5 Business Lessons from Ruben Amorim's Interview With Gary Neville

Albert Camus said in 1957 - “what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

I often think that a lot of what we need to know about leadership and decision making can also be learnt from sport and football. I’d like to write a book about this sometime. So you can see why I was quite excited by the excellent interview the new Man United manager Ruben Amorim did with Gary Neville. Ruben Amorim is seen as one of the brightest upcoming managers in European football and he has won over a lot of people with his charisma. That’s not to say it’s a guarantee of success - only time will tell. But there’s no doubt about the calibre of his thinking and articulation.

You might not be a Man United fan, or even a football fan. But here are 5 interesting principles you could still take away from Amorim’s interview:

1. The one thing - shared identity and thinking: When pressed about his playing style, Amorim said the one most important thing is to have a shared identity and thinking. If you watch any great teams play you’ll see a kind of telepathy at play. A hive mind, where the one individual knows what the other is about to do. In professional football, especially at the top, an advantage of half a second may be the difference between getting a clear shot at goal or being blocked. Telepathy buys you that half a second. For any team to work well, you need that element of telepathy and single identity, a shared clarity of the goal and the vision. In business situations too, a good team can be just one step ahead of the competition by executing well and having a near telepathic trust and understanding with each other - whether it’s at a meeting, or a presentation, or while executing a project, or a campaign.
2. Data not perception: This is the bit that set Amorim apart and underscored his ‘modern manager’ credentials. At multiple points, he referred to using the data - such as for fitness and tactics. There is a lot of data available in sport now, including in football, but most managers tend to be old school and would still prefer to go with their gut, intuition, or experience. I could tell you many stories about senior leaders in organisations who have at best an arms length relationship with the data from their own businesses. In today’s world this is practically a crime. If your data isn’t accurate then fix it, but don’t ignore the data and don’t be a dinosaur that doesn’t trust data.
3. Goodharts law - Goals vs Metrics: This is probably my favourite part of the interview - when asked if he’s targeting finishing in the top 4 places in the league, Amorim says that he’s aware that that is how he will be judged at the end of the season, but that is not his goal. His goal is to play better football, and win games. This is such an important and often subtle point, encapsulated by the wonderfully pithy Goodhart’s law, which says that when a metric becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good metric. Put another way, it means that you can game the metric, and end up meeting it but you really haven’t done the thing you set out to do. You could play obdurate and counter attacking football, and win enough games and points to scramble into fourth place. But that wasn’t the goal. Similarly, if the value of your pipeline is a metric for a sales goal, and your daily focus switches to showing a great pipeline, you might harm your overall goal of driving actual closures and sales. This is not to say that you don’t manage or measure your pipeline. Just that it should be a measure of your sales process and not a goal.
4. Suffer before improving - the long view: Amorim suggested that United have to suffer before they improve. Because playing the ‘right way’ - the way he wants the team to play, with higher possession, and more intensity, will require time to fix. It will need an improvement on Players’ fitness, and adapting their game to the new way. But the willingness to go through this pain to achieve a better longer term future is key to true growth. The option to trade off principles for short term success is always available to most of us. I wrote recently about contact centres and customer service. Improving your business by focusing on better customer service is a longer term program but a much more sustainable one. A quick boost to your bottom line by cutting costs of customer service through your contact centre or chatbot is the short term win that may harm you over time.
5. Learn the game, not the system: Amorim was asked about the academy and whether he wanted all the kids at various age groups to play the same system (3-4-3) as his first team so they would become the kind of players that could be good for the first team. He said no, he wanted the kids to become good at football, not at a system. He wanted them to understand ‘the game’, not any one system. And that playing in multiple systems would probably benefit them. They could instead focus on a few key specific traits and ways of playing that would make them fit for his system. I thought that was such a great point and an excellent example of having a wide angle view. Organisationally, we often reward people for being great at doing things in the way we do them in our businesses. But really young people working their way up need to be versatile and able to understand the business not just their specific roles and in the ways that have been set up in our own company. When I advise young people I often try to tell them to think about their breadth and depth of experience, and not to specialise too early, but also to try to really understand business from all perspectives, before they become specialists in any industry, company, or process. Sometimes that path may take longer, and as the earlier point suggests, involve a bit more ‘suffering’, but you become better leaders over time.

You can see the full interview on YouTube here.

#innovation #lessonsfromsport #football

Mark Wignall Paul Roberts Debabrata Mukherjee (Debu) Joy Bhattacharjya