The founding editor of The Wall road Journal’s activities part profiles the best groups in heritage and identifies the counterintuitive management characteristics of the radical women and men who drove them to prevail. Fuelled via a life of activities spectating, two decades of reporting, and a decade of painstaking examine, The Captain type is not only a ebook on activities; it's the key to how winning groups are equipped and the way transformative management is born.

a number of years in the past, Sam Walker got down to resolution the main hotly debated activities query: what are the best groups of all time? He devised a formulation, utilized it to hundreds of thousands of groups and indexed the sixteen so much dominant groups ever throughout all activities, from the English prime League to the NFL. yet what did those freak groups have in common?

As Walker dug deeper, a development emerged: all groups have been pushed through a novel kind of chief, a captain, yet now not one you could anticipate. They have been unorthodox outliers – awkward and unpleasant, marginally expert, bad communicators, rule breaking and instead of pursuing popularity, concealed within the shadows. Captains, briefly, who problem your assumption of what encouraged management seems to be like.

protecting international well known groups like Barcelona, Brazil, the All Blacks and the recent York Yankees to lesser recognized successes of Soviet ice hockey or French handball, The Captain Class unveils the seven key traits that make a superb chief. Drawing on unique interviews with athletes, coaches and executives from dozen nations, Walker questions if nice captains are made or born, why groups decide the inaccurate captain and the way the price of the captain could be revived.