17 ordspråk av Simon Walker
Simon Walker
 [At 8 AM one day, Walker and his crew lined up on the boat's foredeck and prepared to take in the 100-pound anchor.] There was one particular guy who probably drank a few too many beers the night before. Suddenly, he says he's got a bad back -- right in front of the entire crew, ... Everyone knows his back is fine. So all eyes turn to me to see what I'm going to do. Do I confront him? Do I let him get away with it? I had a split second to decide. |
| [If that were to happen, the crew quite possibly would have lost both its skipper and its rig to the world's harshest seas. Why take on such a risk?] Because I was young, I was fit, but most importantly, I was a member of the team, ... And sending me up there was the best use of the team's resources. So I did it. |
| [The first goal: Pass the tenth-place boat, which was five miles ahead of the Toshiba Wave Warrior, within the next 12 hours. The crew members did it. Then, they overtook the next boat and the one after that. Some 1,000 miles later, the Wave Warrior stormed into Boston in third place.] The race was all about learning: The team that learned the fastest would win, ... My ambition was for the crew to learn so well that they wouldn't need me. I really feel that a leader's goal should be to make himself redundant. |
| [The most challenging sailing was in the Southern Ocean. But the leadership challenge was comparatively easy.] It was muck and bullets -- battleground leadership, ... These guys were hanging on by their fingernails. As long as I was technically competent, leading was pretty straightforward. |
| [They turned east and, soon after, lost the bet. The wind dropped, they missed the most favorable position to cross the Doldrums, and they slipped to eleventh place. Fed up with the conditions, members of the crew began to lose faith in their strategy. One crew member complained that he had wasted three years of his life training for the race. The solution was to reset the goal.] I called the crew up on deck, and we discussed what had happened, ... 'We're in the eleventh position,' I told them. 'We can't think about winning. We're going to set ourselves new targets to beat as many boats as we can, one boat at a time.' |
| [Watch in, watch out, for 30,000 miles, the Wave Warriors hot bunked.] If I had come up with this idea in the middle of the race, I could have been the most charismatic leader in the world, and I never would have gotten them to agree to it, ... It all goes back nine months, to when we sat in that house in Wales. After that, we didn't talk about it -- we did it. That was our life. |
| But I also had to be realistic -- and setting a goal like 'win the race' just isn't credible, ... So I said to the all-or-nothing guy, 'To finish first, first we have to finish. We have to sail smart. If we go for broke, sooner or later we'll blow up.' |
| But then I noticed two of the guys standing on the foredeck, |
| I wanted my team to specialize in particular areas and stick with particular functions, but that wasn't me. And Mike wanted to be more sensitive to his team and be more collaborative, but that wasn't him. Ultimately, it's not a matter of which style works better than the other. It all comes down to which style works best for you. |
| I won't do it. I've got a bad back. |
| In the last race, we discovered that each boat's performance had very little to do with sailing, ... It had much more to do with the leadership that we as skippers were exhibiting, and with our ability to develop the full potential of our teams. All of the skippers were extremely good yachtsmen. All of them excelled at managing the boat. But ultimately, the race is all about managing people. |
| Mike and I barely talked during the race, |
| No one was getting the whole picture, thank God, ... But confiding in each of them was the only way for me to handle the loneliness of command, which is very, very real. |
| Some of the other boats did everything exactly the same way, from start to finish. On our boat, there wasn't a single operation at the end of the race that we did the same way as in the beginning. You were learning, changing, and evolving all the time. If you weren't, you were dead. |
| Somerset is the only club that I ever wanted to ride for this year. Being left out of the team last season made me even more determined to get my team place back, and that was the motivating factor throughout last year. |
Number of proverbs are 1469539
varav 1407627 på engelska
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This website focuses on proverbs in the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian languages, and some parts including the links below have not been translated to English. They are mainly FAQs, various information and webpages for improving the collection.
Här har vi samlat ordspråk i 12744 dagar!
Vad är proverb?
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Vanliga frågor
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varav 1407627 på engelska
Proverb (1469539 st) Search
Categories (2627 st) Search
Authors (167535 st) Search
Photos (4592 st)
Born (10495 st)
Died (3318 st)
Dates (9517 st)
Countries (5315 st)
Idiom (4438 st)
Lengths
Toplists (6 st)
This website focuses on proverbs in the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian languages, and some parts including the links below have not been translated to English. They are mainly FAQs, various information and webpages for improving the collection.
Här har vi samlat ordspråk i 12744 dagar!
Vad är proverb?
Hur funkar det?
Vanliga frågor
Om samlingen
Ordspråkshjältar
Hjälp till!
 |
This website focuses on proverbs in the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian languages, and some parts including the links below have not been translated to English. They are mainly FAQs, various information and webpages for improving the collection.
Här har vi samlat ordspråk i 12744 dagar!
Vad är proverb?
Hur funkar det?
Vanliga frågor
Om samlingen
Ordspråkshjältar
Hjälp till!