THREE KEY FACTS
- How the All Blacks maintained an aura of mystery and excellence by keeping their inner workings concealed for decades.
- Understand how the publication of the book “Legacy” and subsequent releases began to lift the veil on the All Blacks’ inner sanctum, plus the media frenzy sparked by a glimpse of the All Blacks’ motivational messages, revealing their strict culture of secrecy.
- Delve into the concerns of former coaches and players about the long-term effects of revealing the team’s cultural and motivational strategies.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He’s won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
OPINION
There was a time when there was next to nothing known about the inner workings of the All Blacks, and the only way to find out was to be good enough to be picked to play for them.
They were as secretive as the Masons, an invitation-only club that gave barely even vague hints about how they operated.
The mystery and mystique became part of the story – the All Blacks were renowned for their brilliance and relentless excellence and no one sure how they were doing it, no one sure how their culture was built.
Even deep into the professional age, what went on inside the All Blacks remained a secret – the values of the team, how they interacted, what drove them, how they behaved.
Only those inside the citadel walls knew the answers.
In November 2013 when the All Blacks were in London, there was a global media storm when a reporter from The Telegraph happened to wander into an empty room at the team’s hotel and see a few things written on the whiteboard.
The All Blacks were preparing to play England who had beaten them 12 months earlier at Twickenham – the only defeat the team had suffered since Steve Hansen had taken over as head coach in 2012.
“We are the most dominant team in the history of the world,” was one phrase the reporter had seen.
“On Saturday, don’t moan, even to yourself.”, was another, as was, “We are playing England - this is about history, about human nature”.
It wasn’t much – a tiny, abstract insight into the concepts the All Blacks apply, the processes they go through and the detail they absorb to be at their physical and psychological peak on game day.
This little snatched moment had no context, though, no ability to reveal a detailed picture about how these themes knitted together, but still, it was apparent how even this minor leak upset the All Blacks.
“When there’s a breach of trust by you guys [media], it’s always disappointing because we’re trying to work together,” Hansen said when he was asked about what some of the comments on the board meant.
“I just wished he had come and asked me what it all meant because what he wrote didn’t make sense.
“We have given ourselves an uppercut. It was our problem letting someone in there. Ultimately, we shouldn’t have done that. But we can’t change it.”
Hansen’s reaction typified how protective the All Blacks were of their intellectual property and how reluctant they were to let any of it become public.
Secrecy had value. It intimidated opponents, who often came into tests fearful rather than respectful of the All Blacks.
So too did secrecy add to the aura of the All Blacks – help promote the myth that the team had managed to be so successful for so long because they had tapped into some secret source.
And on a more practical level, the All Blacks coaches didn’t want their opponents to know too much because it could be copied and adopted.
But a few months after the incident in London, there was another more significant release of intellectual property (IP), when a book called Legacy was published by Kiwi author James Kerr.
It became an instant best-seller, offering insight into the organisational and motivational structures within the All Blacks and how they could be applied to the business world.
The book drew heavily on what appeared to be sanctioned contributions from the All Blacks’ coaching panel, and Kerr’s observations from time he spent embedded with the team.
But it transpired that Kerr, in conjunction with photographer Nick Danziger had been commissioned by New Zealand Rugby to produce a coffee table book called Mana, and Legacy was an additional, unsanctioned side-hustle.
“There is a lot of stuff in Legacy for example that was the start of this taking the blackness out of the All Blacks, and it becoming a bible for people around the world in terms of how to get your team to perform,” former All Blacks coach Wayne Smith revealed in the book Black Gold published in 2023.
“It put a lot of pressure on us I felt to innovate to try different things and to add to the legacy in different ways.
“Which was probably a good thing, but there was a lot of information that has gone out and Legacy is a difficult one because the photographer and the author who were here doing Mana.
“I got rung up quite a bit when we were out of camp thinking I was doing interviews for Mana and then a year later Legacy comes out and the Union starts asking us questions about who did this, why did you guys give interviews for this book?
“We were really caught off guard because it was the same bloke who was writing Mana.
“It was a warning shot for me that there was a real change going on in this area and that more and more of it was going to be intrusive.
“It was going to be difficult to retain the inner sanctum of the All Blacks if you like and keep it away from the public eye.”
But although Smith and Hansen had their concerns about how damaging it would be to the All Blacks and their ability to win if IP kept leaking out, they found themselves being asked by NZR in early 2017 how they would feel if Amazon spent most of the year with the team to make a behind-the-scenes documentary called All or Nothing.
