Successful Conversion

Given Arbuthnot Latham’s exemplary sporting heritage, it seems only natural that they should extend their services into the exciting world of rugby.

Steven Myatt reports – wine glass in hand

They could never have known what they started, those sons of the wealthy who first picked up their football – in gross contravention of tradition - and ran with it for the length of the playing fields of a well know school in the midlands. Along with soccer, football and host of other sports, rugby became one of this country’s great gifts to the world. It goes to show that breaking the rules can be a jolly good thing.

Arbuthnot Latham are well known for their enthusiastic support for both horse racing and motorsport and now they are looking at adding rugby as a specialist interest.

As the bank’s CEO Dean Proctor says”we decided to explore some possibilities with regard to a tie up with rugby. We’d seen an enthusiasm for rugby among many of our clients and there is definitely a cross over the motorsport enthusiasts: it did seem that if you were of fan of one then you tended to be a fan of both”

Early in September the bank held a very well attended reception in their London offices. Around one hundred and thirty clients, potential clients, and friends nibbled canapés, sipped wine, and heard presentations by Humphrey Walters and Will Greenwood.

Humphrey, who was profiled in this magazine earlier this year, talked about his motivational work with JCB’s Diesel World record team, Chelsea Football Club, the round the world Bt Global Challenge yacht team, and of course the 2003 World cup-winning England rugby team. Will Greenwood needed absolutely no introduction to the assembled rugby enthusiasts, having been a member a member of the team that took the world cup, which was just one of his fifty five caps for England ( over and above his countless appearances for Harlequins and Leicester).

Humphrey talked about being recruited by Clive Woodward (now Sir Clive Woodward) in 1997 to help build the sense of teamsmanship among his guys ahead of the World Cup, having heard and read Humphrey’s despatches from the Round the world, World Yacht Race.

“It was obvious to me that there could be no great leaps forward.” He said. “Everyone has tried everything – but what you can do is look for the tiny improvements which add up to make a big difference.”

He also made the point that, in his philosophy, being a “follower” is twice as important as being a leader. The team members follow their leader or captain, but also have to look after each other. The third philosophy, which really mattered, was a sense of partnership with other people beyond the team. “The press was very important in what we wanted to achieve, and we had to extend the hand of friendship and help them. We had to identify who were stakeholders in the England team’s success and see what we could do for them.”

Will Greenwood followed Humphrey and picked up immediately on one – apparently tiny-change that Humphrey had made to the team. Instead of starting the second half in the sweaty muddied strip from the first half Humphrey had arranged that they would have a second set and the team would start the last half of the game looking as good as when they had first stepped onto the pitch. Yes, Will said, it did make a difference and those small improvements all added up.

“Another innovation for the England team was our six-one policy,” Will said, “We had our own chef and we ate well for six days, keeping away from sugar, and not allowed to drink Coke or eat chocolate, but one day a week we were allowed to eat whatever we liked. And you know what we kicked off with on that day? Wherever we were in the world our chef served us chocolate Rice Krispie cakes, and it was like feeding time at the zoo. And with Jason Leonard, Lawrence Dallagio, Phil Vickery…you try getting to the front of the queue for the Rice Krispie cakes!”

Will also talked about Prozone, which was an innovation in 2001, ahead of that series. Prozone tracks everything that each player does on the field during the game so that personal performance can be analysed later and bespoke training can be put in place.

“What we saw was that Johnny Wilkinson ran sixteen kilometres during every game, and I was running six and a half kilometres. That’s fair enough because we do different jobs in fact, but those at the bottom of the running tables were unhappy about this apparent discrepancy. We worked out that all the eyes and all the cameras are only on one person when a try has been scored, so in fact if you’d looked at the other end of the field you’d have seen most of the rest us just doing some shuffles to try and stop him being quite so far ahead of us in the tables.”

On a more serious note, Will mentioned the ‘Lombardy Time’ policy, which was introduced; the insistence that everyone, absolutely everyone, was always on time for a meeting or a training session or whatever. They got into the habit of always being set to go at 9.45 for 10am session, and it became a point of honour. The discipline was such, he says, that in four years no one person was ever late for anything. “We had a collective standard of behaviour, which was understood and respected by everyone.

“One example of this is that the London-based guys like me used to all meet up at 6am to have a secret training session ahead of going to Twickenham fir the official training session. It was all about building a team. Two minutes before we went on the pitch for the World Cup you could of offered us any player in the world and we would have refused him.”

Will surprised the guest by saying that he had never seen a tape of the World Cup. “I don’t need to. I know that I missed a tackle in the second half, I dropped a ball, had an easy ball fifteen yards from the line and could have re-cycled that maybe… but I don’t need to watch it again; it was Utopia and you can’t reproduce that. It wasn’t about those hundred minutes; it was about what we did to get there – from September 1 st 1997 to November 22 nd 2003.”

Another distinguished guest from the upper echelons of the rugby world was Ian Lenagan, owner and Chairman of Wigan Warriors. He said that he had thoroughly enjoyed the evening. “Its an opportunity to meet other business people who share common interest, and just from the point of view of a rugby enthusiast it’s great to meet the like of Will Greenwood and listen to their stories.

“Even though I am a league supporter I followed the World Cup series in 2003 and was thrilled by their win. That collective feeling, that togetherness in sport, typifies our country in some ways. When we have the combination we had then, of the game and the sense of national pride, we’re unbeatable.”

Having mentioned that he followed League rather than union, there was an obvious question to be asked about how things sit between the two disciplines nowadays. “I like both,” Ian said. “Both have their attractions and co-exist well together. To simply talk about rugby, like this is good.”

What could Arbuthnot Latham’s role be then? “The bank is here to do business, let’s be honest. You have the people who play rugby, you have people who support rugby teams, and they’re natural clients for a private bank like Arbuthnot Latham. I was expecting to see thirty or forty people tonight, and in fact we had a packed room of people all talking about rugby. That’s great.”

DeanProctor says that he was cheered by the attendance at the September reception, and the reaction of the guest; “You usually invite a certain number to an event like that and about 70%turn up. In this case it was well over 100%. More than twenty invited guests brought along friends who are rugby fans. Now we are open to ideas about how to proceed. It might be an idea to support a second or third West London team, but there are a lot of options. And which ever way we go I’m sure it’ll be great fun.”

Taken from Arbuthnot Latham / Private Life / Spring 2011