Sir Alex Ferguson on how to win

As performances go, Sir Alex Ferguson’s counts among the few to justify the descriptor he gave to just four of the players who served him: “not just great but world class”. Under his now-legendary, 26-year-long leadership, Manchester United Football Club won 38 major trophies. His career tally reached 49. All that in a sport famous for high-profile managerial false starts, failures and heroes who become zeros (ask Chelsea’s ‘Special One’, José Mourinho). 

Manchester United became the world’s most valuable soccer team. One Forbes commentator estimated Ferguson was responsible for $385m, or 11 per cent, of the publicly traded English soccer team’s enterprise value of $3.5bn at the time of his retirement. No wonder there’s a fascination with Ferguson and an eager audience for his book, Leading, written with Sequoia Capital Chairman, Sir Michael Moritz, especially given Sir Michael’s own record of success with Apple, Google, Paypal and WhatsApp.

I have been a diligent student of Sir Alex’s leadership, listening to almost every carefully curated word he spoke before and after the 1,500 matches he was in charge of at United, devouring most of the column inches ever devoted to him and dissecting his biographies, both authorised and unauthorised. More recently, I have examined Professor Anita Elberse’s Harvard case study, on which she and Sir Alex expanded in a packed classroom at London Business School, featured in a BBC1 documentary, Sir Alex Ferguson: Secrets of Success. Harvard’s Ferguson Formula has eight lessons for leaders, including foundation-building, standard-setting, team renewal, readiness to win, control retention, media management, observation and continuous adaptation. 

The most telling conclusion in the BBC documentary was, in my view, Professor Elberse’s unease about too direct an application of her Ferguson Formula to business, specifically the extraordinary degree of control Ferguson demanded and retained until he retired. Long-term corporate health requires checks and balances to the leader, and signs of Ferguson-like insistence on total control should be concerning to shareholders. 

A close examination of Leading and an interview with Sir Alex – suggest that, beyond the sheer force of his personality, the overriding lesson – and killer application for business – of the Sir Alex success story is one of belief. 

Do you have the conviction to define a set of beliefs as robust as his and the courage to lead by them? Are those beliefs authentic, audacious and non-negotiable; daily reminders that guide behaviour and inspire consistently winning action? 

Sacrifice is absolute