Damian Hughes - The Barcelona Way: Unlocking the DNA of a Winning Culture

DAMIAN HUGHES

THE BARCELONA WAY

Unlocking the DNA of a

Winning Culture

MACMILLAN

Contents

PREFACE

The true evidence of a culture is how people behave when no one is watching.

Anon

The game was forgotten. The lesson was not.

There was a chance, a golden chance, for Barcelona to score the first goal of the game. The quickly taken shot flashed past the goalkeepers desperate dive, past the post and missed by inches.

Before the crowd had the opportunity to process the events and react accordingly, Pep Guardiola, in his first season in charge of FC Barcelona, immediately turned around to look at his bench. He wanted to take a mental snapshot of the players that had not been selected. He wished to observe their reaction to the incident that had just occurred.

Some of the players leapt from their seats in anticipation of the ball nestling in the back of the net, before holding their heads in shared frustration that their team had not taken the lead. Other players neither moved nor reacted to the events, appearing to be uninterested in what had passed before their eyes. This detachment conveyed their personal unhappiness at not being included in the starting line-up.

The following summer, all the players who had failed to react had left the club.

A teams culture is about the conduct and behaviour of everyone involved, its working together towards shared objectives and, as such, is an immediately identifiable part of the groups identity, said Pep Guardiola.

INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 2008, Futbol Club Barcelona was a big-name global brand that was losing its lustre. The fortunes of the first team were in decline. Frank Rijkaard, a Dutch disciple of Johan Cruyff and a stellar former player, had helped them scale the heights, winning the league in 2005 and both the league and Champions League (formerly the European Cup) in 2006. But the team the most talented and expensively assembled crop in the clubs history had faded, winning no major trophies in two seasons. A five per cent drop in commitment creates problems, the then Barcelona CEO, Ferran Soriano, said, and Frank didnt know Rijkaard, it was felt, had lost control of the dressing room. The ideas were running out, the competitive edge had faded, morale was low. New leadership was called for.

The board had a range of options, chief among them a serial winner whose record offered the closest thing to a guarantee of success in a game where, more often than in most other sports, outcomes turn on fortunes tricks.

The authoritarian, charismatic Jos Mourinho, a coach with a spectacular record of success in his native Portugal, then in England and Italy, seemed just the man to cut big egos down to size and restore drive to a rudderless team. Two board members were dispatched to Portugal to sound him out. Mourinho, who had cut his coaching teeth at the club a decade earlier, gave them a detailed PowerPoint presentation of what he would do to turn Barcelona around.

To the dismay of the majority of Barcelonas 180,000 paid-up members, the board chose Pep Guardiola, a novice with one years coaching experience with the clubs lower-division B team and none in the games upper reaches. Guardiola had been a great player and captain of Barcelona under Johan Cruyff, but in terms of the new responsibility on his shoulders and the uncharted waters he was being asked to navigate, it was, suggested the sportswriter John Carlin, like Sony selecting the manager of a medium-sized regional office to

Nine years and four coaches later, Barcelona have established a stranglehold over European football, winning seven league titles, three European Cups and three World Club Championships. In the four years that Guardiola remained at the club, they won fourteen out of nineteen possible leagues and cups, a feat unequalled in the history of the game. Unequalled also are the five Ballon dOr prizes, the award for the worlds best player, granted to Barcelonas Lionel Messi, who has continued to get even better and better. Barcelona have achieved something else, too, something more difficult to win than any official prize: the admiration of the sporting world. The team have revolutionized the 150-year-old sport, while other clubs have peaked and faded from season to season. Coaches from clubs large and small make pilgrimages to Barcelonas training camp, notebooks in hand, hoping some of the gold dust might rub off on them.

Where did it all go right?

The starting point in answering such a question can be found on a single piece of paper, written on by CEO Ferran Soriano, Director of Football Txiki Begiristain (both now at Manchester City) and Jos Ramn Alexanko, the clubs head of youth football. These three men were charged with the task of finding and appointing the next manager. Think of Barcelona as a restaurant, wrote the Daily Telegraph. Txiki Begiristain is the guy sourcing ingredients and deciding what goes on the menu. Soriano, meanwhile, is the one whos already planning where theyre going What they were looking for was a head chef to combine these elements.

They detailed the criteria their chosen leader would have to meet. Significantly, of the nine-point checklist they employed, just two the style of play demanded and a wide experience of European football could be said to centre on the technical skills required to coach a leading football team.

What is particularly fascinating is how little the rest has to do with football and everything to do with the environment in which the players grew up and operated in. The remaining criteria, including a match with the values of the club, the ability to develop leaders and the accepted behaviours, broadly aligned with the principles which Edgar Schein, the worlds leading corporate culture expert, outlined as the most important In The Barcelona Way, we will discover how successful organizations, with no connection to sport, also conform to these same factors. Most importantly, we can learn how to replicate this cultural model and find the template to lead any successful organization.

To achieve success in any industry, it is vital to understand the logic behind it, concurs Ferran Soriano. You need to go to the roots and put culture at the heart of your business. Combine this with hard work, use good management criteria and apply lots of common sense. Success has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with good luck but lots to do with a good culture.

The appointment of the unheralded Guardiola was part of a coordinated plan to re-emphasize the cultural values of the club values whose lineage can be directly traced back to Johan Cruyff which had ebbed and flowed in the order of importance during the intervening years. It was now decreed that it was time to go back to Cruyffs drawing board.

The importance of culture

Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, has written that, culture underpins Culture was Merriam-Websters word of the year in 2014. In 2015, the worlds largest management consultant, Accenture, identified optimizing organizational structures for productivity as one of the key challenges that organizations face. In other words, culture matters. A lot.

In 1994, two business school professors at Stanford University began studying how, exactly, one creates an atmosphere of trust within a company. For years, the professors James Baron and Michael Hannan had been teaching students that a firms culture mattered as much as its strategy. The way a business treats workers, they said, was critical to its success. In particular, they argued that within most companies no matter how great the product or how loyal the customers things would eventually fall apart unless employees trusted one another.