E140: How to be the best

Mark Williams has spent his career studying expertise and is one of the world’s leading authorities on skill acquisition in sport.His book, co-written with journalist Tim Wigmore, is called The Best, How Elite Athletes Are Made and includes stories and interviews with many leading sports stars including Marcus Rashford, Steph Curry, Helen Glover and many more.So what can we learn from these people about how to be better at what we do in other spheres? How do some of the book’s themes apply beyond sport and are there patterns to the ‘best’ organisations?What are the limits of the sports metaphor in training business people? How much of success is about culture? Do businesses ever grow beyond the culture of their founders?What are the traps of using data as the basis of decision making and how valid is the idea that technology spend is the key competitive advantage in sport/business in the future?To go deeper in to this topic and themes that run through the podcasts, you should sign up to Unofficial Partner’s weekly newsletter, which can delivered directly to your inbox every Thursday afternoon. Head to unofficialpartner.com to sign up.Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter and TikTok at @UnofficialPartnerWe publish two podcasts each week, on Tuesday and Friday. These are deep conversations with smart people from inside and outside sport. Our entire back catalogue of 500 sports business conversations are available free of charge here. Each pod is available by searching for ‘Unofficial Partner’ on Apple, Spotify and every podcast app. If you’re interested in collaborating with Unofficial Partner to create one-off podcasts or series and live events, you can reach us via the website.