Last week unheralded Leicester FC won the premiership for
the first time in their 132 year history.
Everybody is calling their run to the
pinnacle of English soccer a fairytale, and be glad you lived to see it. At the
beginning of the season the betting companies had given the team a 5000 – 1
chance of winning, the same odds they gave the possibility that Elvis was alive
or that rocker turned philanthropist Bono can be the Pope.
The team had shown little inkling of greatness, even though
they had escaped relegation the previous season by winning six of their last eight
games. Their £48m (sh235b) wage bill is
less than half of league runner ups Tottenham and only a fourth of highest spending
Chelsea’s payroll.
What made the feat even more improbable is that the team has
sustained quality for a whole season and 36 games. So a fluke it was not.
"The feat puts to shame all the people, businesses and governments who faced with little financial resources, inadequate manpower or other assets are content to wallow in mediocrity having convinced themselves that it is useless to even try and compete with the big boys...
So if it wasn’t a miracle, how did Leicester do it and how
can the rest of us mere mortals benefit from their wonder run?
Already the book deals are being signed to explain this, but
maybe we need not look further than,
“Execution: The Discipline of getting things done” written by Larry
Bossidy & Ram Charan.
Bossidy cut his management teeth at the feet of Jack Welch
at GE, before moving on to manage aerospace engineering firm, Allied Signal.
In the book Bossidy points out that it’s the interaction
between human resource, operations and strategy that determines whether
companies can get things done.
In his experience it is a rare company that can have these
three elements complimenting each other to unleash the full potential of a
company. Often times two of the three maybe in sync – and not always the same
two or that if the three are in unison, it is not often enough to produce
consistent results over a prolonged time.
Let’s try and decipher the Leicester magic.
1.
Human Resource
"What seems like a motley crew of underachievers, veterans in the sunset of their careers and big team rejects were brought together deliberately, systematically and then melded into a single unit. The whole was greater than the sum of the individual parts...
It started with the recruitment, which was based on solid
statistics and analysis of the players strengths and weaknesses and how these
fit into the way the team wanted to play.
They also had a backroom staff of administrators and medical
staff committed to the team’s success and willing to explore the cutting edge
of management and sports science to extract maximum value from their charges.
We talk about sweating assets in terms of plant and
machinery, Leicester showed us how to sweat human assets. Employing the
smallest team in the league, with little change from game to game and still
keep most injury free.
2.
Operations
You can have the most talented staff but the operations, how
these interact with themselves and their tools in pursuit of a common goal is
where everything comes together or apart.
"Coach Claudio Ranieri, a bargain acquisition too, worked at creating a family atmosphere in the team, discouraging big egos, promoting the mission over the individual and emphasising the process over results...
He was aided by a management that was confident to give him his
brief and let him run with it. He was no amateur and in hindsight may be
credited with laying the foundation for Jose Mourihno’s winning teams at
Chelsea.
The technical team threw the training book out the window,
emphasising explosive workouts and ice boxes to speed up player recovery
between matches – explaining their low injury downtimes.
3.
Strategy
It starts with the strategy – what is your vision? How are
you going to achieve it using what you have?
Clearly Leicester while they might have aspired to greater
things, knew their place. With a relatively small wallet they went shopping for
good value selling at a discount, both on and off the field. On the pitch they
eschewed possession for efficient, counter attacking and trained with that in
mind. Is it possible they lost early in other competitions to focus on the
league, because they had the smallest team and couldn’t afford to rotate them?
Of course this does not even begin to scratch the surface
about what went on behind closed doors at the club.
"But if there is any moral to this story it is that a team, business or country, can over turn the tables by having a good understanding of their place in the greater scheme of things, question and be unafraid to buck conventional wisdom and to practice unrelenting discipline in executing their strategy....
Of course a thorough
examination of their human resource practices would be instructional – their
identification of what they need, the systematic way they went about acquiring
it and what will be a true test for them going into the next season, their ability to retain that talent.
