Andrew Strauss
Most senior teams know how to perform in favourable conditions. The harder problem is holding standards when results collapse, scrutiny intensifies, and the dressing room starts to fracture. Leaders need a working model for how culture, selection, and honest feedback hold a group together when the external pressure is at its highest.
Sir Andrew Strauss is a former England cricket captain and former Director of Cricket at the ECB who helps leadership teams build the culture and decision-making habits that hold up under sustained pressure.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Sir Andrew Strauss
- He led England to the world Test No. 1 ranking in 2011, a position the team had not held for three decades, and can speak specifically to what it takes to move a group from mid-table to the top of its field.
- He has sat on both sides of the performance question: as the captain inside the team, and later as Director of Cricket at the ECB responsible for the system that selects, develops and accounts for that team.
- His 2022 ECB High Performance Review, convened with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key after the 4-0 Ashes defeat, is a named case study in structural reform of an underperforming elite system.
- He founded the Ruth Strauss Foundation in 2019 and can speak from experience to leading people and commitments through personal crisis without collapsing the standards he asks of others.
Biography highlights
- 100 Test matches for England, 7,037 runs at an average above 40, 21 Test centuries.
- England captain in 50 Tests; Ashes winner in 2009 and 2010-11, and architect of England’s rise to world No. 1 in 2011.
- Director of Cricket, England and Wales Cricket Board, 2015-2018.
- Chair of the ECB High Performance Review, 2022, with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key on the panel.
- Knight Bachelor, 2019 Resignation Honours, for services to sport and charity. OBE, 2011.
- Founder and chair of the Ruth Strauss Foundation, established 2019.
- Author of Driving Ambition: My Autobiography (Hodder).
Biography
England were ranked the best Test side in the world in August 2011, for the first time in thirty years. The captain who took them there, over a four-year rebuild, had replaced an injured Michael Vaughan on debut seven years earlier and opened with a century at Lord’s. The gap between those two facts is where the substance of Strauss’s leadership argument sits.
The captaincy is the obvious credential: 50 Tests in charge, the 2009 Ashes at home, the 4-0 series win in Australia in 2010-11, the first there in twenty-four years. The less-told part is what happened after the playing career ended. Strauss returned to the England and Wales Cricket Board in 2015 as Director of Cricket, where he was responsible not for one dressing room but for the pipeline, culture and selection architecture behind the national side.
That dual perspective, captain inside the system and later the executive above it, sharpened after the 2021-22 Ashes collapse. Strauss chaired the ECB’s High Performance Review, working with Sir Dave Brailsford and Rob Key, and produced recommendations for the structure of domestic cricket intended to reset England’s standing across all three formats. It is a recent, named piece of work on the harder problem leaders actually face: reforming an institution that is failing on its most public measure.
The private context matters too. Strauss founded the Ruth Strauss Foundation in 2019 in memory of his wife, who died of a non-smoking lung cancer, and has built it into a significant charity for bereavement support and rare-cancer research. It is the part of the story that gives the leadership material its weight in the room.
Key speaking topics
- Leadership under sustained pressure
- Building and rebuilding high-performance team culture
- Captaincy, accountability and honest feedback
- Reforming underperforming institutions
- Decision-making in elite sport
- Resilience through personal crisis
- The transition from practitioner to system leader
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive committees managing a performance turnaround or a credibility rebuild
- Senior leadership offsites focused on team culture, selection and accountability
- Sales and commercial leadership audiences that operate under repeated public scorecards
- Boards and HR directors working on succession, captaincy, and leadership development
Audience outcomes
- A working model for how a captain or senior leader holds standards when results are against them.
- Specific examples from the 2009 and 2010-11 Ashes rebuilds of how team culture was reset.
- A view from inside the ECB High Performance Review on what reforming an elite system actually requires.
- Language for talking honestly about pressure, scrutiny and personal loss in a leadership context.
- A sharper question set for their own team: who owns standards, who gives honest feedback, and who decides when the group is failing.