" I Can Only Compete Through My Crew."

"In the last race, we discovered that each boat's performance had very little to do with sailing," says Walker. "It had much more to do with the leadership that we as skippers were exhibiting, and with our ability to develop the full potential of our teams. All of the skippers were extremely good yachtsmen. All of them excelled at managing the boat. But ultimately, the race is all about managing people."

During a midsummer sail across the San Francisco Bay, Walker looked back at the 1996-1997 BT Global Challenge, when he skippered the Toshiba Wave Warrior. He recounted some of the leadership lessons that he took from a flat-out race around the planet.

To Finish First, First You Must Finish

Nine months before the starter's pistol fired for the 1996- 1997 challenge, race founder Sir Chay Blyth announced the crew lists for each yacht. For the 14 skippers, the race before the race -- to build a fast crew -- had begun. Most of the skippers took their crews to the water to log as many training miles as possible. Simon Walker headed for high ground. He led his crew to a large holiday house in Wales, where they spent two days talking about the race. His reasoning: You can't build a team before you've agreed on the goal.

"I'm pretty competitive, but I can only compete through my crew," says Walker. "So first I had to learn each crew member's agenda. One guy wanted to win at all costs. Another guy wanted simply to make it around the world. The key was to avoid agreeing to the lowest common denominator. So I said to the guy who just wanted to have an adventure, 'You aren't competitive in your sailing, but you're certainly competitive in your work life. And I think you'll enjoy the race more if we're sailing fast and if we're doing things professionally.'

"But I also had to be realistic -- and setting a goal like 'win the race' just isn't credible," says Walker. "So I said to the all-or-nothing guy, 'To finish first, first we have to finish. We have to sail smart. If we go for broke, sooner or later we'll blow up.' "

After much discussion, the team worked out a statement of strategic intent: to build a campaign that is capable of winning the BT Global Challenge. They chose the words carefully. "To build a campaign" meant that the work started now, nine months before the race; "that is capable of winning" meant that all of their planning and preparation was devoted to one goal: to make the boat go faster.

The crew members would do more than steer quickly or trim the sails like speed demons. Sailing fast meant adding value to every task. They'd clean the head like pros, to lessen the chance that they'd all come down with a stomach virus. They'd use an Excel spreadsheet to plan out four meals a day for what would be 163 days at sea -- because the way they ate through 800 kilos of food would affect the trim of the boat. The commitment to be fast even affected the way they slept. To help balance the boat, they'd switch bunks whenever the conditions dictated. Even in the mayhem of the Southern Ocean, where they sailed through six gales and three storms, the Wave Warriors "hot bunked."

"There's a watch change at two in the morning," Walker explains. "So seven people who have been on deck for four hours in immense waves and windchill get to go down below. They're covered in sleet. They're bruised. They're exhausted. And they've got four hours before they're due back on deck. They clamber out of their dry suits. They lay out their moldy sleeping bags on the bunks on the high side of the boat, and they get in. They've already used up 30 minutes. After another half hour, the wind shifts, and the guys on deck need to tack the boat. That means the guys down below have to wake up, grab their sleeping bags, walk across the boat, and lay out on the other side. Now they've lost even more sleep."

Watch in, watch out, for 30,000 miles, the Wave Warriors hot bunked. "If I had come up with this idea in the middle of the race, I could have been the most charismatic leader in the world, and I never would have gotten them to agree to it," Walker continues. "It all goes back nine months, to when we sat in that house in Wales. After that, we didn't talk about it -- we did it. That was our life."