E208 - Steve Parish: The Candid Journey from Crystal Palace Fan to Owner

0:00Before we start today's episode, I have news that the High Performance App is now available and you can download it for free. And on there, exclusive content, including our live Q &A with two-time Rugby World Cup winner Dan Carter. Simply search for High Performance in the app store right now and then use your exclusive code HPAPP to get in. Hi there, you're listening to High Performance, the award-winning podcast that unlocks the minds of some of the most fascinating people on the planet. I'm Jake Humphrey and alongside Professor Damien Hughes, we learn from the stories, successes and struggles of our guests, allowing us all to explore, be challenged and to grow.

0:41Here's what's coming up today. Most of my life I've been underestimated as a starting point and that's quite a decent starting point to be. I did the hard graft, you know, I made the teas, I cleaned the sink, I went and got the guys food for them, you know, I wasn't too proud to do any of that. everything I do I look through the lens of is it the right thing for the football club we've all got an ego healthy one right but you do have to subordinate it if you want to be involved in in football at this level and you do also have to block out the noise I want success for this football club to be an everyday occurrence not one day out at Wembley every every 10 years losing everything is a pretty good incentive to get up every morning a little bit earlier than everybody else and make sure you succeed.

1:31You know what? I loved this conversation with Steve Parrish, the man who runs Crystal Palace Football Club. We recorded it at the training ground. They've got this beautiful new facility. His office overlooks the training pictures and just his pride when he looks out of the window and sees the first team and the youth team and the development squads all playing together. It was a really clear indicator of what he's done at Crystal Palace, which is to create a football club totally linked to the community, but also a football club where there's a true pathway from starting out as a young child to going all the way to the Crystal Palace first team.

2:05And this conversation, oh my goodness, please don't turn this off if you think, oh, it's a conversation about football. This is a conversation about life. It's a conversation about testing yourself, a conversation about failure, a conversation about doing things that scare you. Of course, there's football in there, But even those conversations are about how do you let managers go when you're no longer happy with them? How do you continue to evolve and look forwards as a football team? How do you compete in arguably the most famous football league on the planet? So here we go then. Co-owner and chairman of Crystal Palace Football Club, Steve Parrish, on High Performance.

2:50well steve thanks for being with us pleasure nice to see you welcome to the show what do you believe high performance to be high performance is obviously performing at the optimum level that you can you can get to as close to every day of your life as you can get to it trying to achieve the optimum, the zenith, the most that you can possibly achieve, making the best of yourself, making the best of people around you. Well, we're sitting here today in your office at the Crystal Palace Academy. So it's fair to say things have gone relatively well, but this is where you're at now. And we really want to sort of tap into the journey.

3:25So let's go right back to when you left school at 16, or maybe even before that, if you want to go further back than that. When do you think you first had this idea in your mind of being the best version of Steve Parrish? I think it starts at school wanting to be a footballer. You know, it starts at school wanting to be the best at something and realising that you're not, you know, and maybe not being the best, but at least be very good, you know, and seeing what that bestowed upon those people, you know, the sense of self-worth that those people that were really good at stuff got. Maybe it's a certain type of person, but, you know, you've then got instilled in your head that you want that, you know, you want to make a difference.

4:06You want to matter somewhere. It's important to you. You know, you want that self-respect. You know, maybe there's a little bit of positive jealousy about the people, you know, that have got it. So then it's a process of trying to find out what that is. And, you know, I'm always a great exponent for young people that are constantly asked, you know, what do you want to do? You know, I mean, who knows what they want to do, really? You know, unless you are a footballer or, you know, you've got some particular vocation. what's really important is you don't end up doing things you don't want to do you know that you're single-minded enough to say look I want to find something where I can be really good at it you know where I can make a difference so you need to try things and work out the things that you don't want to do the things that you're never really going to excel at and you know I see life in that regard as a sort of game of pinball you know you bounce off a lot of things until you finally hit the the jackpot and you find the zone that suits you so I remember for example leaving school and being given a job in insurance in thatchers britain you know when there were no jobs and telling the recruitment company i'm not doing that job yeah there's no one working in an office adding up numbers all day not happening and that was it i was struck off the recruitment companies you know that you know and and in the end i found my way into into graphic design and advertising and retouching found it was something that i loved doing you know the real passion for it and then gradually because of the kind of person i am had different ideas about how it could work and how it could run and really found a place where I could make a difference and I could be exceptionally good at something and get that kind of self-respect that I think is great for everybody to try and gain if they can, you know, where you're getting praise and recognition and, you know, people value you.

5:50So what was it about graphic design as opposed to football that you'd obviously let that ambition go at some stage? What was it about graphic design that lit you up, Steve? um so i went to work in this you know i got a job through a friend you know nepotism really and um i didn't understand what they were talking about for the first four months that i was there you know they were walking around with these pieces of black and white film calling them a blue and a red and a and i just thought they were talking gobbledygook and i'd always been made to work you know my dad had sent me out for a saturday job when i was 14 i had a good role model with my father in terms of working hard you learn that earning your own money you know is is far more gratifying than being given it you know going out and buying something with the money that you've earned you learn about how to build relationships with people that you wouldn't necessarily be friends with outside of it you know one of the things I I said to my daughters you know whereas at school you can have very black and white views of of people you know in a workplace you've got to learn to find a common ground with everybody that you work with because you're going to be with them every day and you know and i learned about selling and customer interaction and human behavior and i learned how if you give people positivity generally they they give it back to you so i learned an incredible amount of things with those jobs working on saturdays and in the summer and then when i went into the the graphics business what i learned was early retouching you know um we were very fortunate the business that had some of the first i mean you needed a supercomputer to do what the kind of things that you can do today on a mobile phone.

