It means they desire it enough to claim they want it, but they don’t want it bad enough that it hurts not to work for it. For them, the pain of doing it is still bigger than the pain of not doing it.

Winners inspire others; “whatever your job title, whatever your role, you are here to make Tony Blair Prime Minister”. I would describe strategic communication as like painting a picture. Every piece of action or communication lands a tiny dot. Overtime the dots come together. Counter messages distort even destroy it. As long as a tactic works for implementing your strategy in a way that gets you closer to your objective, keep doing it. But once it stops, drop it and try the next one, without changing the strategy. Lesson 2:Winners are so terrified of losing that they’re happy to get uncomfortable to avoid it.Some people are winners simply because they’re scared of losing, and this fear propels them into greatness. However, winning isn’t just about having a motivation to win, winners are also comfortable with being outside of their comfort zone. It’s easy to do things you find easy, but you only really improve when you do things you find difficult, so putting yourself under pressure to get better is crucial to winning.

The book is split into sections, with each section starting off discussing different parts of the skills Alastair sees as essential to any sort of success, which then proceeds into a case study of an individual who Campbell feels shows the perfect example of the winning trait in action. For example, the first section of the book focuses on the holy grail of “Objective, Strategy, Tactics”, followed by chapters on how effective leadership and teamship is essential to carrying out a winning OST blueprint. After this, characters from the world of business, sport, and politics are given as examples to study, from Ana Wintour of Vogue fame to Jose Mourinho, possibly the most infamous non-player figure in the world of professional football right now. The book's strength comes from interviews with winners from a range of fields, from politics, sport and business, which works both ways. On the one hand, we should get a genuine insight from figures such as Jose Mourinho, Haile Gebrselassie and Sir Charles Dunstone. On the other hand, Anna Wintour and Richard Branson get to put out their brand unchallenged, with the former dismissing claims of how she got ahead in her career and the latter promoting Virgin almost as a service that just gives people what they want, rather than a business which exists to make a profit.

Communicating a clear strategy; just when the communicator is getting bored with saying something, there is an outside chance of it reaching the outer radar of public opinion.

Do you love reading about successful people and finding out how they achieved their success? If so, then Winners: And How They Succeed by Alastair Campbell might be a book for you. Keep on reading to see my review of the book. However, the one big inspirational idea is almost a throwaway right at the end and seems to have been largely missed by Campbell. An unnamed courtier of King Juan Carlos is credited with recognising the “communism of humanity” in the Queen’s branding. The way that the monarchy reaches out to all stakeholders whatever their race, nationality or beliefs, capturing their aspirations, hopes and fears and bringing them together in a stunning, flag waving, happy experience of loyal connectivity. Act boldly – acting boldly puts you in a position to accept challenges that other more reserved people wouldn’t accept. You might not yet be experienced at something, but by being bold and ‘going for it anyway’ despite the difficulty you effectively throw yourself into the deep end and this behaviour gets you noticed. Alastair Campbell knows all about winning. As Tony Blair's chief spokesman and strategist he helped guide the Labour Party to victory in three successive general elections, and he's fascinated by what it takes to win. In addition, although this book was only written in 2015 it already felt dated due to the people Alastair choose to highlight. It is also fair to mention that there was a lot of male ‘Winners’ chosen to be highlighted with the only women being mentioned that I recall being Anna Wintour, Angela Merkel and The Queen.While I was researching the book, I spent some time with Formula One teams and was completely blown away by their attention to detail, their use of data and their obsession with innovation. They have a mindset that says: “no matter how fast we go, we should have gone faster”. Successful entrepreneurs are exactly the same. Perfection doesn’t exist - there is always room for improvement. In Winners: And How They Succeed, Alastair Campbells set out to get to the heart of success by analysing the best athletes, political leaders and global business empires. However, right at the beginning, Alastair states that “ there is no such thing as a single ‘recipe for success’ and nobody is likely to win anything simply by following the formula of another winner”. This seems to be contradicting the purpose of the book, but hey ho.

Recently, I’ve been sending out a motivational video with the Four Minute Books newsletter every Saturday. One of my favorites has been one that encourages you to do what is hard. It makes a very simple distinction between those, who are successful in life, and those, who aren’t: winners win and losers lose.Alastair Campbell is a man that divides opinion, in the political world and out of it. Seen as the man who brought “spin” in British politics to a new level, and with it helping Tony Blair win 3 successful elections for the Labour party, he is also painted as one of those involved heavily in the infamous and dreadful decision to send the British Army to Iraq. However, his views on this can be seen in this other book, while this latest release from the man strays very much away from British politics to observe various aspects and traits winning people have that make them so successful. Another major focus of Part 1 of the book is around leadership and teamship. In sport, politics and business, great leadership is vital. There are lots of people who dream of being a leader, but I loved the fact, Alastair mentioned the downside of leadership – “Big decisions are likely to be controversial. All leaders go through periods of being popular and unpopular.” Whilst being a leader is glamourised the fact is that leaders have to make unpopular decisions and it can be very lonely at the top. leadership becomes more about setting the conditions for excellence in all areas rather than providing the expertise yourself. What is meant by that is that for elite performers, doing exceptional work is the norm.They’ve made it part of their identity, not by deciding to be exceptional, but by deciding to work hard every day.