Frank Lampard: The Truth About What Happened At Chelsea

- Welcome back. - Thank you. (laughs) - So, like you, I was listening to the first episode,

and I thought we would start with what is high performance? But maybe start with whether anything's different. So, when we spoke initially,

you said hard work, talent, and a certain type of intelligence represents high performance. Have any of those three changed

in the intervening two years since we last spoke? - No. None of those three has changed,

and re-listening back to it this morning, I was on the bike in the gym,

I was pleased I went through it, 'cause I was pleased with myself. I thought, "Now I still feel like that. It's a good thing."

There's some add-ons, I think, and it's a strange thing, isn't it, I think in life and in management on your job, whatever,

I think there's this balance of how much do I evolve and change for the better and how much do I stick to my core beliefs

of what I think I'm about and what gets me there? And then you get affected by, you know, a hundred things,

sometimes a hundred things a day as a manager, and the big thing that happened to me, obviously, is I lost my job after speaking to you,

and it's funny, as well, Damien later on in the episode goes, you know, "You sorted the messy patch," or something.

You talked about my curve, and you called it, and I agreed. - No, but you actually said, you said, "Oh, we've already had that, I think."

Do you remember? You went, "No, I think we've had the messy middle." - How wrong was I? But that's life, and that's fine,

but I think the one thing I would add to it, and it probably correlates with what happened in my job there

and probably what I'm sort of working out, albeit in different circumstances.

I think I said a few things that you can control yourself. I mean, intelligence is a weird one,

but my point was more work smart, do those things, so the one thing I didn't, which I would add now is timing and the uncontrollables,

which, I listen to a lot of your stuff, and I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I had a year to do that, actually, out of a job,

and some of the podcasts you can come away from and hear great stories of amazing teams

that have multiple champions and winners and individual stories, team stories, and I always kind of go,

having been in this, the more I lived this situation, how perfect is the story, really?

'Cause it sounds great, you know. This person, a great coach can be telling you about it. And American football's something

that I don't know much about in terms of detail, but I'm like, "Wow, what a great idea that was, and he had an incredible environment of players

and they all worked together and they won these things." And then I wondered about how true that is. Sometime when you're telling the story,

you refer back to certain parts. Not everything's like this. It's just my feeling. And my feeling as I came out of it was

you have to have time, and which means lots of things, talent, recruitment,

and the main thing I felt is an alignment when you're working in team sport and at a club,

and a corporation, whatever it is, there has to be an alignment in terms of the idea,

and that's something that I think is a huge thing. Now, not everybody has to think exactly the same, but you have to have a vision

and a target you want to get to and a basic idea of how you get there, and I think if those things aren't aligned in team sport,

I think it's probably hard to get there, and I think got some pretty good examples in the Premier League. Straightaway when you look at the evolution

of Liverpool and Manchester City, Liverpool had a lot of years without winning anything, and seems like at some point somewhere it happened,

and probably Jurgen Klopp is a huge part of it, but the way things changed and aligned and worked in a direction and we see the results.

In Manchester City, I was lucky enough to have a year there, and even though it was before their sort of dominations

happened with Pep Guardiola, you smelled in the building, it was an alignment of, this is where we're going to get to,

and it doesn't matter that we came, the year I was there, we came second, and probably fell below the expectations for a club.

You could see it is no surprise to me. I left because from owner, chairman, sporting director, whatever,

all the way down through, there was something about the place that was going in one place. So, I think that's a really interesting thing.

- Let's delve deeper, then, into alignment and how you get it, why it's not there.