7:23And it was the type of work we were in advertising. So we manipulated these images. And then you could see them on billboards the next day, you know, there's a physical manifestation of the work that you did. And I had a computer graphics OA level, I took an extra subject when I was at school. And that basically made me the one eyed man in the land of the blind at the time, literally, you know, people transitioning from a craft to a computerized skill and i walked into this place as an 18 year old and there were literally computers almost gathering dust in the corner that it was quite unionized and people didn't want to touch them and they were sort of devil machines and you know they're going to take all our jobs and of course i was there to embrace them and and get into them and and i just loved it i loved the whole process i went from you know probably being somebody that my parents would think of outside of you know going and doing a job on a Saturday or in the week of being relatively lazy outside of that or just wanting to play football to you literally couldn't drag me away from the place if I was creating an image for an ad I think I'm one of those people that never wants to let somebody down you know if I make a promise to you if I say I'm going to deliver that to you you're going to get it right and and that made me quite a valuable commodity in that in that business there's two things you've said there that really fascinate me that I'd like to explore one is you're going into an industry where you are the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind so you're coming in with new ideas and you're innovating and you're trying to change old habits and old practices but you also spoke about your ability to get on with people you know what you'd learned about human behavior because i can see the problem of being an 18 year old lad coming in and telling people this is the way things are going to be could easily get their backs up or cause resentment and yet you obviously didn't do that you got them to buy into it and I'm interested in how do you bring people with you when you have a sense of a vision or a sense of how things could be to bring people that might be resistant along with you on the journey well I think you've got to start slowly you know I think it's all very well having confidence generally you know when I was younger I always looked younger than I was and I was incredibly tiny, skinny, slight.

9:44So most of my life I've been underestimated as a starting point and that's quite a decent starting point to be really, because if you're underestimated, then you're normally going to surprise people on the upside and I think you've got to earn your spurs, right? You can't just walk into somewhere and say, oh, I know all about this and I know all about that. I did the hard graft, I made the teas, I cleaned the sink, I went and got the guys food for them you know I wasn't too proud to to do any of that I did I think I changed some of the customs and practices of the time where they used to bang you out and drag you in the street and tie and feather you with ink and I made it quite clear to them in the early days that that wasn't happening at any point so you grow your natural instincts and I think I would go back to working in the CAF I worked in working in Millets which I worked in for years you know you just learn how to interact with people and I think it's as much about listening isn't it you know and have you got the emotional intelligence to listen to people much later on I remember we would go into pitch for business you know what became an advertising graphic design business and often I would take young people in there and I would say to them afterwards I think the meeting went today and they would go great great I said listen you're not you're just listening to what people say you're not watching them right you're not watching their body language you're not really listening to the undertone and not listening to what they're not saying right that meeting did not go well right that we're not in the box seat to win this piece of business they're not happy with us i can tell it so i think you develop those that emotional intelligence in places like shops you know i counsel all kids you know go and work in a cafe go and work in a restaurant go and work because you deal with difficult customers people who are 90 because you know they had they did break the zip it wasn't broken when they bought it you know and you've got to deal with all those kind of difficult situations which i think help you in later life this is interesting then so you've you've kind of you've been at school and you've had that big dream hasn't worked out for you you've then gone into the the agency world and your um social ability to your personal relationship ability your ability to read people has become quite important but you still don't end up sitting where we're sitting having this conversation today without the visionary side of this so when did you sort of realize that you were looking at things differently to other people you were the kind of person that wanted to own and run a business and do more than your average member of staff often you're activated by people saying things you think are wrong it was fairly obvious to me that the business wasn't going to stay the way it was i mean at the time you know the unions were fighting all the change they were fighting this technology coming in i mean it was pretty apparent that how can you stop technology i mean you just can't stop it you can't lock it up in a box and and and say it doesn't exist and it's never going to exist so when you're very very ingrained and i would counsel a lot of people to understand this i think today there's a there's a thought that there's a lot of get rich quick you know everybody looks at a facebook and a youtube and they think that every business happens like that they are massive outliers most of the time most of the people that have been successful gather a deep intrinsic knowledge of an idiosyncratic subject you know the people that have invented those businesses didn't just sit in their bedroom one day and come up with an idea they're people that have worked in the industry and they've seen how it's been done wrong they've seen how many layers and steps there are in the chain that in their view are unnecessary you know and they really want to start to construct something that's better and that's where I think it all comes from it just comes from seeing things why do we do it like this this is nonsense he's going through four processes when it only needs to go through one and then if you're a type of person that's confident that's willing to speak out that wants to change that wants to make a different go back to the that thing you know there's something in you that wants to be the best at something wants to do things properly then you start to sort of push change and then when you can't get change easily you decide that the only way you're going to do that is if you're in charge and you can tell people to change so what age did you realize that you needed to be in charge to to affect the change that you wanted um very young you know I was very lucky in the in the first business that I was in you know the people recognized quite early I suppose I could make the money you know and that I could make a difference and then it's just it's a natural process you know people realize you know what you're doing most people just fall into line and start doing what you know you want them to do and then the people that don't you either work a way of getting around or you know you work a way of getting them out basically and then in the end you know i bought the business i bought the business it was struggling i went to the bank i put my house up as collateral it was actually much much more difficult to raise capital then um and was that a scary time for you would was fear a prevalent emotion in that period or not i think one of the things about entrepreneurial behavior is typically people think you're a massive risk taker but you you don't think you're taking risks because you can just see the picture of it all working can't you it was an incredibly exciting time probably a bit less exciting for my wife who had to sign a thing with the solicitor saying that i was putting the family home at risk and and all that kind of stuff but i was laser focused you know the downside i thought was so minimal the upside was so big if if i worked hard enough and got enough good people around me you know with with the right kind of mindset that it was more exciting than it was scary i think it's good for people as well to have some risk i think you know a lot of businesses now people just go and raise outside capital from friends and family and they don't have enough skin skin in the game of their own you know they don't have enough downside risk because losing everything is a pretty good incentive to get up every morning a little bit earlier than everybody else and make sure you succeed so tell us about risk then tell us about what is almost the calculations that you make in your head to determine whether a risk is worth pursuing or not i mean if you come to a football club which is hugely risky i think sometimes you know you've got to just take a leap into the unknown to a certain extent as well.

