Book Review: If Better is Possible

by John Buchanan

The Teak Yew Business Book of the month for May 2010 is If Better is Possible, by John Buchanan.

John Buchanan was the coach of Australia’s most successful cricket team. Over his eight years with the team they maintained an unprecedented win ratio in both Test and One-Day Internationals. No other team in cricket history has been able to reach or sustain a similar winning record over such a long period of time.

In his book If Better is Possible John Buchanan shares his insight into coaching teams to achieve high performance. Many of the skills and techniques used to coach sporting teams are equally applicable in the business world, where working together as a cohesive team can be essential to ongoing success.

Key to this success, according to John Buchanan, is to have a clear vision of where you want to take people. From this everything else will follow. In elite sport, where all players have high skill levels, winning is about more than just technique. Motivation to win is even more crucial in test cricket, one of the few games where a draw is a regular outcome. Sustaining this motivation against doubts, setbacks, adversity and defeat is an essential role of the coach.

With the Australian Cricket team, John Buchanan employed innovative performance improvement techniques and used rigorous measurement of the Australian team and opposition teams as a crucial tool in developing winning strategies.

He also emphasises the importance of creating and maintaining traditions to develop a strong team culture, one that will survive after today’s stars are retired.

In If Better is Possible John Buchanan talks from his intimate experience about making a great team greater and how you can use his proven coaching philosophies to help your team achieve greater success.

Back to Book Reviews