What can visitors look forward to at your seminar? 

I’ll be looking at managing transition. Transitions can be hard, but expect and know that you can come out the other side. My biggest transition was into politics. That was a leap in the dark for me. One can never train for it. I was a candidate for a marginal seat held by the government. I had been involved with politics and I had a relatively high profile because I was an athlete. They wanted a high-profile personality in the seat because it had to be won. That was a leap of faith. There was a lot of uncertainty. 

I have written a book called Shakespeare the Coach. My favourite quote from Shakespeare is: “Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.”

In your time as a coach and athlete, you must have trained for the unexpected?

There is no certainty about winning the gold medal or whether you will succeed. What you have to do is apply yourself to preparing as well as possible. The quality of the preparation is usually measured in the final performance. You spend your time doing everything possible to make sure that this can be a successful venture, but the nature of the game is capricious.

You can do all the sums, work out what you think is going to work, then something changes. When I took over as coach, they changed the interchange rule and the offside rule and I had to revise my judgments. 

What was your greatest success as the Australian hockey coach? 

Being Olympic and World Cup champions as well as world number one for consecutive periods.

What was your greatest disappointment? 

My failure to secure Olympic gold as a player. I threw myself into other pursuits and did other things. Now I help others do what I failed to do!

You are a renowned mentor. How could printers benefit from mentors?

People who have a done it before, who have experienced the sort of seismic shift that the industry is facing, can offer valuable advice. These sorts of changes aren’t new. My grandparents had a very successful carting business in Perth, with lots of paddocks and horses. Then along a came the automobile. They said, ‘This will never catch on’ – 15 years later they were out of business. This is not new. Changes in technology have been occurring since the wheel. You can feel hard done by or say it is unfair, but that is not going to help solve the problem. 

What advice do you have for managing transition?

You need a process focus. The poison in sport is when you have an outcome focus. You have to be committed to the process and be committed to the detail. But people need to understand that sometimes, the plan is, “We better go and do something completely different, there is no way through for us in this business, in this shape, at this time.” I imagine this is happening in printing. Some will sell up and move on and others will find a way to do it better. They are both the right answers. Not everyone will find the same solution.

Name one thing to make people proud and optimistic about working in print?

The printing press was arguably one of the greatest inventions in human progress. The creation of printing and books and reading and sharing knowledge were in some ways the foundation of our whole society. It is an admirable thing to do and has a marvellous history.

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