15:59I mean, when I got involved in football, I didn't really know how I was going to do it right. I'd just seen a lot of people doing a lot of things wrong. So I thought if I steer clear of those, you know, I'll manage that. But I think you've got to believe in yourself and your own acumen and you've got to think that you've got some knowledge that can help you do it. And when I looked at Crystal Palace, you know, when I was a kid and I used to go to Sellers Park, it was pretty much the same experience as going to Highbury. By the time, you know, I bought the club, Sellers Park was worse than it was when I was a kid and Arsenal were in the Emirates right so it was pretty clear that there was an upside potential right and obvious that the downside risk was pretty dangerous you know the last two owners of the club had gone into administration so I think you've just got a certain point you've got to believe in the ideas you've got to believe in yourself and and as I said you tend to not really think you're taking risks because you believe in the story the narrative you've built in your head so much the other key thing here is bringing people on that journey with you and this is just as applicable today at crystal palette as it was back then in your early business you said that you know i raised capital i put the house up for as collateral against the business and then i had to find great people and work with them we have a lot of business leaders a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of what did brent hoberman call them wantrepreneurs who aren't yet but would love to be in business what would you share with them about recruiting the right kinds of people how do you get that part of a business right because the truth is that every business is a recruitment business right well i tend to gather people finding good people people that think like you that will act like you in the right circumstances that have got integrity that are honest that but you know understand the concept of working for an organization and putting that organization before themselves are hard to find if you then couple that with actual knowledge about the thing that you're doing so I've run very few recruitment processes in my life I think the concept that you know you get five candidates who happen to be people that want to move jobs at the time and then you make the decision that you're going to pick one of them has got so little chance of success and the problem is is if you if you hire somebody who's the wrong person generally you're looking at six months to two years before you fix it before you get out of it the benefit of getting a great person is so much higher even than the value of a good person that it's just worth taking your time so i'm much more somebody that collects people than i am somebody who recruits explain that if you're in an industry you know you'll meet people along the way in a natural environment you'll get to hear about people you know i'll get to hear about somebody i'll look at things that they're doing and i think they're interesting we might talk about football managers you know i was talking to another chairman the other day about football managers you know and they have an interview in a football manager i mean they're all they'll do good interviews i've never met a football manager now doesn't have a powerpoint have some tactical stuff you know we'll tell you how brilliantly they get on with the manager and they work seamlessly with the recruitment you know what i mean i mean nobody comes into an interview not wanting to sell themselves to do a job it's a completely i've never had any idea or anybody makes a decision in an interview about whether somebody is the right person for them to work with but watching somebody from afar seeing their track record seeing the things that they've done maybe getting to know them because you bump into them at industry events or you're walking into a pitch while they're walking out or you just did good things through other people for example we used to have a recruitment scheme in my advertising business where we would pay the staff to recommend somebody and bring somebody in you know we're a recruitment company that we don't know and we don't know that they know us but we've got great people that work for us probably they know great people because they're people that we like so we're much more likely to pay them to bring people in than we would to pay a recruitment company so i would take my time i would rather not hire somebody than hire somebody that was just good as opposed to getting somebody great and i would just build relationships with people over time and then gradually bring them into the business sometimes talking to them for six months to make sure that it was it was right because the other thing as well is it's a two-way street right it's not just about finding people that are right for you they've got to be right for the company they've got to come and be a success and it's got to be a place that they want to be so equally in an interview what i find is that you know the company aren't really truthful about what the reality is of working in their company and the candidate isn't really entirely truthful they're trying to sell the best version of themselves right whereas what you really need to understand is what's everybody's worst day like and you know I'll sit in an interview saying we're not very good at this and we're not very good at that and we've really got to improve at this and we've really got to improve at that and this is what you're going to walk into and you know we expect people to work really stupid hours and I'm probably going to ring you at midnight on a Thursday and just so you know before you come that's the way it is you know but by the way if you've got to go to the dentist or you're not in four days a week no one's checking up on you as long as you're getting your work done so what's been the best recruitment or an example of the best person that you've recruited using your methods in advertising the first person i worked for was as an apprentice was a guy called tim courtley and his father owned the business and I recruited him into my advertising business when it was when it was my business he was brilliant one of the problems that you have to overcome and I'm much better at it now is this constantly striving for perfection you know everything's got to be perfect and nothing ever will be and it's stymies decision making and he was always the one who would say to me right okay you can make decision now Steve we need to know now what do you want to do we'll do whatever you want to do but we need to know now so he was brilliant at that kind of thing i had another guy called colin bond who sadly passed away who i'd say was a mentor the first day i walked into work he was a proofer he took me under his wing he used to come and pick me up at 6 30 in the morning when i'd come home from a nightclub at four o 'clock you know that morning and and make sure i got to work he taught me how to go and get my first pay rise on what to say go on this is information everyone listening to this would love to hear the thing was i worked in this business and it was it was unionized but the the way you could get out of the union place goes you become a manager right and you knew all the managers were because they had company cars right so the thing you coveted most in this business was getting a company car and um at this point i was running all of this computer equipment people going off sick and there was one particular period where I was literally doing everything.

