Summary

Dry, dull and poorly written with generic management advice. Little background. Read The Effective Executive (management) or The Score Takes Care Of Itself (sports) instead.

Key Takeaways

None

What I got out of it

After one chapter of The Manager by Mike Carson, I skimmed 3 more and ended up reading only the introduction and summary sections of the final few chapters.

It’s dry, dull and poorly written. Carson introduces a manager’s philosophy at the start of the chapter, then lists generic management advice, interspersed with quotes from any of the managers mentioned in the book.

It reads like a dry management book filled with platitudes. Any of the “wisdom” can be found in management-related Twitter threads. For management, you’re much better off reading Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. And for sports (leadership), you’re much better off reading Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care Of Itself.

Summary Notes

The quality which sets apart the very best from the rest is ‘leadership’. The best managers are passionate about football, obsessed and driven by the need to manage and succeed. Without exception, they also share a crystal-clear sense of where they are going; they know and understand how they will get there; and they have that precious ability to get inside the hearts and minds of those they work with and convince them to follow. They all possess an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, a passion for learning, and a willingness to successfully adapt to changing times and circumstances. In addition, they all have a huge generosity in their willingness to share information for the benefit of those taking their first treacherous steps up the slippery slope of football management.

The owner has employed me; and the fans are the people whose interest in the game has generated my job and my players’ jobs. We must never lose sight of that, but you can’t work for the fans or even just for the chairman. The only way you can satisfy both parties is to do your job well and win.’ Simple focus: team first, then each other party in turn, giving them real attention.

The manager’s philosophy, if sufficiently clear and powerful, will filter down not only to his team, but also to other teams at all levels within his club’s structure – and it might actually impregnate the whole club for a long, long period.

Sharing a long-term vision is a sure-fire way to secure a long-term relationship – and, with it, stability for your organisation or team.

If a football manager is to play his part in creating the stability he needs to function properly, then, as in most organisations, he will need to lead upwards.

Leadership is rarely about some heroic ‘follow me’ message – it’s more often about inspiring all round. And an important component of that is inspiring confidence, trust, excitement and commitment in the person or people under whose authority you stand yourself.

The three most important things he will need from anyone working together with him will be competence, diligence and communication.

There are two types of players: the players who bring what they have to the team to make the team good, and players who use the team to make themselves look good.

He thinks of football supporters with great respect – almost affection: ‘I’ve always worked on the basis of three very simple thoughts:

that the fans know what they are looking for, that they understand what football is and that they want the best for their team. Then I add to that the simple fact that they keep our football going. It may not be their gate receipt money that keeps the current level of the game afloat – and they know that – but it is their presence.

In ancient Rome, the Caesars who feared the power of the people were the ones who kept themselves distant. Great leaders in football – and sometimes in business – use all the means at their disposal to engage with the wider audience, and they see it as a pleasure, not a chore.

The last thing you want to do is get labelled. The only thing you can do about it is to create a label of your own.

Shaking off a label or a reputation – whether personal or organisational – is a significant challenge for leadership.

At the heart of leadership lies an ability to inspire people.

Leaders are only leaders if they have followers, and followers – real followers – are inspired most of all by personal connection.

Point one for a leader is to make yourself aware of what’s going on – to spot the symptoms and have the courage to delve deeper. Point two then is to address the individual challenge.

Brendan Rodgers sees ‘four magic words that people have on their foreheads: “Make me feel important.”

Leaders who listen like this command not just loyalty but affection from their people, which in turn means that employees or players are willing to work harder for them, leading to more success for the organisation or on the pitch.

Empathy has two components:

1. We put ourselves in the shoes of another person, to better understand their mindset and thus their worldview. 
2. We show our awareness of their situation by some clear acknowledgement.

Steel, then, can come from professional knowledge, decision-making ability and self-belief. It is a hugely important quality in a leader.

There are four challenges to great one-on-one leadership: 

• Capturing the loyalty of your people
• Understanding their humanity
• The extent to which the environment you’re in is one of high pressure and high visibility 
• The changing nature of the world around. 
• In response to these challenges, football’s leaders must deliver a mix of empathy and steel.

The master of empathy builds loyalty through understanding, listens to his people at a profound level, shows a human side that speaks louder than the external noise and transcends the changing times through personal charisma.

The master of steel builds loyalty through clarity and objectivity, makes good decisions with clear rationale but without apology, takes time in the high-pressure environment to get to the clarity and holds fast to his deeply held beliefs.

How should a leader work productively with that complexity? Wenger’s answer to the problem is clear and simple: ‘For me, being a football manager is being a guide. A guide is someone who leads people somewhere. That means he has to identify what he wants in a clear way, convince everybody else that is where we go together and then try to get the best out of each individual.

