A review by seanius
The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams by Sam Walker

3.0

A book which has one main point that is perhaps over-explained (a valuable captain is no hot-shot, but a 'water carrying' team supporter), the last couple of chapters have a little twist, commenting on the current vogue for leaderless self-managing teams, and minimal hierarchy, aka the agile approach.

Whilst a bit heavy on detail for non-sports fans, some of the incidents and back stories are well told and deserve the odd guffaw.

One questionable point could be the way different systems are used to compare teams from different sports -I'm no statistician but it seemed at times like comparing apples with oranges, and somewhat undermines the selection of the 'tier one' teams that verify the author's hypothesis.

An improvement could have been to seek out the opinion of other sports commentators or of organizational psychologists etc as to the validity of the 'captain class' theory...

Worth a speed read for anyone who works in a team and has wondered about what makes a positive leader...