22:39And it was an overtime-based system, so I could go home at 2 o 'clock, but they were keeping me on until like 10, 11, 12 o 'clock at night. I was missing dental appointments and stuff like that. Anyway, I'm driving to work. He said, listen, you need to go and get a pay rise. You need to go and talk to them. And the guy that owned the company was literally terrifying. This guy was, you know, he was not a pleasant guy, to be honest. He was terrifying. He said to me, you know, what you need to do is you need to go and talk to them and they're going to offer you a certain amount of extra money while everybody's off.

23:11And at that point, you've just got to get up, put the chair back under the table and say, thanks very much, really appreciate your time. I'm going to carry on what I'm doing. I'm not going to let you down, but I'm going to think about my options because I don't think that's really acceptable. I said, come on, I don't think I'm going to do that, mate. He said, you've got to do it, you've got to do it. And I did, I went up there and I did it and I came out of there with, I was 19 years old and I got a Toyota MR2 convertible, which I just, I literally couldn't believe. That was the car to have at one point as well.

23:46That was the car to have, yeah. It was incredible. And then in football, Dougie Friedman would be the number one person. I mean, he taught me so much, so quickly about the game when I came into it. You know, I was so fortunate. You're fortunate at football clubs because you've got people that love the club, right? As a default, you know, they care about the club. He was the second manager, but he was first assistant manager. And he's still here today. I mean, having left a couple of times in the documentary, if you want to watch it, we'll tell you the story of... Well, that's what intrigues me because on that documentary that you made, because it was filmed in real time, I know it was put out retrospectively, was your sense of grievance.

24:33you felt wounded when he left you to join Bolton at the time comes across in your interviews from that period and yet you've had the grace the the the foresight to invite Dougie back in and he speaks about repairing that relationship that I think no I felt I mean I think hopefully what comes across is I felt responsible right so so this is my thing about if you if you run a business you own a business you're in charge right everything's your fault that's that's my starting point right everything that goes wrong is my fault anyone can do the good days anyone can be there when the team are winning you're there for the difficult days that was what i was there for you if you want to run a successful business you got to do all the difficult things first you got to run towards the gunfire all the time and and by doing that you set a great example so i mean i think if you watch both of those interviews that were filmed completely at different times without any briefing on what either of us should say actually both of us feel responsible you know Dougie says I was young you know somebody came along and offered me a load of money I say I knew I wasn't paying him enough money he didn't have a long enough contract but everything was going great and I didn't really you know I thought oh we'll get promoted and obviously he's gonna hold all the cards I'm gonna have a fantastic conversation and I just didn't want to break that spell of the of the moment you know by trying to talk about money and then I'm not offering him quite as much as he wants and and all that kind of thing so I think in that instance you know we both shared responsibility for the mistake but I would take the bulk of it you know because I was older wise should have been wiser I'd manage more people have been in that situation more often so hopefully actually what comes across is you know a sense of responsibility from from me but what impressed me was your willingness to go back and reinvest in that relationship because I think football's got a reputation of once you've gone you've burnt your bridges you move on in those relationships and you obviously didn't you then went back and rekindled it and I'm interested in why that was important to you and and how did you go about building those bridges again I think time's a great healer isn't it I also think look if it's business I don't bear grudges right I mean if you say something nasty to me personally you know if you'd say I'm a bad person or I'm a dishonest I'm going to take it personally right but there was none of that right he got offered a job with a lot of money with a contract that was very attractive right that's life you know I remember right he writing in his book football's the only profession in the world where there's people think that you shouldn't be aiming to better yourself right you know to be going to a better place to be getting a better job you know to be earning more money for your family to be trying to achieve more things so you know I just thought could have managed that situation better Steve couldn't you you know obviously there was a lot of noise around the fans is it his fault is it your fault as as normal with these things it's it's my fault because I'm in charge and I should have stopped it at the time I was just focused on making sure that it wasn't catastrophic you know and getting Ian in and making sure we still got promoted but I always knew like he was a good bloke and he would learn life was a bit different and and i didn't think necessarily we would find a moment to work together again but i was very pleased when we could for so long many of you have been asking for more from the high performance podcast and now you can get it i'm pleased to say the high performance app is available for you to download now simply search for high performance in the app store right now and then use your exclusive code HPAPP for exclusive content, untold stories and things you won't see or hear anywhere else.

