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Tips
from a sports playbook to keep your business on top
Winning
strategies include setting clear goals and constant reinventing
By Catherine Bolgar
SUCCESS
is wonderful, but sustained success is even better. Whether in sport or
business, staying at the top is a rare feat. Sir Alex Ferguson’s 24-year stint
at the helm of the Manchester United football club is a show of survival
uncommon in an industry
known for high turnover and whose winning percentage is but a dream for lesser
mortals.
How
does he do it? Here are eight tips from Sir Alex’s playbook that can be applied
in business.
Know yourself
“It’s
the same for any tribal environment: you want to create something that stands
the test of time,” says Clive Gilson, professor of Human Resources Management
at the University of Waikato
in Hamilton, New Zealand, and director of
Inspiros Worldwide Ltd., a consultancy that inspires organizations to sustained
peak performance. Dr Gilson is also co-author of the book “Peak Performance:
Inspirational Business Lessons From the World’s Top Sports Organizations.”
“What any organization has to ask is, ‘what do we stand for?’ Manchester United and Sir Alex can answer
that question.”
Sir
Alex “has enormous presence and strength of character,” Dr Gilson says. “He is
clear about what he believes in, clear about what he stands for and clear about
how he translates it onto the pitch.”
The
team, meanwhile, delivers
attacking football, which reliably fills Old Trafford with faithful fans, he
says.
Set clear goals
When
Sir Alex arrived at Manchester United, he said
he wanted to knock Liverpool off its perch,
says Tom Common, professor of strategic development at the University of
Liverpool Management School and a member of the university’s Football Industry
Group.
“It
was a good goal, because it could be defined and everyone knew if he had done
it or had failed to do it,” Dr Cannon says. It’s important to have a focused,
straight-forward goal and not a lot of smaller subgoals, he adds. “Organizations
often get confused by having lots of objectives.”
Reinvent
“One
of the most successful strategies of any organization is the willingness to
reinvent itself,” says Dr Cannon. “The team that knocked Liverpool off its
perch isn’t the team that will compete with Chelsea.”
Sir
Alex has reinvented the team several times, always around key individuals. Eric Cantona was crucial to
success in the early ‘90s, and became a role model for group of younger players
who were just arriving from the academy – the so-called Golden Generation of
David Beckam, Ryan Giggs, Paul
Scholes and others.
“Cantona left just as
those players were ready to take over. They created the next team, “says Bill
Gerrard, professor of sport management and finance at Leeds University
Business School.
Next, Sir Alex replaced David Beckam with Cristiano Ronaldo; now he is remaking
the team around Wayne
Rooney.
…yet maintain continuity
“Any
organization or any individual
who is successful over a period of time has that balance of continuity and
change,” Dr Gerrard says. “If you’re successful, others will emulate to
outmaneuver you. You have to keep what made you successful but always innovate
to keep ahead.”
That
isn’t to say you want lots of churn in your personnel, warns Dr Gilson of Waikato University. Football players are at
their physical peaks between the ages of 21 and 28, so by definition football
teams constantly need new blood.
Rally the troops
“You can have the greatest strategy and know where you want to go
with it, but if you don’t take the people with you, you aren’t going to get
there,” says Dr Gerrard of Leeds
University. “Sir Alex has
an amazing ability to inspire people.”
Sir Alex has famously cultivated a mindset of being the underdog,
even though Manchester
United is one of the richest teams in football and holds the record for the
most FA Cup wins and the most Barclays Premier League titles.
“It’s very hard when a club wins a champions league or the
equivalent in business, because there’s a tendency to think that’s good
enough,” says Dr Cannon of Liverpool
University. “Not with Sir
Alex. It doesn’t matter how good you are, you can always be better. And he
communicates that.”
Sir Alex’s halftime talk to his team at the 1999 European Cup
Final included this: “At the end of this game, the European
Cup will only six feet away from you and you’ll not even be able to touch it if
we lose. And many of you that will be the closest you will ever get. Don’t you
dare come back in here without giving your all.”
Have
resources
Research show a high correlation between spending on player wages
and results on the field, says Stefan Szymanski, professor of economics at the Cass Business
School of City University in London and co-author of
the book, “Soccernomics.”
So team owners are looking for managers “who can outperform a
given sum of money,” he says. “Over many years, Sir Alex has done fairly
consistently better than the money might have predicted. But he couldn’t have
done half of what he’s done without the money. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem
for any manager” – you need the money to win and you need to win to be trusted
with the money.
For the 2008-2009 season, Chelsea
led with 167 million Pound (US$271
million) for player wages, followed by Manchester United with 124 million Pound. Liverpool spent 107 million, and Arsenal 103 million, he
says. Then spending dropped to 82 million, at Manchester City. The lowest spender that season was
Stokes City, at 30 million.
“Mostly, if you spend a lot of money on players and you pay market
prices, you will have success,” Dr Szymanski says.
That said, before arriving at Manchester
United, Sir Alex turned around Aberdeen,
which had a small budget. He took them to the top of the Scottish League, which
had been dominated by Celtic and Rangers, and even won the European
Cup Winner’s Cup against Real Madrid.
Deliver
Sir Alex’s admirers note his unswerving confidence of how to get
the right result. Indeed, “when you’ve got a
line of sight to performance, as long as you believe in yourself, people will
take off their shoes and socks and walk to Rome,”
says Dr Gilson of Waikato
University.
While too many supremely confident people suffer from delusions of competence, Sir Alex actually delivers. He may be
famous for quirks like the “hair dryer” – screaming into the face of a player
who has disappointed him. But the “hair dryer” doesn’t make him great; he gets
away with it because of what he is – a peak performer who delivers.
“People focus on the three or four things they notice and miss the
dozens of little things that really make a person successful,” Dr Szymanski
says.Confidence has to be founded on a record of success, Dr Gilson adds. “ You
have to know what you’re doing, to have been there and done that. Believing, on
its own, isn’t enough to make something happen.
Be Lucky
Winning the lottery, being struck by lightning – some things are
rare, but they do happen.
“Very few football managers get the chance to see if they can have
a consistent level of performance before getting fired,” says Dr Szymanski.
“You need little bit of luck to get you going.
“Who is to say Alex Ferguson has not been serially lucky,” he
adds. “Most companies have that too – somebody has to get lucky, and millions
won’t be.”
Sir Alex himself admitted, in an interview in the New
Statesman in March 2009, “The thing
about Cup football is you need to be the best, but you also need a lot of luck,
and I think it’s asking too much for all the games to go your way.”
(Source:
WSJ)
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