This was a shock to both men as it represented a definitive shift in strategy by their employer, as this was a deliberate and controlled means to sell IP for profit.
Of all the potential threats Hansen felt his All Blacks would face in his last few years in the job, he never imagined one of the most dangerous would be his employers’ appetite for selling trade secrets.
But this was the reality of what the All Blacks faced in early 2017 when NZR’s financial forecasting was showing a relatively bleak picture and a need to drive revenue higher.
Every asset within NZR’s realm was deemed to be part of the commercial inventory and so when Amazon knocked on the door offering $3m, there was an inevitability that the project would be going ahead.
Within management, there was no desire to say yes, and the senior playing group weren’t keen either, but they also knew they weren’t really being asked.
This was a commercial venture, and everyone knew that money would talk louder than any high-performance arguments.
The coaches’ primary concern was that having cameras everywhere would negatively impact the team’s preparation for the series against the British and Irish Lions.
Seven years on, and the All Blacks management from that series feel they were right to have been concerned.
Gilbert Enoka, who was the All Blacks mental skills coach at the time, says he was one of the people who campaigned the hardest to not allow Amazon access.
“When Amazon came in – wow did we get that so wrong. I think it was naivety.
“The commercial people didn’t really know how to do it. We as a group didn’t know how to do it and boy did we clunk our way through that.
“I do genuinely think it contributed to us drawing the series with the British and Irish Lions.
“That’s a big statement but every time you put a camera in there, people acted differently. The coaches acted differently – you couldn’t have conversations.”
The Amazon documentary was – despite only making around $1m in the end due to a blowout in costs – only the beginning, however, of the great IP fire-sale.
In 2019, an All Blacks leadership programme was sold to the executive team at Mitsubishi. The IP for this was lifted straight out of the All Blacks’ inner sanctum.
That in turn sparked a new business venture called All Blacks Labs – a bespoke service for clients who want to think, lead and set themselves up like the world’s best-known rugby team.
Former All Blacks and Black Ferns are used to deliver leadership programmes for cash – to use their own experiences to sell real-world examples to corporations who are willing to pay.
And last year, NZR+ was launched – the national body’s own streaming platform that pumped out a behind-the-scenes documentary that delved into the dramas the All Blacks encountered in 2022.
The veil of secrecy has long disappeared, which is why back in early 2017 Hansen and his coaching team feared the longer-term consequences of selling IP.
He felt it would demystify the All Blacks, damage the aura and most likely enable opponents to pick out prime intelligence that they could work into their own set-ups.
It was a view supported by Kieran Read, his captain between 2016 and 2019, who said in Black Gold: “I don’t think you want to be selling your IP.
“There have been a few different things written about us, the Legacy book and the [Amazon] docco. I watched it and I don’t think it revealed much.
“We gave nothing away because we could dictate how it worked. Do it in another 10 years and I don’t think you would be able to do it that way.
“The IP of who we are, it is shown in the way teams play against us that if you don’t quite have that fear factor then it is an advantage you have lost.”
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There is a powerful statistical narrative that aligns with NZR selling IP and a decline in the All Blacks’ success.
Between 2012 and 2016 when there was no commercial strategy to sell off trade secrets, the All Blacks lost just four tests.
Their win ratio was 91 per cent, and it was 93 per cent in 2016 – the year after they lost six legends of the game in Richie McCaw, Dan Carter, Conrad Smith, Ma’a Nonu, Tony Woodcock and Keven Mealamu.
But between 2017 and 2023, they lost 18 tests and drew another four for a win ratio of 74 per cent.
The commercial strategy can’t shoulder all the blame for this, but Enoka, who served as All Blacks mental skills coach for 24 years, believes it has certainly impacted performance.
“I think we will pay a performance price,” says Enoka. “What has separated us is talent and the ability to extract from that talent, their best in the big moments and a lot of that has come down to the way in which we have set up our culture and the way in which apply the principles of our tradition which power us forward into the future.”
Enoka believes that there has been a failure on the commercial side of the business to understand the value of IP and what certain cultural and structural systems may be worth.
He, and others such as Hansen, feel that commercial personnel tend to simplify high-performance to the point where they believe that the only high-value IP is specific tactical and strategic ploys.
The argument gets made that as long as documentaries, books and social media clips don’t reveal tactical secrets, then nothing is being lost.
It’s a point best illustrated by comments NZR Commercial boss Craig Fenton made in an interview with the Herald recently about the future strategy of NZR+.