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28:21I want to get into the details of Crystal Palace, but I think before we talk football, I'd love to just wrap up the previous part of your life. So you're in this business, you're running it, you're leading it, you're recruiting people. I mean, it sounds like you were in real flow at this point am i right in saying it felt like everything you touched kind of worked yeah you learn it for a while it does and then you make a really quick decision you know to do something like buy a company and it goes wrong i mean you're definitely you're most vulnerable when you're most successful one of my favorite quotes of all time is bill gates which is that a success is a really bad teacher it makes smart people think they can't fail and that's absolutely true you know failures you learn I know people say this but you do you learn infinitely more out of your failures than you do out of your successes so typically you know you tend to go on a roll and everything's going really well and it's working really well and then you know you buy a business I bought a business called world writers that translated ads for people all over the world that was really successful and then I bought a business called smoke and mirrors and that was really successful and then I remember buying another business after that where I didn't do the same level of diligence I didn't give it the same amount of thought I just thought I'm brilliant everything I touch turns to gold and that's when you have failures right that's when you realize that you don't do the work generally you won't succeed and and I think that's what I learned along the way and then out of that you probably develop a bit more caution and you go a little bit slower I think sometimes actually doing 10 things and accepting three of them are going to be a mistake might be better than only ever doing three things and getting them all right i'm involved with another business where a lot of my staff went afterwards where the leader of that has much more of that philosophy than i do and that's worked brilliant for him although you know he's run a lot closer to the wire you know financially i mean it's incredibly successful now but he ran a lot closer to the wire than i did so there are different ways of doing things but definitely you know your your failures tend to come hot on the heels of your biggest successes and you got to the point where the business was sold is it on record what that sold for how well you did out of that or not yeah so we sold it for a couple hundred million yeah it's just sold again for 700 which was 11 12 years i bought the club and i had both businesses at the same time and look i'm somebody who's been driven by passion i'm not driven by money everyone likes money and um that great saying you know uh does money make you happy well i've lived with it and I've lived without it and I much prefer living with it because it facilitates a lot of things but look the advertising business was it was hard work lots of traveling I had 14 different physical locations around the world I had about two and a half thousand people if you included all the freelancers that worked for us I knew all the clients intimately there probably was a different way of doing it and I could have kept it and carried on running the football club but I took in some mates money as well for the football club and I felt a sense that was the first time I'd ever had any outside investors you know I owned my advertising business so I didn't have anybody to answer to other than a bit of bank debt whereas as soon as I took in investors into the football club I felt a bit of responsibility so you know so I sold it look I think I honestly think if I'd have kept it it would be worth you know a few billion by now so do you live with regret about that or not none not a minute because if I hadn't you know look at all the amazing things I've been able to do in football and even the really really bad times you know one of the things I say about football being involved in it in sport is you're alive right every single day you're alive you know you you're feeling real emotions every single day and in fact you can go from as we all know the pits of despair to complete elation back to the pits of despair in the space of five minutes when I was four years old I sat in my bedroom and I picked Crystal Palace over Millwall when my dad gave me the choice of the two his dad was a Millwall fan um who did he support your dad dad wasn't really a football fan I always joke one of the reasons I never made it professionally you know because he wouldn't take me to the right the truth of his it wasn't good enough but um so he wasn't a massive football fan but he gave me the choice based on that they're the two that I can I'm going to easily be able to take you to so since I was four years old there's there are even people that I went to primary school with that come to some of the games that say I said I was going to own Crystal Palace when I was a kid.

32:45Do you remember that? Well, look, I think wanting to play so much and then not being able to, the next best thing maybe is, you know, can you own your football club or can you run your football club? So being able to do this, being able to make a difference to my community, my local community, and the players obviously do all the work on the pitch, right? But being a catalyst, if you like, to bring so much joy, you know, to people has been incredible. So, you know, I certainly don't think I would be happier with more money, but still in advertising than I am now doing this. Can I go back and just explore something you said about when you were on that run of success?

33:25I'm interested in what lessons you could pass on to listeners about how to avoid complacency. When things are going well, you start to think that you're the cock of the walk. How have you learned to avoid that? look I don't like letting people down and I don't like failure that's a natural instinct and and that's got as I said some positive and some negative connotations you know I think you can move quicker as you come to terms with failure and you do have to try things and you know I know that move quickly and break things thing they've got in in in Silicon Valley you know that that is very true you know it's a quick way of doing it I think I was a bit of a worrier you know I think I was born a bit of a worrier I think that that any good manager and that's what you are essentially if you run a business or if you manage a football club you know you've got a kind of crystal ball in your head it might not be a perfect one but you do have one you know you go you're trying to envisage the future aren't you that's why you develop products and services that people don't necessarily know they want or need that you think that you know they do need and in that regard you're generally in your worst moments catastrophizing right you know i think people that do well build successful scenarios in their head and then they also build the alternative reality in their head of how it can all go wrong and and what they they need to do to to avoid it you know I always say just coming back to kind of football analogies you know the good football managers have to work so hard because they look at the season in their head they can see how the season's going to pan out and unless they get that player to make that run and that one to do that and that one always to be in that position and that hotel was no good that we stayed in that needs to be better you know so you're constantly scanning the horizon for threats aren't you one business partner that i had once in one business said something really really smart to me that's been really useful in the dark times is that your worst fears are seldom realized i mean it's really interesting like we interviewed a guy called adam grant on this podcast steve and is an organizational psychologist at walton university you love his episode actually so he explains the theory behind the practice that you've just said of having a really clear sense of what you do want and where you want to get to but then almost creating a vaccine if you like or of then catastrophizing and working out what could kill us and all those factors and he he's proven that the combination of those two things improves your resilience to be able to keep going by his estimate is around 32 percent and i'm interested that you gave us a hint of when you recruit somebody you present them the worst day scenario which it seems like that's what you're doing for employees as well that you're bringing on the journey with you how do you go about doing that now that you run a football club that you present the vision of what could be but equally the dangers of uh of what of some of the pitfalls i mean that's really interesting research because i would concur with it i thought i would call it you know if you can stare down your greatest fears it enables you to function so much better.

