In recent days the retirements of both Sir Alex Ferguson and his once-cherished protégé David Beckham have resulted in gushing commentaries on their ability to influence those around them.
Whatever we may think about the former – and the stories of his aggressive style and temper are legendary – it is impossible to argue that he was able to extract the best from a succession of players whose sublime ability and huge salaries can make them extremely difficult to handle.
Whether Ferguson’s success is entirely due to his skill in ‘man management’ or he was lucky in being able to attract great players is open to debate. I suspect that outside of football his infamous use of the ‘hairdryer’ approach (shouting in people’s faces) would not be tolerated.
The widely rumoured return of the ‘The Special One’ José Mourinho to manage Chelsea is attracting interest. His style of leadership is more explicitly charismatic coupled with a good soupcon of idiosyncratic statements that sometime make him appear bonkers! However, his failure to ensure that Real Madrid achieved success this season has tarnished his reputation as someone with the Midas touch. Maybe he has simply run out of luck?
David Beckham is different to Ferguson and Mourinho in that his leadership has been achieved on the pitch. Though many argue that he will never be remembered as a truly great player in the same way our own Bobby Moore or Edison Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé), he was certainly inspirational to a whole generation of players and fans. And his ability to inspire was best demonstrated by his single-handed determination that England should beat Greece in order to secure qualification for the 2002 World Cup.
That Beckham became bigger than the game of football and has been credited with being a leader of style was assisted by his luck of being borne with photogenic looks that has made him a marketing dream.
It’s easy to forget that when he started dating Victoria Adams (“Posh Spice”), then a member of the Spice Girls, the biggest phenomenon in pop music, he was merely seen as a good-looking footballer. That he has gone on to eclipse her is down to good image management and ensuring that his every move has been followed avidly by the press.
So what does this tell us about leadership in general terms and, most especially, its relevance to business and politics?
In recent weeks I have written articles about the apparent decline of once-dominant businesses such as Tesco, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Marks & Spencer and Apple. A consistent feature in all of these is that new leaders have been appointed to replace previous incumbents who possessed creative strategic ability and the capability to inspire innovation throughout the business.
Probably the luckiest of the leaders of these companies was Bill Gates of Microsoft. In 1980 IBM were developing a new personal computer and needed an operating system for it. Gates knew that such a system was being produced by a company called Digital Research and suggested they contact them. Luckily for him the negotiations didn’t go well and IBM came back and asked him to develop one for them. Even luckier he was aware of a system that had been developed by Seattle Computer Products; the 86-DOS. He negotiated a deal with SCP and sold the system to IBM. The fact that this system became MS-DOS and has been used on, it is estimated, over two thirds of a billion computers, has made Gates one of the world’s richest men.
Once a leader has had the sort of luck Gates had it is always going to be a challenge for others to emulate their success.
In terms of theory there is no shortage of texts and articles which proffer explanations of what leadership involves and the sort of characteristics that are involved. It is probably unsurprising that luck does not figure in ‘models’ as it is too subjective and, of course, down to chance. In the rational world we live in the idea that any leader would be selected on the basis of being lucky would be regarded as overly superstitious.
Indeed, the fact that the French leader Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was reputed to eschew skill or training in his generals instead preferring them to be lucky has led some to believe that this was instrumental in his eventual downfall. But any reading of history will tell you that great military victories were frequently down to luck. Let’s face it if Hitler had not been so egotistical and had listened more carefully to his military advisors the second-world-war might have turned out differently.
Having recently read Anthony Beevor’s D Day which provides a detailed account of the Normady landings, one is struck by the internecine squabbling that went on between among the military leaders who planned the operation; particularly generals Eisenhower and Montgomery. The fact that everyone appears to have distrusted French leader General de Gaulle means that we were extremely lucky to have a Prime Minister in Winston Churchill who ensured that the greater good prevailed.
And it is Europe which is dominating the current debate about what is best for this country and will potentially split the Conservative party and probably cause the end of the coalition government. Similar to other leaders of his party, David Cameron is finding that he is faced with the thorny issue of how to manage the question of whether we should remain in the European Union.
Margaret Thatcher, who was lucky in many conflicts, notably the Falklands War and the miner’s strike, discovered that being able to provide leadership on Europe was far from easy. Her successor the thoroughly decent man John Major’s premiership was consistently undermined by the Eurosceptics in his party.
It would seem that David Cameron will experience the bad luck of having to deal with Europe and how he should appease those within the party who seem to detest any continuance of our relationship with the EU. Anyone who heard Vince Cable speak at the gala dinner of the British American Business Council last Thursday, at the Council House in Birmingham, will attest to his very reasonable argument that we should not allow good economic logic and relationships with our European partners to be scuppered by the belief that being isolated will benefit us. His use of Norway as an example of how the justification for leaving the EU is based on mistaken assumptions was especially persuasive.
Whether we are offered a chance to vote on Europe is less important than whether we have the good fortune to have leaders who are willing to present clearer information on both the benefits and negative aspects of remaining part of the union. Given the huge consequences for business of a vote to leave the EU let’s hope that we are our political leaders are willing to trust in what they believe to be good for the nation. President Obama, who is blessed with the luck of being genuinely charismatic, believes that the European Union is stronger if based on our continued membership.