He was explaining that the channel will continue to drive out behind-the-scenes All Blacks content, and why he felt that wouldn’t affect performance.
“There is a big difference between exposing tactics and game play and some of the strategic thinking that goes into match winning,” he said.
“Versus the broader values that the team stands for – which I would summarise as they have been summarised to me – humility and excellence, keeping your feet on the ground, the so-called sweeping the sheds, the sense of stewardship that you are borrowing the jersey which I think is a universal aspirational value.
“These values speak to and to some extent unpack the mystique because it is those values, that for me as a Kiwi, which are New Zealand on a best day.
“It is our culture. It is a culture that is rooted in Māori culture. It borrows from Pasifika but fundamentally it is who we are.”
But what is perhaps misunderstood, or not fully appreciated, is how vital these attitudes, cultures and behaviours have been in shaping the All Blacks’ success.
These concepts translate into the way the team plays and how everyone understands their respective roles – and the humility, gratitude and respect that exudes is critical in keeping individuals grounded and aligned with the wider goals of the team.
But having sold these concepts to corporate executives and shown them to the world via various documentaries and books, Enoka says the value has been lost.
Now, the rest of the rugby heavyweights, and indeed much of the business world, has cottoned on to the importance of their organisation having a defined culture, open-mindset, can-do attitude and sense of identity.
“The magic sauce has been spread across the globe and it pulls us into the pack rather than separating us from the pack,” says Enoka.
“We have always thrived on being first and doing things that other people haven’t done, or don’t do and we have to protect some of the inner sanctum stuff and not share what is central to what we do.
“It is not only in sport. I do a lot of speaking with businesses now and they are all talking about sweeping the sheds, about being grateful, humility.
“We had the legacy group come in [to the All Blacks] last year [2023] and one of the things Liam [Messam] and Kev [Mealamu] said, is that, ‘you know what Bert, whenever people come into the All Blacks they used to see things and experience them for the first time and they could get it nowhere else but coming in. But now they have seen it all online’.”
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It’s only days now until the All Blacks begin their season under the leadership of new coach Scott Robertson, who famously uses themes to galvanise his players.
In 2017, when the Crusaders had to travel to Johannesburg to play the Lions in the final, he used the concept of “Rumble in the Jungle” to prepare them.
This was a nod to the famous world heavyweight title fight Muhammad Ali won in what was then Zaire in 1974.
“I get a bit tingly just thinking about it,” Robertson would recount six years later. “Ali hadn’t won a championship for eight years, and neither had we. The story just lined up beautifully.
“We were in the jungle, we were in a rumble… This was real. We were living it.”
These ideas are not only powerful, but they are going to form the basis of Robertson’s coaching tenure and therefore be considered enormously valuable intellectual property.
This is how he coaches – how he relates to players and brings them together.
The themes he strikes, the way he delivers his ideas and his success or otherwise in being able to get the players to buy into his vision will be infinitely more influential than his tactical blueprint in determining how often the All Blacks win.
How easily he’ll be able to keep his secrets secret will be a source of ongoing tension with his employer, who is under increasing pressure to make more money.
And specifically, NZR is under pressure to make NZR+ a greater commercial success than it has so far been.
It sits as the central plank in equity partner Silver Lake’s investment thesis. The US fund manager has bought a stake in NZR on the basis that it can find and monetise new All Blacks fans and the hub of all this activity is NZR+.
If the risk of selling equity is to pay off, NZR+ needs to win a higher audience than it has so far managed to engage and ultimately, to do that, it’s going to have to drive out more compelling content.
And this is ultimately what concerns Enoka – he can’t see the genie ever going back in the bottle and he fears that the All Blacks will end up selling too many secrets, showing too much of their inner sanctum all in the name of trying to balance the books.
“I think it is a major issue because I think the world has gone that way,” he says. “We have got to create content that people can see because of the mediums and the potential revenue, but it has to be thought through really carefully.
“I was a big resistor inside the environment for that sort of stuff in a lot of ways and they will probably be quite pleased I am gone because others will open up and show them everything.
“I just shudder when I look up at BJ [former captain and coach Lochore] and a few people whose pictures are in my study and imagine what they would think.
“I want to support it and I understand it is the way of the future, but jeepers we have to navigate it with a sense of protecting that mystique.
“The challenge for the current crew [Robertson and his coaching team] is to identify what the next horizon is and we have always thrived on being first and doing things that other people haven’t done, or don’t do and we have to protect some of the inner sanctum stuff I believe, and don’t share what is central to what we do.”
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He’s won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