36:28So if you work out your plan for your worst day, so in the Clays Football Club it's pretty clear, isn't it? For a Premier League football club, your worst day is relegation. Your worst day in the immediate future is relegation. You've got to make sure you get that out, look at what it looks like, really understand it, understand how you're going to mitigate it, stare it down, and then I think it liberates you, because then you think, OK, the worst happens, we'll be OK. and I think it then actually makes you perform better. The one time I've been in the dressing room after a game to talk to the players, under Sam's blessing, when I was with Sam, we'd lost 4-0 to Sunderland and we were at the bottom of the table and we were in real trouble.

37:12And I'd built a good relationship with the players over the summer about it and there were various conversations I had with them in that dressing room that aren't to be repeated. But one of my themes was that, right? was look we're playing like we're terrified and you're terrifying the crowd but at the end of the day right if we get relegated the sun's still going to come up tomorrow you know you're still going to have a beautiful family and a great life you're going to have a beautiful family a great life you're i'm going to have a beautiful family and a great life right it's not great but it isn't the end of the world and we'll work away to come back i love um how involved you are here because actually there's a strange thing in football isn't there that it's one of those rare businesses where you could own it but people are negative about someone on the non-football side being involved in it this thing about does the owner go in the dressing room does the owner come to the trainer does the owner go meet the players and it's like why is there this conversation in football about owners should be more detached for some strange reason you know i don't know i do tell um people that come into it you know if they do come and ask for advice you know i say to them look as a chairman of a football club you need to remember a couple of things right you're only really there for the bad days you sign all the bad players you mean that any bad player was definitely the chairman that got involved in signing that bad player when you're losing it's all your fault and when you're winning no one's asking you to go on the lap of honor and no one's you know you're you're pretty much invisible right i can easily come to terms with those things because i love this football club right so everything i do i look through the lens of is it the right thing for the football club we've all got an ego healthy one right but you do have to subordinate it if you want to be involved in in football at this level and you do also have to block out the noise so to answer your question directly i don't think you'll find any high performance or good organization where the person at the top isn't actively involved i actually think that one of the problems that a lot of people have is that they are very successful businesses and then they come into football they're kind of past that level where they want any aggravation they've delegated a lot of that into their into their normal business and they come into football as a sort of hobby they think they can hire some relatively good people and it will all go all right and often they can end up losing you know quite a bit of money so my view as always is that the buck begins and ends with me you know I don't really much care what people think about what I haven't haven't achieved I've got my own measurement of it right I know what my job is in this football club and my job in this football club might not be to be the the one that wins trophies right I mean I want to win trophies we came within eight minutes of winning the cup final it'd be great for the football club but my job is to build a platform for this football club that will last for years right the thing that drove me into it was Sellers Park Highbury Sellers Park the Emirates right I want to bridge that gap back I want success for this football club to be an everyday occurrence not one day out at Wembley every every 10 years so I think that people that come into football just need to think slightly differently I think people tend to try and do things too quickly you know we're going to be really successful right away and I think that's very difficult in any business and I do think if you want to be successful at anything you need to learn about it i'm a great believer in stealing the best ideas from everybody so one of the comments you made there steve was that that you don't really care what people think about you which is i can see that's a healthy position to take but you also do seem to be really open to feedback where people will say to you that's not working or or there's a better way of doing it as you've just described so what's the filter you apply when somebody is offering you feedback that you go that's valuable but that's just noise well so firstly i definitely care about what people think about me i don't care about what people think about certain decisions that i have to make because if they're not armed with all of the information for example you know let's take the recent situation with patrick you know there are people who said it was the wrong thing to do you know when he went and then they'll now say to me oh you know it was brilliant you know you did the right i know like listen i wasn't really interested what you thought when you said it was the wrong thing and i'm not particularly interested that you think it was the right thing right you didn't have all the information that i had in a lot of cases with football clubs or any business you know from the outside looking in having an opinion about you know what should happen is a bit like somebody telling a judge what verdict they should come to in a court case based on a newspaper story right i mean the judge has got all of the information and sat through 10 days in the court right and understands exactly what's going on so you know none of us want to be thought of badly we all want to be well thought of right but you can't let that cloud every individual decision right sometimes you have to be what seems to be unpopular to do what you believe is the right thing that's different to people thinking that you're honest decent you act with integrity you act for the right reasons these are really important things to me and to everybody right but equally i don't care if a thousand people think i'm making the wrong decision and I feel like I know I'm making the right one.

42:29Should I tell you what I think about this owner-fan situation in football at the moment? Because it feels broken to me, right? I mean, I'm a Norwich City fan, so I hear Delia out being chanted every week and it breaks my heart because she saved the football club. She's done everything she can for the football club. And if you really want someone like a local fan like you are, you hear people talk about fan ownership. Well, here it is. You're a football fan and you own Palace. Delia's a Norwich fan and owns Norwich, right? I think the part of this comes from communication. I would love more conversations with owners, right?

