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Suiting Up with Paul Rabil

Sam Walker: Author, the Captain Class

Suiting Up with Paul Rabil

Paul Rabil

Sports, Business

51.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2017

⏱️ 75 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week’s guest was a tremendous interview! Sam Walker is The Wall Street Journal's deputy editor for enterprise, the unit that oversees the paper's in-depth page-one features and investigative reporting projects. A two-time bestselling author, Walker's latest book, "The Captain Class", set out to answer one of the most hotly debated questions in sports: Who are the greatest teams of all time? He devised a formula, applied it to thousands of teams from leagues all over the world, and when he was done, trimmed the best of the best down to a list of the sixteen most dominant teams in history. With the list in hand, Walker became obsessed with another, more complicated question: What did these freak teams have in common? As Walker dug into their stories, a distinct pattern emerged: Each team had the same type of captain — a singular leader with an unconventional skill set who drove it to achieve sustained, historic greatness. So he wrote a book that delivers to us this exact formula. On today's show, we talk about his discoveries, take a deep dive with into the history of success for each captain and team he highlighted in his book, and much, much more. Walker's ability to identify these counterintuitive leadership qualities of the unconventional women and men who drove their respective team's to success is phenomenal. A must-listen show. Suiting Up is a podcast that explores the psychology, playbook of tools, and strategies of the most influential people in sports, entertainment and business.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

You know if you show incredible toughness and do something that's really passionately

0:08.8

aggressive to help the team win and the spirit of helping the team win.

0:13.8

Everyone sees that and our brains process that and we actually feel a paler version of that

0:19.2

emotion already. So you can if you can tap into that interconnected system of personality that's under consciousness

0:28.0

You can have a really dramatic impact on how a team performs

0:31.9

Welcome to an all new episode of Suiting Up Podcast.

0:35.0

I'm your host Paul Ravel and this week's guest.

0:38.0

He set out to answer one of the most hotly debated questions in all of sports.

0:43.0

Who and what makes up the greatest teams of all time?

0:48.1

And by doing so he devised his own formula, which we talk about, and applied it to thousands

0:52.2

of teams from leagues all over the world of all time.

0:56.0

From the NBA of the NFL, English Premier League, Olympic Field Hockey, and yes even American and Canadian professional lacrosse,

1:02.6

when he was done, he somehow trimmed it down

1:05.6

to a list of the 16 most dominant teams in history.

1:09.4

And with that list in hand,

1:10.8

Sam Walker became obsessed with another more complicated question.

1:15.6

What did these freak teams have in common?

1:18.0

And as he dug into their stories, a distinct pattern emerged.

1:21.9

Each team had the same type of captain, a singular leader with

1:26.0

an unconventional skill set who drove it to achieve sustained historic greatness,

1:31.4

underscore sustained.

1:33.2

So he wrote a book that delivers us to this exact formula.

...

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