week — in which to train, prepare and play with the best rugby players in the country against the best teams in the world.
Compare that with a business situation: most of us work 50 weeks a year, five days a week, which means that in business we have roughly 250 days in which to communicate, train and do our work. Looking at it that way, it would take me five rugby years to move as far with the rugby team as I might in one year with a business team.
That was one of the many things we changed, improved and worked on over the years, clearly done with this broader context of winning in mind. The obsession for winning would extend to all parts of our game, to our entire organisation and to our entire elite environment.
Other coaches before me had asked themselves: “How can we be victorious with what we’ve got?” or, in other words, how could you coach and manage the players most effectively to earn victories? To me the question was flawed; I took a different view. Instead, I started with the end in mind — winning — and then worked out what it would take to get us there.
I asked myself: “If our goal is winning against the best teams in the world, what would our organisation need to have to succeed consistently?” It soon became clear to me that in my vision there were seven core components of a winning team.