The FINANCIAL -- A project at Ashridge working with Harlequins rugby club is featured in an article in The Times, where Owen Slot looks at how rugby clubs are turning to education to change perceptions of modern day excesses, but money still seems to talk the loudest.

According to Ashridge, it focuses on issues of behaviour and commercial incentives and highlights the positive intiatives being undertaken by some clubs.

The article reads.. At Harlequins, they have run teaching sessions at Ashridge Business School in Hertfordshire to establish culture and values. “We are pushing people the whole time,” Conor O’Shea, the director of rugby, says. Last year the players were given comedy classes and then staged “pretty awful” comedy nights — a new form of learning to perform under pressure.

O’Shea, one of the smartest in the business, says that what he sees is not a cultural problem but “a group of people who are incredibly committed to bettering themselves”.

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