Book Review: Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win

I didn't book Soccernomics to read, only because of soccer. I wanted to read it to understand the power of data analytics. It turned out to be interesting also from soccer point of view.

Book looked soccer from all the different angles. It explained the economics of soccer, how money does mean a lot in soccer. Also it explained why some team are better on their transfers. But it does talk also quite much about what's happening in the field.

The whole idea of the book is to analyze countries and their enthusiasm towards soccer. Then based on many different data select, which are countries that will in the future dominate soccer.

I liked the book very much. It was just the season of Leicester winning the Premier league, which kind of destroyed some of the thoughts of the book. Most probably Leicester was a one season wonder and can be explained as a statistical bias. Still for the sake of soccer, I wish the thoughts in the book don't happen exactly as they predict.

It was an interesting book and I recommend to read it. Statistics and statistical analysis is field that will grow all the time, when more and more data becomes available. This is a good start to understand it more.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: The Sports Gene

David Epstein's The Sports Gene was exciting read for me. I follow many different sports and I've been intrigued about how much success is about nature (genes) and how much about nurture (training, etc). This was the first time I got some concrete facts about the subject.

David Epstein isn't a scientist, but a sports journalist, who has made a long learning journey to be able to write about so technical subject. I believe this book is better, when it's written by a journalist and not by a scientist. Book goes quite deep into the genes and biology, so it's better when it's written in bit more understandable way.

Book tells stories and facts about athletics, basketball, sprint running, long distance running, cross country skiing, baseball and many others. It really tries to look for patterns behind athletes and their genes. For certain sports there are definitely genetic differences that make some athletes to have a superior change to succeed to others. Still success always needs lots of training.

In one way book is depressing for some sports. As an example, with current conditions in the world Kalenjin Kenyans will rule the marathon and long distance running field for some time. But actually not that long ago, Finnish people used to rule the long distance world (Hannes Kolehmainen, Paavo Nurmi, Lasse Viren) , before we got richer and didn't run that much anymore. So in a way we Finns still might have the genes for it, but our environment and training doesn't support those anymore. The same might happen to the Kenyans at some in the future.

The whole book bounces between nature and nurture. What is certain is that there are no genetically perfect athletes, because no one doesn't have any good ideas what genes actually are needed for which sports. There are some genes found which might prevent success in some sports and some genes that are common with the elite athletes in that sport. Most often still, the genes of elite athletes can be found from thousands of other who still are not elite. So there is no one answer for nature vs nurture debate.

One other thing that interested me was the trainability of people. Different genes actually mean that people develop differently. Populist journalism often tells that training like this and that will only give results. The fact is, people acquire skills differently. The famous 10 000 hour rule, isn't exactly true, but then on the other hand it gives an idea of the ball park people need to train. People need to train the way their body and mind adapts. That's the most important lesson of the book.

I highly recommend this book the everyone interested about sport training or coaching. It felt bit longish at some point, but reading this is time well invested.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book Review: Tapering and Peaking for Optimal Performance

Once in a while I'll try to read something related to my endurance hobbies. This time I wanted to know more about tapering, preparing for competitions. From some blogs I run into Inigo Mujika and his recent book Tapering and Peaking for Optimal Performance.

Inigo Mujika is respected researcher and also have lot of practical experience from coaching many teams and individuals. His background made it is easy to believe what he is saying about the subject.

I did expect book to have more practical tips about tapering, but book had lot of scientific knowledge about the subject. It went through tapering from so many different approached based on scientific researches, that it was even bit hard to follow all the differences. Information was really valuable, but I have to admit sometimes I didn't fully understand all the nuances of different studies.

At the end of the book there were real life stories and plans from world class athletes, coaches and teams. It was excellent, that those examples were really from the best, olympic medalists and world champions. Those gave excellent practical knowledge on tapering. Of course tapering is different for world level athletes, than for normal amateur athlete, but same laws mainly should apply.

