Q3 · 2026The Leadership behind the Extraordinary

The momentum around my latest book “WINNING MATCH: Leadership for Game Changers – Together Toward the Extraordinary” continues to build. Since its publication, it has become an international #1 bestseller and award-winning leadership book. Even more meaningful to me is the growing attention its ideas are receiving from relevant international business and leadership media.

Over the past months, publications including The Wall Street Times, CEO Weekly, US Business News, The American News, C-Suite Network, Market Daily, and Economic Insider have turned their attention to my work, to the WINNING MATCH^® leadership framework I established, and to Strategic Leadership Sparring – the leadership methodology I created and pioneered specifically to lead your best people.

Each publication approaches my work from a different perspective. Some examine the fundamental leadership philosophy behind WINNING MATCH. Others focus on Game Changers, Leadership Champions, Strategic Leadership Sparring, or the lessons that can be transferred from the highest levels of sport into executive leadership.

Together, they point toward a question that has been central to my work for many years: What does it really take to make the best people even better – and lead them toward the extraordinary?

In this issue of Spotlight on Performance, I would like to share an overview of this latest international media coverage and some of the perspectives that particularly stood out.

The Wall Street Times: Rethinking What Leadership Is For

One of the most fundamental examination of WINNING MATCH came from The Wall Street Times, which described the book as “a genuine rethinking of what leadership is actually for”.

Rather than approaching leadership primarily through the behaviors and capabilities of the leader, the article focuses on the relationship between the leader and the exceptional individual – and on creating the precise conditions in which a Game Changer can fully realize their potential.
I particularly appreciated the observation that WINNING MATCH can change what you previously noticed. Once you begin looking at leadership through the WINNING MATCH lens, you start recognizing the relationships in which extraordinary performance was previously unlocked – and probably also those in which enormous potential was present but never fully activated.

That goes to the heart of why I created WINNING MATCH. Game-changing potential alone is never enough. What ultimately matters is whether leaders recognize it, invest in it and provide the quality of leadership that allows it to become extraordinary impact.

US Business News:
What WINNING MATCH Asks of You as a Leader

US Business News approached the book through an equally powerful question: Are you the kind of leader someone with rare potential would choose to work with?
This reverses the traditional talent conversation. Organizations quite rightly ask whether they have great people. WINNING MATCH asks leaders to go further and examine whether they themselves are capable to provide the kind of leadership their best people need.

The article describes the WINNING MATCH^® framework through three interconnected elements: identifying Game Changers, creating the right trust-based partnership with them, and engaging in the quality of leadership conversations that move performance rather than simply monitor it.

That distinction is critical. Game Changers are not simply high performers to be managed more efficiently. They are exceptional individuals whose ultimate impact is closely connected to the quality of the leadership relationship around them. The question is not only whether you have Game Changers. It is whether you are becoming the Leadership Champion they need.

The American News:
From Performer to Architect of Performance

The American News focused on another central shift within WINNING MATCH^®: moving from the leader as the primary performer to the leader as an architect of other people’s performance – especially individuals with game-changing potential.

I find that description particularly important. Many senior leaders have reached their positions because they know how to perform, compete and deliver. But especially at the highest levels of leadership, personal excellence alone is no longer enough. The expectation is that they are capable of creating the conditions in which exceptional people can achieve things that might otherwise never have been possible.

That requires trust, attention and the courage to give Game Changers room to operate without abandoning them. It requires understanding when to challenge, when to support and when to step aside. And it requires leaders who derive genuine satisfaction from seeing another person succeed – even surpass them.

The ultimate measure of leadership is not only what you achieve yourself. It is what exceptional people are able to achieve because you led them.

CEO Weekly: Strategic Leadership Sparring
for Extraordinary Performance

While several of the new features examine the broader WINNING MATCH^® leadership framework, CEO Weekly focused specifically on Strategic Leadership Sparring, the methodology I developed to make the best people even better.

The article explores a leadership problem I have observed repeatedly: too much harmony can quietly undermine top performance. When comfort becomes the priority, difficult conversations are softened, assumptions remain unchallenged and people who are already very good are no longer pushed toward what might still be possible.

Strategic Leadership Sparring provides the counterbalance. It creates an intense, focused and trust-based space in which thinking can be challenged, assumptions tested, blind spots exposed and important decisions stress-tested. CEO Weekly also highlights the five principles I have identified as fundamental to effective Strategic Leadership Sparring: being respectful, flexible, demanding, maximally supportive and playful.

