Rasmus Ankersen

Rasmus Ankersen is a writer, acclaimed leadership and performance expert and ‘the high-performance anthropologist’. He has worked and trained with some of the world’s best athletes to understand and contribute to how they work.

A former footballer who trained as a UEFA-accredited coach and served as Co-Director of Football at Brentford FC for almost seven years, Rasmus is now CEO of investment firm, Sport Republic, which owns a majority stake in Southampton FC. Alongside these roles, he has lived and trained with Jamaican sprinters, Brazilian footballers, and African long-distance runners. His work has given him a unique insight into what gives these sportspeople the edge – personal attributes like focus and mental and physical stamina, but also statistical analysis of performance and decision-making. His work on talent, data and development was seen as being one of the key factors to Brentford’s elevation, for the first time in over sixty years, to the top tier of English football.

Rasmus has taken his understanding of performance, leadership and teamwork and translated it into the everyday and business environment, forming strategies to enable groups and individuals to achieve great things. In his first book DNA of a Winner, Rasmus considers what attributes world-class performers share. In Leader DNA he took his studies to the boardroom looking at top CEOs and politicians to see what makes them inspiring leaders and strategic winners. In The Gold Mine Effect, Rasmus returned to sport looking at naturally occurring centres of sporting excellence from footballers from Rio’s favelas to marathon-runners from an Ethiopian village to women golfers from Korea. He looks at the links and effects of their social, personal, and environmental circumstances. His book Hunger in Paradise examines the drawbacks of success; primarily complacency, arrogance, and the fear of failure, and how to counteract them. As well as writing, he directed a documentary, The Hockey Miracle, exploring how a small unassuming town in Denmark produced five National League players across a nine-year period.

Rasmus looks at real examples of leadership, team, and high performance from a different perspective, finding patterns, examining the big data, and realising that the extraordinary is often surprisingly normal and imitable. He delivers real, tangible lessons to audiences with verve, enthusiasm and wit that cover everything from incentives to big data to recruitment.