If
you had a chance to interview him, what would you ask the man who many
regard as the best coach in the history of European football, and
perhaps sports as a whole? I can imagine many fans have pondered that
question, but last year it took on greater relevance for me.
That's
because in what turned out to be Sir Alex Ferguson's last eighteen
months in charge at Manchester United, my former student Tom Dye and I
had a unique opportunity to study the legendary coach's leadership
approach. We were able to conduct lengthy interviews with the man
himself, we followed him around as he went about his daily activities on
United's training ground, we saw him in action at the stadium, we
interviewed several players, and we spoke with many people around him,
from the club's kit manager to the chief executive officer. Not your
average academic research project, in other words.
We captured some of our initial findings in a case study, released last fall (see here and here and here for some media coverage). Today, the Harvard Business Review
published a second result of the study: an article, titled "Ferguson's
Formula" and co-authored with Sir Alex, in which he provides his
perspective on eight critical leadership lessons, offering unique
insights into what it takes to build and manage teams.
I obviously can't reproduce the full article here -- it is available through the Harvard Business Review 's website
-- but I thought it might be helpful to list the lessons, and for each
lesson select one quote that I found especially insightful. Here we go:
Lesson 1. Start with the Foundation
"When
you give young people a chance, you not only create a longer life span
for the team, you also create loyalty. They will always remember that
you were the manager who gave them their first opportunity."
Lesson 2. Dare to Rebuild Your Team
"The
hardest thing is to let go of a player who has been a great guy -- but
all the evidence is on the field. If you see the change, the
deterioration, you have to ask yourself what things are going to be like
two years ahead."
Lesson 3. Set High Standards -- and Hold Everyone To Them
"I
constantly told my squad that working hard all your life is a talent.
But I expected even more from the star players. I expected them to work
even harder."
Lesson 4. Never, Ever Cede Control
"There
are occasions when you have to ask yourself whether certain players are
affecting the dressing-room atmosphere, the performance of the team,
and your control of the players and the staff. If they are, you have to
cut the cord."
Lesson 5. Match the Message to the Moment
"For
a player -- for any human being -- there is nothing better than hearing
'Well done.' Those are the two best words ever invented."
Lesson 6. Prepare to Win
"I
am a gambler—a risk taker—and you can see that in how we played in the
late stages of matches. ... If we were still down—say, 1–2—with 15
minutes to go, I was ready to take more risks. I was perfectly happy to
lose 1–3 if it meant we’d given ourselves a good chance to draw or to
win. So in those last 15 minutes, we’d go for it."
Lesson 7. Rely on the Power of Observation
"I
came to see observation as a critical part of my management skills. The
ability to see things is key -- or, more specifically, the ability to
see things you don't expect to see."
Lesson 8. Never Stop Adapting
"Most people with my kind of track record don't look to change. But I always felt I couldn't afford not to change."
Anita Elberse is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She is the author of a book, Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, (in stores next month but available to pre-order now), and faculty chair of an HBS Executive Education program, “The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports.”
Manchester United's Longtime Boss Retires
When
Sir Alex Ferguson waved to the crowd at a stadium just outside
Birmingham (U.K.) this Sunday, he was ostensibly saying goodbye to the
most distinguished coaching career in the history of professional
soccer, but in reality he was bringing down the curtain on one of the
great displays of leadership in the past quarter of a century.
Alex
Ferguson took over the role of Manager of Manchester United when Ronald
Reagan was in the White House, Margaret Thatcher lived at 10 Downing
Street, Deng Xiaoping was undoing the calamity of the Cultural
Revolution and Cristiano Ronaldo was just starting to cut his teeth. In
the annals of American sports, Ferguson’s accomplishments dwarf those of
Vince Lombardi who coached the Green Bay Packers for nine years, or
John Wooden who led the UCLA basketball team for 17 years. (In top-level
American sports only Mike Krzyzewski's run at Duke is longer.)
Ferguson’s 27 year run at the helm outstrips Steve Jobs' 14-year reign
as CEO of Apple or Andy Grove’s 11 years as CEO tenure of Intel.
When
it comes to business, Manchester United and, for that matter, every
other high-profile soccer club, are tiny concerns. (Manchester United’s
revenues are about one third of one percent of Apple’s). Yet the
challenge of transforming a rotting entity (which was Manchester
United’s condition in the mid 1980s) into a winning franchise that has
lasted for more than two decades – especially under the phosphorous
glare of the media – is a task accomplished by very few leaders of any
sort of organization.
The performance of most soccer
managers is closely correlated with the amount of money that team owners
lavish on players. Most managers, just like people who "actively
manage" mutual funds, don’t outperform their comparable indices. Not so
with Ferguson who wracked up a record, accumulated over four decades,
that for his fellow managers will seem like an unsurpassable bogey.
