Claudio Ranieri, coach of this year’s English Premier League winner, Leicestershire City Football Club, hasn’t yet got on to the lecture circuit world inhabited by the likes of Robin Sharma (of The Monk Who Sold a Ferrari , fame) and Ram Charan ( New York Times bestseller Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done ) and other professional management gurus. But after his latest success with football, it is a fair bet that he will be avidly sought out by Global Inc in the not-too-distant future.
Of course, football in Europe is a round-the-year phenomenon, much like cricket in India. So, it is a moot point if you would get to hear him expounding on leadership qualities and such other management insights any time soon while holding down a job as a football coach. As a rational economic agent he would prefer to continue his coaching stint with Leicestershire City Football Club.
There is certainly more money to be made from coaching a successful team than on the lecture circuit, even if the speaking fees are in the region of what the likes of Tony Blair or Bill Clinton might charge for a session at the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Viewed purely in terms of success in the professional sporting arena, his work in lifting the Leicestershire Foxes (popular moniker for the city football team) to the top of the league table when, just a year ago, the team was at risk of being relegated to a lower division, is nothing short of phenomenal.
Coaching style
Many articles have featured some facet of his coaching style and its linkage to some new aspect of management thought or reiteration of a well-known principle of leadership. There has also been some reference to the team’s performance as emblematic of the kind of group behaviour that is necessary for success in an enterprise.
The Economist muses on the lessons in one its recent issues. Ranieri’s long stint as a professional football coach is remarkable for the fact that, until this point in time, he hasn’t achieved any significant success. The closest he came to any kind of success was when Chelsea Football Club came second in the English Premier League. Does this suggest he learnt from his failures for eventual success?
There have been many instances in business history where failure has led to eventual success. As Bill Gates is supposed to have remarked once, success is a much lousier teacher than failure. Apple had to go through many years of middling existence as an electronic product company before it hit pay dirt with the iPod. The magazine goes on to make another interesting point: that fashioning new tactics, be it in business or sport, by crunching voluminous data need not be the exclusive preserve of the likes of Walmart or Amazon in the world of business. Smaller players too can afford to do such number-crunching, thanks to cloud computing.
Collective will
The Daily Mail of UK had another interesting take on what Ranieri had achieved. It said that when he arrived at Leicestershire after being sacked as coach of the Greek national football team following an ignominious defeat to a small island-nation, he realised that no longer was his coaching going to be a matter of imposing his ‘personal will’ on the team. Rather, it will be about helping the team discover its ‘collective will’ and imposing that in the field of play.
This is not dissimilar to a leadership notion in management literature that emphasises the value of a CEO fostering a collective self-belief in the team under his charge rather than laying down a path for other members of the team to follow. Forbes weighs in with the thought that, at the Leicestershire City Football Club, the coach soaked up the pressure and allowed the team to play a brand of football that was as uninhibited as it was fearless. But a common thread running through all such claims highlighted in the newspaper articles is that the football team’s success can be attributed to special qualities of leadership that the coach brought to the table.
That brings us to a larger question: just how much weight must one assign to leadership over every other factor for a business to succeed? Is it so overwhelming as to negate the role of other factors to a non-entity? More specifically, could leadership override the constraint of a lousy product and still win at the market-place because the marketing leadership is brilliant? That appears, on the face of it, a facile assumption to make. A good business strategy for competing at the market place and designing efficient financial and management control systems to drive the organisation are factors, to name just two, that are just as important to business success as good leadership can be.
Eternal decision tree
An alternative way to look at the paradigm of business success is to see business as comprising of building blocks made up entirely all kinds of ‘decisions’ sitting one on top of the other. Now, decisions involve identification of choices, the evaluation criteria for validating one of the many alternative choices that are available to a business. It is as though the organisation is an unending series of nodes with alternative choices, a sort of eternal ‘decision tree’, as it were. If all decisions were capable of being arrived at by the application of an objective set of rules it could be easily handled.
On the contrary, decisions, more often than not, involve situations where neither the alternatives nor the criterion for evaluation of each of those alternatives can be defined in rigid, objective terms. The way forward often looks blurred but a choice has to be made. The situation is tailor made for bringing every head, or at least as many heads as possible, to bear on the problems so that the myriad choices available are identified; and the criterion to be applied in respect of each such situation determined.
These are typically situations where people can be involved as a collective for the best possible results. This is where a leader can play a decisive role in bringing the collective wisdom of the people in the organisation to bear on a problem so that the right decisions are taken. It does, then, boil down to leadership as the defining attribute of business success.