The Game is Never Over…

Beyond doubt, Sir Alex Ferguson is the world’s most successful and best known Football Manager and has played a central role in transforming the Manchester United into the iconic football club it’s today. Such is his influence on the club that David Gill, the club’s former chief executive says ‘Steve Jobs was Apple; Sir Alex Ferguson is Manchester United…’

By the time he retired in May 2013, he’d consecutively served for 26 Seasons as the Manager during which the Club won 13 English league titles along with 25 other domestic and international trophies. The next best English Football Manager may have but half of Sir Alex’s accomplishments under his belt. In this article, I intend to discuss a few crucial elements of his enormously successful management approach and how they can be applied to the world of business.

When he joined the Manchester United in 1986, unlike most managers, he focused on building the club rather than a team. Firm in his belief that he could win with young players, he established two ‘centres of excellence’ for promising players as young as nine. He intuited they would build the future of the club.

The big bold bet he took on the young talent against the prevailing wisdom at the time paid well as a number of his early signings such as Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville went on to make their mark in the world of football. His single-minded focus on building the club was absolutely vital to their sustained high performance particularly during the late 1990s and early 2000.

Notes Sir Alex in an HBR article headlined ‘Ferguson’s Formula’ by HBS professor Anita Elberse with Sir Alex Ferguson himself “…Winning a game is only a short-term gain-you can lose the next game. Building a club brings stability and consistency…” Whether it’s a football club or a business, building a strong structure beyond just winning a game or marketing a product or service is essential to sustain its growth and performance over the long run.

Akin to this is consistently looking into the future like Sir Alex has always done. Running a business on an operational rather than on a strategic basis in the fast-changing business environment today is simply not enough even for survival let alone growth. Why, the moment the unexpected strike your business and catch you off guard, things will start to go haywire. Now that’s just about survival. From a growth perspective, ‘scalability’ is a vital factor for a progressive business and should be a strategic concern rather than an operational one.

I must tell you that this is not to suggest that operational concerns are less important than strategic concerns. In fact, without paying serious attention to operations, you can’t build a successful business. But, you have to recognize where operational priorities overshadow strategic priorities and address it. Here, an active R & D unit that is steadily working on strategic priorities without interrupting day-to-day operations is a feasible solution.

Equally important, you can never afford to forget the winds of creative destruction blowing far and wide that could make your products or services obsolete at short notice. Even if economies of a football club differ from those of a business that sells products or services, adapting to change is a strategic imperative for both. This is why Sir Alex started to pay attention to what the emerging field of sports science could bring to the Manchester United despite the fact that they’d been at the top of the game for so long.

Following his observation, he appointed a team of sports scientists to support the coaches, set up vitamin ‘D’ booths in the players’ dressing room to offset the effect of the lack of sunlight in Manchester, and embraced the use of vests fitted with GPS sensors that allow an analysis of performance just 20 minutes after a training session and went on to establish a state-of-the-art medical facility at its training ground.
 
However, let me offer a word of caution here. Adapting to change aping the rival businesses may be natural. But, even if the change is positive, it won’t place you above the others who’ve adapted to it before you. Where the change leads to an adverse outcome, blindly following the herd could be a recipe for disaster. So make a firm resolve to be proactive always and calculate the odds of failure and success even when the consequences are not very clear.

In his best-selling memoir, ‘Straight from the Gut’, Jack Welch warns business leaders about the dangers of acting on what he calls ‘false sympathy’. He makes an impassioned argument that it’s pointless keeping people around out of ‘false sympathy’ where letting go of them is the best option. Sir Alex never hesitated to let go of even some of the top players who didn’t fit in at one point or another in the best interests of the club, which is perhaps his greatest forte.