43:06They will never allow you in, but then they'll get frustrated when people form an opinion based on 10 % of the information. And guess what? You've only given us 10 % of the information. Therefore, tell everyone what's going on. So when you do something like you sack Patrick and you say, I had all the information, I think you have a duty to share all that information. as long as it's not sensitive stuff that's difficult for him in his career going forwards. But if it's stuff that explains the decision better, come and tell people. Yeah, I get what you're saying. I think, look, it's a double-edged sword, isn't it?

43:40Right. So let's just talk about Patrick for a minute. Yeah. So here's a person that I've got unbelievable amounts of time for. Right. He's a brilliant guy. He's smart. We had a fantastic season with him. you know we got to semi-final the fo cup you know keeping palace in the premier league finishing 12th is an achievement right let's be realistic we're we're a bottom nine revenue club in the premier league every year somebody does that it's an achievement we'd all like to outperform a bit more than that but he had a really good fantastic season if i was to talk to you about you know where it lost its way a little bit i might just talk openly and freely and tomorrow there'll be headline in the daily mail that says paris slams vera for not blah right so that's why people are cautious about it right you know i want and believe that patrick can be a fantastic manager i think that you know working for nearly two years at crystal palace keeping us in the division having a good point study getting to the semi-final fco cup pretty strong cv for a premier league manager when you think about right the longevity of premier league managers and the fact of the matter is because of the resources at clubs like this and because of the way things go, sometimes things just lose their way, right?

44:57You know, and you start trying things and they're not happening and, you know, it just loses its way. And of course, the spectre of relegation for a club like this is so great, you know, on the balance of me desperately wanting to stick with a person that I like and respect and I want him to be successful and me having the duty of care to this football club and not being able to risk relegation relegation when you know we built this academy this is brilliant we're finishing it off we're just about to start on the main stand that will take us in the top 10 by revenue clubs and build real longevity that risk overcomes you know the other part of it right and and in this instance it's it's been proved to work out but we don't know it wouldn't have worked out under patrick of course we don't know there was there was a chance of that there's no question it wasn't you know all this he'd lost the nonsense right players had all the time in the world for him right just sometimes in organisms and organizations things just aren't going right but i can understand for most people why it's so difficult to speak about that because even out of what i've just said there might be a headline for somebody right that they can twist so of course it makes people very circumspect about about about speaking about things and i understand that i do get that but i just feel that almost everyone that owns a football club does it because they love football or they want that club to be successful and the fans are on the same journey and there does there feels a disconnect doesn't there at the moment has it ever been any different though jay i mean you know the fact of the matter is football is a zero-sum game right yeah so of the 92 clubs right there are nine in the efl that can be successful i.e get promoted and there are what maybe six or seven in the premier league that can be successful every other football fan is either mildly dissatisfied completely dissatisfied and of course it's the one subject in the world because we all grew up with it and we all feel passionately about it we're pretty much everybody you know the way i describe it is this if if i walk into a restaurant with you and there are 50 people in the restaurant 99 of those people would never imagine they could do your job right not one of them would think you know they know jake's a great presenter he's done f1 he's done all these amazing things he knows how to do the links he knows how to manage the people he knows how to make a program work on its own you know and that's difficult i don't think i could do that could you do steve oh yeah definitely football chairman run a club i know exactly what i would do so it's a different type of profession it's it's it's the ultimate zero-sum game for some to do well others have to do badly right and sometimes it's also quite nebulous you know it's difficult yourself to put your finger on what's wrong you know to go and sit in front of people and and to explain it and then you make promises right and then you look stupid because you make promises you know next year we're going to get promoted next year we're going to win the league i'm more circumspect more open about it because i think we've got a really good fan base you know that have been through two administrations and understand the downsides that maybe some of the norwich fans you know might not see the other side of it but I equally understand for other owners why it's difficult to do.

48:06Can I take you back to a comment you made when you were talking about Patrick and you said that we started to lose our way a little bit you've been through enough managerial cycles now where I'm interested have you spotted early warning signs of when you as a team are starting to lose your way and if so, what are they? Well, the way you play even more than results because sometimes you can win games but you recognise you were lucky you're descending off or a result obviously results I go to the training ground once a week I don't interfere I don't live at the training ground but you can just sense a mood you can get a feeling for the way things are going you've got to remember that you want the manager to succeed right I mean just about the worst period of being involved in football is that period where you think you're inexorably heading towards having to you know have that conversation with the manager who wants to do that and we opened this academy Alan Pardew was here and Ian Holloway was here and Sam Sadie couldn't come but got a great relationship you know with with all of the managers afterwards they know it's a fact of life but in that moment it's not pleasant it's a rejection nobody wants to be told that you know we're going to go in a different direction you know you're as much looking for reasons not to you know you're looking for hope all the time you're looking for a spark but it's a difficult job you know being a Premier League manager is a wearisome tiring job and often you can just start to see the fatigue in the manager even at the end of Roy's last tenure you know Roy now he would say I think compared to at the end of that four years through Covid you know all of that difficult period us not really signing players compared to how he is now.

