Small Steps and Broken Stones

Warning: This post uses an extended use of sport as a metaphor for business improvement, which some readers may find tedious.

Sir Alex Ferguson has been the manager of Manchester United for 23 years, an unprecedented and unmatched tenure in modern football. Great football teams do not burn brightly for too long, as players find title-winning form difficult to sustain against the pressures of fame, fortune, expectation and the deterioration of their physical gifts. Even the greatest sides the sport has seen have had a limited lifepsan of around say, two to four seasons. The vagaries are just too formidable. And once a great team begins to lose its way, to splinter and disintegrate, how does the manager summon the energy to start over, nurturing a fresh wave of talent and staying competitive? Very few of the all-time greats have managed that, but Ferguson has done it three times.

1992-1997: four league titles, two FA Cups
1999-2001: three league titles, one FA Cup & the European Cup
2006-2009: three league titles & the European Cup

Along the way, the way the team is structured has changed from 4-4-2 to 4-4-1-1 to 4-2-3-1 to 4-3-3 and then back to 4-4-2. There’s also been a shift in outlook, with the all-out attacking nature of the early nineties vintage replaced by the more patient, but no less easy on the eye style you will now encounter at Old Trafford.

Everything changes then. Great players move on, tactics evolve, new owners arrive and leave, but Ferguson keeps on building great teams.

Every organisation could learn something from three principles  which I would argue form the bedrock of this man’s ability to build great teams. These are they:

1. Let the team evolve.
After tearing opposition defences apart for two seasons, Andrei Kanchelskis’s form dipped and Ferguson wasted no time in selling him to Everton in 1995. Kanchelskis was a classic winger: fast, direct and tricky. He was a fan favourite and seen as an integral part of that first great Ferguson side. His replacement in the team could not have been more different in style. No tricks, no pace, but in possession of incredible stamina and one of the most accurate right feet the game has seen - David Beckham.

Ferguson has never recruited like for like. He identifies great players, brings them to the club, makes them better and then adapts the shape and style of the team to suit their particular strengths. When Beckham left for Real Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo took his place in the team and once again this saw a consequent shift in the shape and style of the team. Constant evolution.

Too many organisations think about the role first and the individual second. There’s obviously a balance to be struck, but I would always come down on the side of recruiting the best talent and adapting their role and the shape of the team to fit their strengths.

2. Develop talent from within.
Alan Hansen said that you’d never win anything with kids, but Neville (Gary), Butt, Neville (Phil), Scholes, Giggs and Beckham certainly proved him wrong on that. Ferguson believes passionately in giving young players a chance to deliver and continues to have his faith in youth repaid. Not enough organisations are brave enough to follow his lead, despite the fact that talent management initiatives and succession polices are all the rage.

This isn’t about keeping recruiting costs down, it’s about keeping alive what it is that makes your organisation special. Seeing Eric Cantona put himself through extra training sessions had a profound effect on the likes of Scholes and Beckham, helping them understand what it took to be a great player. Individuals who have through the ranks of your organisation will understand its values and what makes it special - they deserve to be given the chance to deliver.

3. Recruit people with hunger
Ferguson very very rarely buys players from clubs similar in shape and stature to Manchester United and when he does (Laurent Blanc, Seba Veron), it hasn’t worked. He has however, had a great deal of success in bringing in players from smaller clubs who have something still to prove, who want to get better and who he will work with (and be patient with) to help them get to the desired level.

Why recruit people to your organisation who have nothing left to prove? Where will the motivation come from? Experience will help you maintain the status quo, but you need hunger and determination to get you to the next level. And I would stress that this is nothing to do with age, this is about giving people a new stage in their career and making sure they have the tools, resources and learning opportunities they will need to develop and perform.

Obviously there is a lot more to Ferguson’s ongoing success than these three principles, but they certainly stood out for me when I was thinking about how he has succeeded in continually building outstanding teams. We have a lot to learn from the great man. Your comments are welcome.

I wrote the following for Londonist in 2006, just after Sol Campbell had walked out of Highbury during half-time in his club’s game against West Ham. It was described as a meltdown at the time and there were all sorts of theories flying around as to Campbell’s state of mind, but no explanation was given by the man himself and I doubt that he will ever feel the need to explain himself to the media now that he’s left Notts County in a hurry. Sol keeps his own counsel and I admire the way he’s maintained a level of privacy. He’s a maverick of sorts, but he deserves our respect.

Still waters run deep is how the proverb goes. And there are few athletes as still, as impenetrable as Sulzeer Jeremiah Campbell. Here is a man who has spent the last thirteen years defying lazy footballer stereotypes whilst going about his business of de-constructing attacking moves with a level of stealth that is almost perverse in its ability to go unnoticed. All the while his sphinx-like visage and ice-cold demeanour have combined to keep us all at bay and denied us the opportunity to proclaim ‘this is what Sol Campbell is about, this is who he is, this why he was good and this is why he is now bad’.

He has let the mask slip though. But only twice. Both times playing for England in international tournaments, when he thought that he’d won the contest for his country, only to have the glory snatched away. In the anguish writ large over his face, we saw just how important it was to this man to win and to set the standard on the global stage. Setting the standard is exactly what he did, as Campbell was voted into the ‘team of the tournament’ on both occasions by the real experts, the technical study groups of FIFA and UEFA respectively. Rated as the best of the best, but not able to take his team all the way, and in those fleeting moments, the pain really showed. The only clues that we have been given then, is that Campbell cares very deeply about playing for his country and after the trauma of Wednesday night, the received opinion is that he is going to be denied the opportunity to make any kind of impression in Germany this summer.

What is wrong with Sol then? Has he lost control? Too old? Too rich? Some Arsenal fans might have it that he is no longer committed, that he is no longer making an effort. But how can you say that of a player whose gift has always been to appear as if he does not need to make any effort at all? Certainly, Campbell appears to have lost focus, but we have no idea why, and perhaps the fact that he has never revealed his life to us, might remind us that players do have a life away from the arena and that like anyone, their focus can be disrupted by the ups and downs of the everyday.

Don’t write him off too quickly though. Towards the end of the 2002/03 Premiership season, Campbell was red-carded for apparently elbowing Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. He missed the last four games of the season and could only watch as the title was conceded to Manchester United and his teammates lifted the FA Cup without him. Sol came back from that, and we’ll back him to come back from this.

He can’t pass though.

Football is part of the fabric of my life. That’s a grandiose and almost meaningless statement, but it is still the truth. I met my wife through football, I made my best friends through football and I share football with my father. I am a football coach and the ideas I encounter through thinking about the game enrich my professional life.

You cannot have any kind of interest in football and be unaware that it is criminal when fathers, sons, daughters, cousins and friends go to watch a football match and don’t go home.

Justice for the 96.