Think first of the root causes, not the behaviour itself:

• Establish your own values
• Know your own motivation and seek it in others
• Address deep needs head-on
• Set clear boundaries and empower people to live within them

High-performing leaders create high-performing teams – in football just as in other arenas. While individual priorities vary, most leaders will agree on the four major tasks to focus on:

1. Understand the nature of the battle and the need for close allies
2. Create a high-performing leadership team
3. Build the environment for success:
   1. The leadership team adds real value when it fashions an environment where success is inevitable. It does this by dealing with the pressing issues of the industry in which it is working.
4. Create the high-performing playing team itself:
   1. Finally, a leader’s focus should be on the people at the front line. The leadership team – from their war room, boot room or executive team room – need to model and coach the key behaviours and mindsets they expect to see from those people.
   2. In football, these distil down to seven critical principles: collective belief, selflessness, excellence, motivation, personal commitment, clarity and positive response to pressure.

Roberto Mancini is a charming man with a core of steel. His philosophy is very straightforward: assemble great players and work extremely hard. By extremely hard, he means a relentless pursuit of excellence. 

Football’s leaders, like business leaders, would agree that the underpinning dimensions of the task are the skills and mindsets in the team. Then there is a six-stage flow from preparation to fallout that enables repeated success.

1. Preparation
2. Training
3. Team selection
4. Half-time
5. Tactical change
6. Fallout

Ask yourself: does the challenge require management, leadership or command?

Mourinho is convinced that great leadership is founded first on great knowledge. “I’m not saying that if you know a lot about football you can automatically be a leader in football. I am saying if you don’t know a lot about football you cannot lead. That’s the main point for me.” Hot on the heels of knowledge though comes a profound understanding of people.

Brendan Rodgers is an authentic leader because he has a philosophy that he stands by, he knows who he is and he doesn’t have to pretend to be anyone else.

Great leaders have a learning mindset. The desire to learn and the ability to find learning even in the tough times sets them apart from their peers.

When fear surfaces, strong leaders can see it for what it is and take action to arrest it. Helpful techniques are to ask what’s the worst that can happen and what’s the best.

A sense of perspective will tell you that when you’re in it it’s a tragedy, but when you’re looking at it it’s a comedy.

In 1986, he joined Manchester United. Very quickly seeing the need for radical rebuilding, Ferguson embarked on the parallel tracks of short-term, high-impact methods and long-term foundational transformation. He quickly achieved stability, but when in his fourth season there was no obvious evidence of sustained improvement, a public assumption grew that he would not last in the post. Victory in the FA Cup in 1990 changed all that, and three seasons later United were champions of the newly constituted Premiership. Perhaps even more significantly, the now-legendary United youth side of 1992 had emerged:

Ferguson had created a pool of talent and strength that would be the source of much of the club’s sustained success for years to come.

Sir Alex has a simple philosophy of leadership in football: that no one is bigger than the club.

The Dynastic Leader
We have seen two parts to the work of a leader who seeks to establish a dynasty.

1. Build for the long term:
   1. This involves bold decision-making, developing and sharing deep knowledge, building loyalty, strategic reinvention where needed and investment in talent.
2. Build something bigger than yourself

The ideas of crisis and turnaround are closely linked. 

• One of the key elements of both concepts is choice. 
• A second key element of both concepts is action.

Many managers like David Moyes and Tony Pulis are winners because of the winning mentality they have instilled in their teams to ensure consistent progress.

The command style required three things:

1. They had answers
2. They acted decisively
3. They held their nerve

An old Chinese story tells of a farmer whose only horse runs away. ‘How terrible!’ say his neighbours. ‘Maybe!’ says the farmer. The next day his horse returns, bringing along three wild horses. ‘How wonderful!’ say his neighbours.

‘Maybe!’ says the farmer. The following day his son tries to tame one of the wild horses, but he falls off and breaks his leg. ‘How terrible!’ say his neighbours. ‘Maybe!’ says the farmer. The next day some soldiers come along to force young men of the village to join them in war. Because the lad has a broken leg, he is left behind. ‘How fortunate!’ say the neighbours. ‘Maybe!’ says the farmer. The soldiers, still one man short, take the young man’s cousin instead.

‘How dreadful!’ say the farmer’s neighbours. ‘Maybe!’ says the farmer. That night a landslide covers the house in which the cousin would have been sleeping if he had not been taken by the soldiers. ‘How fortunate!’ say the friends.

‘Maybe!’ says the farmer.

Great leaders take ownership and responsibility.