If I had to choose between my wife and my putter... well, I’d miss her.
Leading
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Alex Ferguson, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 2015. ISBN9781473621176
The book is the series of stories from Alex Ferguson’s career in football management, arranged thematically into 13 chapters such as: focus, leading not managing, owning the message – with principles of leadership drawn out at every stage. While the book will teach you a lot about leadership, it is anything but a dull management book. The author describes it as an: “attempt to sum up what I learnt from my life in general and my time as a manager”.
The genius of Alex Ferguson is summed up in the opening words of the book: “When I left Govan High School in Glasgow at the age of 16 to begin my apprenticeship as a tool maker at Remington Rand and start my life in football at Queen’s Park, I could never have imagined that, 55 years later I would be standing in front of a lecture theatre at the Harvard and business school talking to a class of MBA students about myself”.
There are snippets of information that I have not read anywhere else such as:
• Ferguson’s assessment of why United lost to Barcelona in two Champions’ League finals;
• That scoring from the halfway line against Wimbledon was not a fluke but something David Beckham practised hundreds of times;
• Why Juan Sebastian Veron never made it at Man U;
• Ferguson states that he has only had 4 world-class players in his Manchester United squads – you will have to buy the book to find out which 4!
There is a surprising admission of regret that he did not include Bryan Robson in the squad for the cup final in Robson’s last season. “In retrospect I would have kept them in the squad and perhaps played for the last part of the game”.
There are some great one-liners: like Ronaldo would “be able to score from free kicks if he took them from behind the moon” and “A housefly has longer life expectancy than the manager of a premier league team”.
It is of interest to this website that there is a reference to attending church in his youth.
The book is written with Michael Moritz, who offers these insights into the man: “For people like Sir Alex who are obsessed by a pursuit there’s no separation between life and work” and “It is much easier to ensure all the setbacks reversals and frustrations of management when you deeply enjoy your work page”.
An excellent and most readable book which succeeds at different levels.