Mike Sanderson on his leadership style and the America's Cup mess

How would you define your leadership style?

I guess I just base it on the principles of what I think are right and wrong. I just try to be fair and consistent. One thing probably I haven't got a bad vision for is identifying what could be good areas to spend the money on, a bang-for-back meter, I suppose you could call it. My time with Dalton has been good for that. I think I've got a pretty good idea of what keeps the guys happy. Spending time on the Volvo Race is good for learning that.

What is that?

People like to be kept informed, and for you to be fair and consistent. Those are qualities are I try to instil in the team's actions, wehter it's through HR or accounts, every department. Let's just be a fair, consistent, nice group of people. I think that gets the best out of people. Whether it's Volvo, TP52, America's Cup, it's all about people. If you look after them and treat them well, that's how you get the best out of them, and that's how you get results.

Cup seems to bring out the best and the worst out of people. Difficult to stay even and fair-handed in a world as murky as the America's Cup?

Not with my own people, because we're really fussy with our people. We've got nice people. Keith is a very fair and nice person, so we've had the ability to treat people very fairly. Origin has worked hard to try to settle this thing. I think we walked a good line, and try not to be underhand or use any trickery, I think we were pretty upfront.

Weren't you quite nice to Alinghi?

People have said that, but perhaps we were too nice to BMW Oracle when they moved the goal posts on everyone a couple of times, but it left the doors open for us to be able to communicate. With that amount of emotion invested in something, people shut the door on you very quickly. Then you don't have a line of communication. Yes, we were probably guilty of that with both parties. But it wasn't about us, it was about getting the event back on track. So we were prepared to take a couple of punches, and we were doing it for the right reason.

We always had an agenda with what we were doing, and we always had a goal, which meant we had to take a bit of hit for ourselves to achieve that. Keith is great for that and it's something which I've always been happy to take a couple of hits to get the end-result we were after, so it's been an interesting time.

What's your view on black hats and white hats in the Cup?

Both I as an individual and we as a team have been very consistent in the view that it has taken two to tango here. There hasn't been a clear white hat wearer or black hat wearer, certainly in my view.

Alinghi seems to have taken the brunt of the criticism....

Yeah, they have, and I think they would be first to admit that their dealings with the media haven't gone very well. I think in hindsight they would have done things differently. But I see equal blame. You can't shift it from both being at fault in this. The bottom line is that if Alinghi hadn't pushed the legitimacy of the challenger of record yacht club, there is nothing that anyone could have done about the protocol, except not come to the event, which is everyone's choice.

That's bitten them very hard. Obviously Bertarelli had a vision for the 33rd Cup. We can all say the protocol was biased and unfair. But there was nothing anyone could have done if they'd have had a legitimate yacht club.