Sir Alex’s masterclass

by the end of the year.

Now the man from Govan is back with a new book — unimaginatively titled Leading — on leadership and management philosophies. If you’re looking for a book on deep-rooted management jargon and a lot of boardroom gyaan, then you’re in for a great surprise. Just as he did when he managed his football teams, Sir Alex blends the right amount of intrigue, flair and controversy in his latest book.

The book jacket tells us that this is an “inspirational guide to great leadership, from the most successful football manager of all-time”. As Sir Alex himself writes, “don’t expect any jargon or formulaic praise” in the beginning and stays true to his word till the end. Leading is co-authored by Sir Michael Moritz, leading venture capitalist of Silicon Valley and chairman of Sequoia Capital, and is more a football book than a guide to leadership. Sir Alex tries — sometimes too hard — to integrate management principles with football philosophies and mostly hits the right notes.

He takes on the various aspects associated with leadership — innovation, discipline, and delegation and weaves a tale based on his footballing life and career as a manager. The book chapters are given dour and, dare I say, self-help kind of titles like “Becoming Yourself”, “Assembling Pieces” and “The Bottom Line.” But these banalities are leavened by Sir Alex’s razorsharp wit, brilliant anecdotes and stories to explain his take on leadership. “The housefly has more life expectancy than a manager of Premier League side,” he writes. Another time he describes how he showed a player the iconic picture of construction workers at Rockefeller Centre and asked, “What can you say about the photograph?” The reply was, “They’ve all got hats on.”

Talking about discipline playing a pivotal role in asserting authority, he writes, “Inexperienced, or insecure, leaders are often tempted to make any infraction a capital offence.” In his book, the deadliest of punishments was silence. “Everyone likes to be acknowledged and the recipient of my silent treatment knew he was in the woodshed.”

Sir Alex always took immense pride in his work-ethic — he was the first one to arrive at the office and the last to leave till his last working day. Great leaders do have immense confidence in their ability but as Sir Alex states in his book, it’s a different challenge to instill confidence in others. “My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That’s the difference between leadership and management.” Mercifully, such phrases appear only sporadically in the book and when they do, they don’t come across as heavy-duty management talk.

There are tales of how he handled negotiations, players’ salaries, his own salaries, dealing with the media — issues that engage all football bosses. Negotiating for players from other clubs was difficult and while buying Dimitar Berbatov from Tottenham — he says that his hip replacement surgery was less painful than the negotiations. The book lavishes praise on Cristiano Ronaldo and Eric Cantona — two of the four “worldclass” players he managed, the other two being Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes.

The importance of teamwork comes with a startling revelation. Of all the 2,131 games he managed, there were only 20 games in which all players performed to perfection. According to Sir Alex, only eight players are actually needed to win a football match because the rest are bound to have an off day or aren’t up to speed.

Significantly, he is critical of a lot of decisions he made and stresses the importance of acknowledging those mistakes. There will be a few surprises for readers who haven’t read his two earlier books. It’s fascinating to read how Sir Alex evolved as a manager every few years and the guiding principles, which made him the manager he was. It’s evident for anyone who has seen or followed Manchester United or even English football, that he loved a good gamble — especially on youth. You can certainly feel his excitement as he talks about why taking chances on young footballers was like a drug to him.

When Sir Alex retired from United in May 2013, United floundered and some sections of fans and media criticised him for not leaving the club in a better state. “You would have thought I had left 11 corpses on the steps of a funeral home,” he writes sarcastically.

You won’t find any leadership secrets in this book and even if you do what worked for Sir Alex doesn’t work for other football managers. Football has evolved and changed and what made him the maestro was his own set of three P’s — preparation, perseverance and patience. (That isn’t what he wrote but his co-writer in the Epilogue.)

One doesn’t need to read a “leadership book” to know that Sir Alex Ferguson was a genius when it came to leading and managing. Read it for his insights on managing young players, handling egos and running a successful football club consistently in an extremely competitive environment. Alex Ferguson with Michael Moritz Hachette India 406 pages, ~799