No playbook

THERE was a great unveiling in the world of sport, which took place over the last week. Normally, unveilings are in the form of players joining new clubs, potentially shifting the balance of power in the leagues where they play. Lebron James from Miami to Cleveland, for example. Or Gareth Bale from Tottenham to Real Madrid. And to balance things in La Liga, Luis Suarez from Liverpool to Barcelona.

Last week’s however, was not about a player. Rather, it was about a person who makes players play their game better. This was Jurgen Klopp, the successful manager of Borussia Dortmund fame, who took an outfit plying their trade in the mid-table of the German Bundesliga and transformed them into back-to-back league champions and runners-up in Europe’s most elite competition—the UEFA Champions League.

This time, he joins Liverpool Football Club, perhaps one of the most storied teams anywhere in the world, but who have, over the last decade, seen a downturn in their winning fortunes.

Klopp is a proven winner, and he has achieved his success without the free-spending player splurges af- forded to other successful managers of sports teams. The latter mold sometimes makes people wonder if great managers win because they are good, but rather because they have all the best players at their disposal to begin with. In the case of Klopp, he built his team from young unknowns and fashioned them into world-class athletes that other teams covet. He is, in the true sense of the word, a transformational mentor. But something about Klopp struck me in his early pronouncements with his new club. The man is an independent thinker, someone who bucks the trend and does not just go with the flow.

What comes out of the things he says is that he does not have a pre-set agenda of how he manages his team. He looks at what he has available at his disposal, considers the mission at hand, and from there develops his strategy of how to achieve a winning result. And in Dortmund, his former team, he did just that.

It occurred to me that in management these days, managers have become too lazy to make up tailor-made solutions to their challenges. Too often, they have socalled “playbooks,” which they try to adapt to whatever situation comes their way. Rather than thinking of unique solutions to suit their individual challenges, they have ready-made answers looking for questions.

The reality is that all organizations are unique. And no two face exactly the same challenges.

As Jurgen Klopp likes to point out, although there are many similarities in the situations of Liverpool and Dortmund, in the end they are different teams, in different leagues, and in different countries. And so people cannot expect that what applied in Dortmund, or indeed, what made them successful, will also apply in Liverpool.

This is a good lesson for those of us in corporate management to take away. Klopp is a manager of a complex football organization. The challenges he faces in making that organization succeed are many times more complicated than most of us will ever encounter. And so it is wise to borrow a page from his book—but not his playbook, mind you. As he always insists, he does not have one.