The objective is never confrontation for its own sake. It is productive discomfort in the service of something bigger. Excellence does not grow from comfort alone. The best people need someone prepared to challenge them precisely because they believe there is still more possible.

Market Daily:
Don’t Lose Your Game Changers

Market Daily brought the organizational consequences of this thinking into focus through the increasingly critical challenge of retaining exceptional talent.

One of the paradoxes I have observed throughout my work is that organizations can invest enormous leadership time in people who are struggling while assuming that their very best people will largely take care of themselves. Yet Game Changers are precisely the individuals in whom leadership investment can generate disproportionate returns.

They have the ambition to achieve more, the passion for excellence, the desire for meaningful input and the ability to implement that input rapidly. When they are recognized, challenged and given the right high-impact activities, they can make an extraordinary difference to the organization. When they are insufficiently challenged or supported, however, they may disengage long before anyone notices it in their formal performance.

Your best people do not need less leadership. They need your best leadership.

Economic Insider:
What CEOs Can Learn from the World’s Best Performers

Economic Insider explored the roots of my work across two worlds that have shaped me professionally for decades: elite sport and executive leadership.

Having worked with world-class athletes as well as CEOs and senior executives, I have repeatedly seen that the environments may be different, but many of the principles underlying extraordinary performance are remarkably similar. Exceptional people want to improve. They value meaningful input. They need trust and challenge. They have to perform when pressure is highest. And even when they are already among the best, there is always another level to pursue.

The article also highlights an element of my Strategic Leadership Sparring methodology that is sometimes underestimated: playfulness. High performance is serious, but it does not need to become relentlessly heavy. The ability to introduce positive humor, perspective and lightness at the right moment can release tension, sustain energy and keep people mentally open – particularly when the pressure is greatest.

Making the best even better requires intensity. But sustainable high performance also requires knowing when to create lightness.

C-Suite Network: The Secret to Extraordinary
Performance Has Always Been Leadership

Finally, C-Suite Network connected my own path from professional football to performance psychology and executive leadership with the central conviction behind WINNING MATCH^®: extraordinary outcomes are rarely created by talent in isolation.

What fascinated me when I first entered the world of high performance – and what has continued to fascinate me throughout my career – is the relationship between exceptional potential and the people who help unlock it. Again and again, behind extraordinary achievement, there is at least one person who recognized something, believed in it, challenged it and invested in it.
That relationship is the Winning Match.

It is why I have spent so much of my professional life studying and working with Game Changers and Leadership Champions, and why Strategic Leadership Sparring has become such an important part of my work with senior leaders and exceptional performers.

The environments change. The individuals change. The challenges change. But the principle remains remarkably consistent: Extraordinary potential requires extraordinary leadership.

The Impact Is Expanding

What I find most encouraging about this latest wave of coverage is not simply that WINNING MATCH is receiving attention. It is how its impact is expanding and what the business and leadership media are choosing to explore within it.

The Wall Street Times asks what leadership is fundamentally for. US Business News asks whether a Game Changer would choose you as their leader. The American News examines the leader as an architect of other people’s performance. CEO Weekly goes deeply into Strategic Leadership Sparring. Market Daily focuses on the organizational cost of failing to invest in Game Changers. Economic Insider connects the principles of world-class performance with executive leadership. And C-Suite Network examines the leadership relationships behind extraordinary achievement.
Different publications. Different perspectives. But increasingly, the same focus.

How to identify the rare individuals with genuine game-changing potential? How to lead them differently? How to challenge and support them in ways that make them even better? And how to become the kind of Leadership Champions capable of turning exceptional potential into disproportionate impact?

These are the questions at the heart of my #1 bestselling and award-winning book WINNING MATCH. They are also the questions that have driven my work for more than two decades – and that led me to create the WINNING MATCH^® framework and pioneer Strategic Leadership Sparring.

The momentum around WINNING MATCH continues to reach new levels. Seeing these concepts now being examined from so many different angles by international business and leadership media is significant.

Furthermore, the book has just received another award: Silver in the Leadership category at the 2026 Four Seasons Book Awards.

Yet the ambition behind my work remains unchanged: to make the best people even better – and to equip you to become a Leadership Champion. And for everyone who’s interested in reading the pieces: all articles featured in this issue are available in the “In the Media” section of www.marcolli.com, alongside an extensive archive of international media coverage.

Be the leader that makes your best people even better.

Together toward the extraordinary.