Ferguson
arrived at Old Trafford, Manchester United’s home, after spending 30
years as a player and manager of three clubs in Scotland (East
Stirlingshire, St Mirren and Aberdeen) where he began to display his
mastery as a leader. In Manchester he inherited a team of dissolutes and
a club that had not won a significant trophy in many years but he was
also helped by the patience of the Club's owners at the time who
provided him leeway to rebuild - a stark contrast to most owners who
shuffle Managers faster than a deck of cards. By the time Ferguson
retired, Manchester United had won 38 pieces of what the British
commentators so charmingly refer to as "silverware" – including 13
premier league titles, and two European championships – and the stadium
had been expanded to accommodate over 76,000 fans.
Ferguson
is part radical (he was a trade union leader in his younger days),
longtime supporter of the Labour party (he was close to Tony Blair) but
also has a deep belief in conservative virtues – application, hard work
and loyalty. He says, “I’m a tough bugger but I’m a fair bugger,” and
that he is. Raised in Govan, which at the time was one of the world’s
great shipbuilding venues, his childhood was spent in a milieu, still
marked by the strict rationing of World War II, outside toilets and no
televisions or telephones. It's far removed from today’s multi-racial
Britain where every boy expects to own a pair of cleats and has a
Facebook account.
Ferguson is a man of subtlety and
charm (even though soccer referees and league officials with puffed-up
feathers have frequently been on the receiving ends of explosive
tirades). He is enormously curious, a wonderful raconteur (with a trove
of stories drawn from a life spent with characters brimming with
testosterone) and a man of great kindness. His interests extend far
beyond soccer and encompass political history, British art (including
the great mid-century painter, Stanley Spencer), wine (especially some
of the more rarified French varietals) and the breeding of racehorses.
Like
all great leaders, Ferguson has led an unbalanced life built upon an
unquenchable desire to win. For him, everything revolved around soccer,
which has become a year round activity. Daily practice, scouting
missions, match preparations, romancing of young players (and their
parents), negotiating with agents and sparring with the press (an
increasingly tiresome task for Ferguson). In hotel rooms his television
was always tuned to soccer and, no matter what he was doing, he was
keeping an eye on a competitor. His winning ways came not from the
match-day appearances but from studious application conducted far from
public view. Consistent, relentless preparation was the foundation on
which his record stands. It’s no coincidence that he had a special
fondness for players who would put in extra time at practice.
Under
Ferguson, Manchester United was an organization that spoke with one
voice. It was a voice of authority, drawn from years of experience. In
his case, it was expressed in a style of attacking soccer and a refusal
to dwell on setbacks. Many of his victories came in the final minutes of
nail-biting games with squads taught that nothing is impossible.
Though
Ferguson made his share of big money signings, he knew that great
organizations are built from within. It’s no accident that several of
Manchester United’s best players of the last 20 years have been schooled
within the club since they were in their early teens. Ferguson had a
knack for improving and tuning these apprentices. The prime example is
Ryan Giggs, signed at the age of 14, and still playing a quarter of a
century later. For the youngster, Ferguson was The Guvn’r, the Boss, the
Gaffer, the Paterfamilias and, for many players, the Father figure they
never had. The approach at Manchester United stands in stark contrast
to other clubs in the Premier League, where mega-stars have been
assembled by the hasty application of oodles of money from Oligarchs or
Emirs.
While Ferguson, like all great leaders a
part-time psychologist, knows how to minister to the insecure, chivvy
the slackers, enhance the strong and tend to the mercurial, there has
never been any confusion that club, team and organization comes before
the needs of any individual. Hence the expulsions of David Beckham (who
had too much of an affinity for make-up), Cristiano Ronaldo (who had a
yearning to play in Madrid) and Roy Keane, the longtime club captain,
who had made 326 appearances for the club, before making the fatal
mistake of making derogatory comments about some teammates. The latest
head-on-the-block is Wayne Rooney, the barrel-chested Liverpudlian,
whose infatuation with himself has been too much for Ferguson.
All
the while Ferguson had to deal with the unpredictability of outside
stakeholders. About eight years ago, an ugly spat with some Irish
racehorse breeders, who owned about a third of the Club, resulted in its
sale to the Glazer family of Miami. At the time, Manchester United was a
publicly traded company with healthy profits. The Glazers, who operate
their own down-market version of the buyout business, have since sucked
out over $1 billion dollars to either pay interest on the debt beneath
which they buried the club or pocket for themselves. This dwarfs the
total amount Ferguson has spent on buying players during his entire time
at the Club.
Ferguson left the field on Sunday with
his team as strong – and young – as ever: the best bequest that anyone
can leave a successor. He had already encouraged United fans to support
his successor in tough times as well as good. Like Ferguson, Manchester
United’s new manager, David Moyes, is a hardened Scot whose heavy accent
sometimes makes him just as difficult to understand.
Meantime,
Manchester City, who with the exception of their Championship winning
season in 2012, have long operated in United’s shadow just appointed a
new Manager. Brian Kidd will be the 19th Manager appointed at Manchester
City during Ferguson’s time at Old Trafford. In his younger days, Kidd
was a United Player. He then spent a decade serving as Assistant Manager
to the man whose ghost will always be in the dugout -- Alex Ferguson.