I recommend this book to all coaches and athletes who really want to make it to the top. For amateur athletes, like I, book is bit too technical. One need to be really into understanding small details, if they're going to read this. So I recommend this book, but with a small note aside.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book review - Swim Smooth: The Complete Coaching System for Swimmers and Triathletes

Due to my Triathlon enthusiasm in past year, I've got into swimming also. As to my nature, I have to get to know the technical jargon about swimming, that I would be able to learn to swim smoothly. For that purpose I found a perfect book, 300 pages about freestyle swimming - Swim Smooth: The Complete Coaching System for Swimmers and Triathletes.

Swim Smooth is book by Paul Newsome and Adam Young, both have a long background on swimming, but even more background on coaching swimming. They have a Swim Smooth named swimming training center in Australia and very useful web page also about swimming.

I must admit, that I thought there can't be written 300 pages about freestyle swimming so, that every page would make sense, but I was so wrong. Book is filled with good information, training tips, technique and useful pictures explaining all the things in detail. When reaching to the end of the book, I even thought it fell bit short.

Book starts from the basics of swimming and explains every part of swimming in great detail. For training purposes, book introduces 6 different swimmer types and give tips on improving swimming to all of those. It also says that there is no one best way to swim, it's always about the body and personal preferences.

If you are on to improving your freestyle swimming or into triathlon, this is a must read book. It stops the speculation on what is good and what is not for swimming and gives statistics and technique advices to all aspects of swimming. It has even its own section to open water swimming.

Only minus I have to give the book is that it became expensive to me. I have ordered swimming training equipment with about 100 euros only due to this book. I believe those will pay back to me on better swimming training sessions and eventually as a better swimmer in next triathlon races.

For freestyle swimming, this book is my bible now. I'm not going to look for any other book or training sites for a long time.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Self organizing teams - is it the best practise or a myth?

In many management literature and methodologies self organizing teams have been thought to be the best ones. This is one thing I've never really understood. I have a background from many sports and I don't know a single team in the history of sports which would have been successful as self organizing one. Also I haven't met many self organizing teams which would work really well. Is the whole thing just beautiful thought or is the concept of self organizing team misunderstood? Or is it just me?

How I see self organizing teams are understood and also how I've understood it, is that self organizing team is a team which is independent, can solve problems on their own, are capable of best solutions due to being all-inclusive (having the necessary skills) and also are able to divide their work on most effective way using the intelligence of the group (self led). This is the idea what this writing is based on.

Many Agile SW development frameworks proposes self organizing teams as the basis for the whole framework to work. Argumentation is that teams are much motivated when they have empowerment to decide about their work. Also they commit and keep their promises much better because they have the possibility to make the decisions about their own work. This all makes sense, almost everyone likes when they get to choose how they do things and what they commit to.

At this point I always start to think on sports. Why there's so many coaches and people around the teams to help them do better? Doesn't the guys in the field know the best how to handle different situations? Doesn't experiences teams know how to adapt to changes in the field themselves? Why sport teams are not self organizing?

Some of the best teams in the world are really capable to handle many situations themselves. And yes the teams are in the field themselves and reacting themselves. But what is different is that they have been prepared to handle many of the situations up front. They have been learning different ways to approach the problem. They have in their minds playbook full of way's to tackle the problem they come in to. They have been preparing, they are most often ready for the challenge ahead. Even for surprising things, they may have common rules to follow to mitigate the potential danger. All this is done with the help outside of the team in the field.

It's easy to argue that sports are different than work life teams. Sport teams train much more and actually "work" much less, and on the other hand work teams "work" most of the time and almost never practice. As said sport teams have much more support personnel and work teams have much less. Also with sport teams there's more strict rules to follow that with work teams. But are those still such a different ones. Team is a team whatever the game is or whatever the purpose is.

Now coming back to the self directing team thinking. Does team really need to be independent? It would make sense that teams would have the best possible knowledge to tackle any given task. Most often there's someone out of the team who has some more insights and ideas on ways to tackle the task. Team can never be complete, there's always some competence out of the team that would be beneficial for the team. Always.