49:54You know, he's got a completely new lease of life. So there's lots of little signs, but I do think it's important to go and watch every game. I don't think you can get a sense of it on television. So beyond just simply deciding to replace them, what other methods would you suggest that you have done that have worked effectively to maybe stave off the threat of the sack or maybe turn things around? um look you're talking to the manager and you're trying to um help them find the right direction i think i learned very early on you know as a as a football chairman your words carry tremendous weight you know at the end of the day that football manager knows they need to keep you happy in in in some ways so you know if you just you want people to succeed right so you're just trying to find ways to mentor them what I find a lot with managers at the moment is that they study certain managers and they understand how they are and how they act but they don't understand what they actually do to be able to act and be like that and I almost think for some managers we're getting too bogged down with data and we're forgetting the fact that a football team is an organism of a group of people and and there is emotion and effort involved you need to have the basics of just man management right which are for me you know if i've got a group of people they want to have a purpose right so everybody in an organization needs a purpose what's my purpose monday morning what are we all working towards where do i fit inside that purpose right what's my role in making that purpose collective purpose better how do i improve as an individual and am i inspired and my big thing about inspiration is inspiration isn't a boring week and then an inspirational speech at the end the inspiration is every second of every minute of every day so let me give you a great example if you go and watch training this afternoon and you watch roy and ray in training all you'll hear is go on there's another ball yes top corner brilliant do it again get around the ball stop the cross stop the cross constantly inspired as i say to people look if you're cold wet tired and bored you're cold wet tired and bored so i do think that the basics of of any uh form of management whether it's a football team whether it's a company hold true right and and and to get the best out of a group of people you've got to provide them with those basic ingredients and then give them some time off you know there's become this obsession in football of six days a week and running every week and everybody needs some time off right everyone needs a break everyone needs to go to the dentist and take the dog to the vets and you know people have got stuff to do in their lives and having a break from your problems is sometimes the best solution to your problems than just sitting you know sometimes less thinking is better than just constantly thinking about something really interesting we've reached the point now interview where we're going to run through a few quick fire questions if you're up for these let's try it so the first one is the three non-negotiable behaviors that you and the people around you would ideally buy into honesty is is really really important um i think you've got to care about what we're doing you know you've got to buy into it and you've got to care and i think you've got to get to the point what what is the point of what we're trying to do what you're trying to say you know don't waste my time with word salad and nonsense and corporate speak you know just get to the nub of it and and let's get on with it they're probably the three most important ones what advice would you give to a teenage steve just starting out oh go harder go faster definitely just get on with it believe in yourself are you an optimist and if so how important is optimism for high performance yeah we've discussed that i i think you have to be an optimist because you have to see a route to success if you're not seeing a route to success then you know you're never going to get there but i just i think unbridled optimism or delusional optimism doesn't help you at all you know to your point you know i think successful people have got optimism tempered by a bit of fear of what what a bad day looks like so i think positive healthy optimism realistic optimism is very important what's your greatest strength and your biggest weakness my greatest strength is i will not stop until i get it done not finishing something is i can't bear it you know if i've set myself a goal um i get it done my greatest weakness is i wish i was more succinct in the way that i spoke i think you know people that can encapsulate ideas in very short sentences very quickly i think save themselves a lot of time in life um and the final question for people that have listened to this like brilliant fascinating educational conversation what would you like to leave ringing in their ears about your sort of one golden rule if you like your final message to them what would you leave them with about your kind of one golden rule for high performance find something you like to do and in a perfect world if you can find a way of owning a piece of it that's that's even better but get up every morning and find something you want to do And the other thing I would say, which is really, really important, is look after your body.

55:14Get fit, get healthy, eat well. I think most people look after their car better than they look after their body. You've only got one body. It's got to last you as long as it possibly can. And if your physical health is good, everything in your life is better and it's much easier to attain your goals. So definitely that for me is probably the single golden rule for life. Thank you so much for your time.

55:41amian jake i mean what an interesting guy who's lived an incredible life and is bringing it all together to turn crystal palace into what it is today it was it was inspirational but what i loved was the practicality of it you know whether it was dougie freeman offering that advice of i don't care what you do but do it consistently every week whether you come or not but the one that stood out for me was it reminded me of a story we read years ago about one of the guys that led the NASA projects of putting a man on the moon where he said that they published their plans and told everybody this is what we're going to do and then and then people brought in and told them all the reasons it wouldn't happen and what they said was using all those naysayers actually helped them direct them to what they should be doing rather than what they shouldn't and from Steve's very early origins of deciding this is what I don't want to do in life he eventually chipped away those bits to work out what his real passion was And I think that's really valuable for all of us that it's easy to say, follow your passion, but how do we do it?

56:40Well, actually, it's about trying and working out what do I not like, what elements do I not want in my life before deciding what we do want instead. There's also a really important lesson here about not allowing young people to be derailed early on if they're not great in school. You know, you think how often have we had high performers sit on this podcast and tell us school didn't work for me, but in the world of work, everything fell into place. Everything made sense. Well, Steve's a great example of like the echoes of Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics telling us he took the bits from school that allowed him to go and pursue the path he wanted to.

57:14Stephen Bartlett said it didn't work for him, but he learned how to connect ideas up with people. Joe Malone told us about how school was almost something that repelled her to go on and be an entrepreneur and away from the life that she didn't want. Steve's a great example of that. And I think what he was really good at explaining there is the characteristics about listening, watching people, learning how to connect ideas. They're things that you can learn in school. And I think we shouldn't underestimate the value of them. I love that conversation. Thank you, mate. Me too, mate. Thank you. Well, I would love to know what you made of this episode.

57:52Don't forget, you can also watch these conversations on YouTube and you can also download the High Performance app. just click the link in the description to this podcast and then use your exclusive code HP app to get in if you would like to get daily motivation from high performance listen thank you so much for joining us for another episode and we'll see you very soon for plenty more from the team behind high performance see you soon

58:27Thank you.