Twenty-six years in charge of a top-flight club — which is in its own right a legendary entity — is an incredible feat of endurance.
Twenty-six years in charge of a top-flight club — which is in its own right a legendary entity — is an incredible feat of endurance. That Alexander Chapman Ferguson — better known as Sir Alex, or simply, Alex Ferguson — survived and indeed thrived in such a pressure-cooker atmosphere speaks volumes of his determination, drive and desire for the job, and also, a very thick layer of skin. Forty-nine titles, including 13 Premier League titles are after all, not earned by being a shrinking violet.
For 26 years, he bestrode the English Premier League like a colossus. Sir Alex survived relative failure at either end of his record-making career, seeing his way through three generations of superstar footballers, a significant change in management and indeed a whole new way of looking at the game — commercially and otherwise — before he was done. Considering the sort of pressures and pulls a football manager has to content with in the modern-day Premiership, it takes massive stamina, and an ability to shrug off abuse, barbs and non-stop pressure from management, media and fans.
Much of Ferguson’s story has been chronicled in great detail in his six earlier books, and as his days lengthen on the sidelines of his beloved Manchester United’s iconic Old Trafford pitch, he is turning more and more into something of a management guru, one called on by business schools and corporate houses to share his theories of managing men and situations, though it is sometimes not very clear how much of football management is actually relevant in daily life.
Answers to that question come in part in his latest book, Leading, co-authored by venture capitalist Michael Moritz The tome is divided into aspects that (in Ferguson’s estimation) go into making of a leader — with chapters titled for example “Recognising Hunger”, “Engaging Others”, “Focus”, “Owning the Message”, etc — most of which open with ideas, suggestions or homilies on how Sir Alex went about his work. Soon thereafter, most of them take an anecdotal turn.
Early on itself, Ferguson avers that there is no jargon and management formulae to be share in Leading, and sure enough, the book — after a short nod towards the concept of the title — is in essence a retelling of the Scotsman’s long and varied career, in the course of which he ran the teams of five clubs, and held the Scotland manager’s post when his idol, Jock Stein, died in the job. Of the five, East Stirlingshire. St Mirren, Aberdeen and Manchester United, St Mirren was the only club to have actually removed Ferguson from the job. “Most football managers are treated without a shred of decency,” he recalls tellingly.
From that experience, though, he drew a useful lesson. “Managers have to find a way to talk to their bosses, regardless of their differences in character; otherwise it will only end miserably.” It was an important experience and one Ferguson learnt well after his acrimonious exchanges with St Mirren chairman Willie Todd. When Manchester United were taken over in 2005 by the Glazer family, owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the United States, he made sure he created sufficient links with the new owners to tide over the fury that followed, and subsequent ups and downs.
Leading, in essence, is a retold Ferguson story, and though it has been penned by Moritz, there is no doubt over who did the final reading of the manuscript. It has Ferguson’s thoughts, comments and anecdotes running through every page, and underlines the Scotsman’s iron-fisted style of running his teams where he would go into each and every aspect of the operation and make sure things were done just the way he wanted them done.
An obsession with his job, hunger for success and a conviction that his way was the best way drive Ferguson. For all his success, he also had very little tolerance for those who did not follow his way, and many of them come in for a share of the Ferguson fire — agents, fellow managers, and most often, the battery of star players he handled over the years. It always had to be the Fergie way.
“We are all haunted by failure,” Ferguson says by way of explanation. “It was my own inner determination to avoid failure that always provided me with an extra incentive to succeed.” That is as good a summary of Leading as any.