What about the self organizing/self led teams then, is self organizing the best way to organize? Is getting the job done the same thing as doing a good job? Sure all teams can self organize, always they do come up with some solution how to divide the work and so forth. Many experienced teams might even do a really good job, but many teams unfortunately don't. Often the result is not leading to learning and using the best people to work on most important issues. Self organizing tends to please everyone in the team and on that way might not be the best thing for the team or the product they are working on.

The main catch with self organizing team is the motivating aspect. Possibility to control your own work and doings is motivating. Doing what you desire leads to the best results in long run. Still true motivation is self centric, it evolves from personal desire's and ambitions and in this case requires that the thing team does is motivating as such. Then there's an extra motivation coming from the possibility to affect more on the things you should be doing.

I think concept of self organizing teams might have been misunderstood a bit. True value of the team comes from it's capability to be more valuable with co-operation than it's individuals would be themselves. Team can be always detected to be a team, but the boundaries of the team aren't always that clear. Is a soccer team only the guys in the field? What about the guys in the bench? What about the guys participating in training? Or all the supporting people, are they part of the team? What actually matters is the result, not the team composition. Teams in work life could also be more open and loosen the boundaries of the team to be able to respond and get help from outside always when needed.

If you think sports teams there's always people to help. Coaches help building the competences all the time, during practices, games and all the time between. Also other support personnel react when there is need to get help for someone. All of these share the common goal and work towards the same target, still only part of these do actual visible work. Maybe this would be a place for work life organizations to learn. Maybe there could be much more coaches and supporting personnel to help, advice, boost and even watch over the team, to make sure team performs and learns the optimal way.

Sure there's many questions that how would this work out in real work life, but I encourage you to look outside the box and really try to reason why the teams need to be self organizing and self led. Is it really the best alternative out there. Could there be some other alternatives which would maybe take some of the freedom away, but would actually boost the effectiveness on the other hand.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Team dynamics - Can group of specialists be a good team?

Yesterday in Agile gathering we discussed about how teams work and how to get teams work more like a team. There was lot of talk about specialists and generalists and how to spread the information of specialists to other team members to make team more successful.

Afterwards I started to think sports. All sports, for example soccer, american football, basketball, you name it are full of specialists. Best teams have most suitable specialists working together to make even more value out of each other as a team. Team member knows each others strengths and use those to beat the opponents.

 Sport teams are bit different than the work ones. There's always games and opponents where teams are weighted. Most of the time is spent practicing. Teams have team practices and individuals practice their specialties. Also there's a playbook to follow. It gives guidelines for problems that arrive rapidly in the field to make decisions which the whole team knows about. Still there's always room for excellent individuals to make their own decisions to make a difference.

Does teams work best if everyone is equal and generalist? Maybe not. Some people are always better than others in some tasks. They should be allowed to come even better on their area to make the whole team better. Main task for line manager or scrum master or whomever is watching the team is to make sure that there's a possibility to learn. Everyone should have the possibility to learn from the more experienced ones. There will always be situations when these less experienced ones need to take the responsibility and tackle the situation.

I see playbooks as an interesting idea. Maybe teams in work life could also have a playbook. That would give guidance to tackle most commonly faced problems. It would give guidelines how to start looking for solutions, but it still would leave room for individuals to make their own decisions. These could be used in discussion, retrospectives and learning's. Maybe those can't be taken directly from sports, but the idea feels interesting to me.

Self directing teams are often said to be the most successful ones. Still in sports there no fully self directing teams. In some sports, like soccer and basketball, teams are more on the self directing side when they are on the field. Then in some others like american football, there's more guidance from the coaches all the time. Maybe this self directing thing is more of a motivational issue than performance issue. Worth to keep in mind still.

I know sports is not the same as work life. There's so many differences. Maybe still, there's something to learn in work life also.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen