On the night of 28 October 2023, my wife and I sat on our couch in Cape Town, watching the world's champion rugby team play the World Cup final in Paris. We'd watched them win the quarter-final two weekends before, and the semi-final the weekend after that. Three weekends, three one-point wins. Sure, there was luck involved, but luck cut both ways.

In a lot of workplaces, 𝘥𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘪𝘵. This week's newsletter is about what it looks like when a team uses it as a 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘩. At a Springbok home Test, the whole stadium sings 𝘢𝘭𝘭 of the anthem, including the verses that once marked 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘈𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘴. The book's record is plain. "𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘚𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘣𝘰𝘬 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩

Ask three people on your team how they ended up in their jobs. The answers will probably differ more than you'd expect. The Springboks' Ox Nché, Malcolm Marx and Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu each came up a different route. The book sums up what they share in one sentence, and this week's newsletter is about what holds a team together when everyone arrived by a different road. Read it here, and subscribe if you're keen to be looped in weekly.

Where did your team's last five hires come from? For most teams it's a short list of the same places, and nobody chose it on purpose. Kurt-Lee Arendse was packing pork sausages at a butchery in Paarl when Chester Williams found him, and in 2023 he played in the World Cup final. This week's newsletter is about finding people who sit outside the pipeline.

The Springboks lost 42-38 to the Wallabies in Perth yesterday, two weeks after winning a series against the All Blacks. They trailed 42-17 with fifteen minutes to go and finished four points short. This week's newsletter is about how to read a result. One result on its own tells you little, whether it's a win or a loss. It tells you more when you see the record around it.

Name three people, out loud, who were actually behind your last success, the ones the story usually leaves out. Tell them this week, specifically, what they did.

Down 24-3 to England twenty minutes into Rassie Erasmus's first home Test as Springbok coach, he refused to abandon the plan the squad had spent three months building. My first newsletter unpacks what that Ellis Park afternoon teaches about holding a new way of working through its first bad result.