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Total Competition

By: Ross Brawn,Adam Parr
Narrated by: Adam Parr,Peter Noble
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Summary

Total Competition is the most compelling, comprehensive and revealing insight into what it takes to get to the top in Formula One that has ever been published.

Across four decades, Ross Brawn was one of the most innovative and successful technical directors and then team principals in Formula One. Leading Benetton, Ferrari, Honda, Brawn and Mercedes, he worked with drivers such as Michael Schumacher, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton to make them world champions. In 2017, he was appointed F1's managing director, motor sports, by the sport's new owners, Liberty Media. Now, in this fascinating book written with Adam Parr (who was CEO and then chairman of Williams for five years), he looks back over his career and methods to assess how he did it and where occasionally he got things wrong.

Total Competition is a definitive portrait of modern motorsport. In the book, Brawn and Parr explore the unique pressures of Formula One, their battles with Bernie Ecclestone and the cut-throat world they inhabited, where coming second is never good enough. This book will appeal not only to the millions of Formula One fans who want to understand how Brawn operates; it will also provide many lessons in how to achieve your own business goals.

©2016 Ross Brawn, Adam Parr (P)2017 Simon & Schuster Audio UK

What listeners say about Total Competition

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Compelling

Excellent insight into Ross & his approach not just to F1 but in general, thoroughly enjoyable listen & a must listen for anyone in a leadership role

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8 people found this helpful

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Are You Ambitious? This is MUST READ

Clearly both individuals are educated, shrewd, highly successful, wealthy and well connected. What could they possibly have in common with every day working people striving to reach for better than just paying bills?

Well, their willingness to show their weaknesses, how they feel and responded to challenges are just like so many every day people I have observed over many years.

Once you feel this connection it’s liberating to listen to their strategies to resolve challenges. More significantly their processes to think ahead, foresee the problems and engineer them out. Then, engineer in wins in each step of the process of getting a winning end result. Races are largely won before each race day..

Their style of talking encourages you to adopt these winning strategies. Something I am now doing. Thank You to both authors.

Richard Baker

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7 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars

An interview with Braun

This fails because it is not a book, it’s a podcast. Then it goes on to try and correlate Parrs over indulgence on the Art of War and compare it Brawn style. As best I can tell Brawn never gave these ancients works a second thought.
I look forward to a Ross Brawn autobiography. This was not that.
On the plus side Chapter 6 was a good summary, and there is value in some of the politics.

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Understanding Strategic verse Strategy

Brawn and Parr come from different backgrounds and joined together through F1. This difference makes this book work and the use of F1 to support examples from both authors brings reality to the theory.

The clear explanation of the difference between Strategic Direction usually of shareholders/owners and Strategy of those implemeting strategic direction is vital to making this book work and also to show how Brawn was so successful in F1 with a number of teams. You also see that Parr would have been the strategic direction and Brawn the strategy implementation.

The book is written is an clear and easy way to understand and as it is based on conversations the two had together and narrated in this way, the conversation flows and you can imagine them sitting opposite each other simply talking, you also know this is the case as at one point Ross tells his dog off mid sentence, shows they are human.

I picked up a lot from his book, yes a management book, yes for leadership, but the benefit was how it is written, how things are explained and as someone in a management position it helped be clearly split Strategic and Strategy which to be honest get blurred easily in the workplace and senior management always have their interpretation to fit the needs. Use this book to allow your brain to distinguish the differences and allow the fog to lift.

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3 people found this helpful

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Yawn... Ross Brawn great.. Adam Parr Yawn!!!!!!

Struggled through this and Adam Parr's thesis layered interview. Off to read some Katie Price Biography to normalize my brain.

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How to be successful in a competitive

Amazing how it was described in the book by Ross on how to simplify, acknowledge the situation and over coming it with total success in a very competitive world of Formula 1. THANK YOU ROSS....!

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Not what was expected

This book seems like your listening to a long lecture on the topic of how to become a successful top level manager. Although it compared to F1 it doesn’t really have much to do with it.
Seems quite a lazily written book as it’s basically just transcripts from some recorded interviews. Some interesting topics tho

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I wanted to like this.

This is more across between a biography and a story of Ross Brawn.

I've always been interested in him so that made up for the gaping lack of strategy, as a F1 fan I was very much looking forward to these two parts coming together however there is very little on actual strategy beyond how he setup the teams around him.

nothing to do with strategies used in F1, no insights into when and how or why decisions are made, more like being down the pub and listening to him chatting about things.

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Interesting but a bit rough around the edges

I generally enjoyed listening to this and learned a bit from it. But I feel like the material was stretched a bit thin with a fair bit of repetition. I also found that narration just a bit hard on the ear at times: Adam Parr tends to say something like “Formlia” 1 rather than Formula and Peter Noble put me more in mind of Ross Kemp than Ross Brawn. Having just listened to Adrian Newey’s book, this was an interesting contrast. It’s a bit more of a management guide (one I can align with) than the autobiography that is Newey’s book. Worth a listen.

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A+++

A must read for any formula 1 fan, but also contains very valuable lessons for anyone in a management or leadership role in industry.

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