Maintaining Focus

Grant: Damian, of course, one of the keys to success is being able to be really focused. Alex made sure his players always maintained focus and you tell a great story about Ryan Giggs, I think at Lee Sharpe’s house at a party. I don’t know if you want to tell us a bit about that.

Damian: Sure. It took place in the April of 1992 when everything was starting to unravel for Ferguson at Manchester United. They’d been winning the league and were neck and neck with Leeds United and then they went into the difficult Easter period where the games come thick and fast. The United’s focus started to waiver somewhat and they started to lose games. Ferguson was at a dinner in Morecambe in the north of England when he was told a story that another partygoer that he was at the dinner with, had seen Ryan Giggs and Lee Sharpe, his two young wingers, had been out in a club in Blackpool on the evening after one of these catastrophic defeats.

Ferguson describes that his blood pressure was rising as he drove the hour long trip back to Manchester and he drove straight out to Lee Sharpe’s house. He said that he had to park 300 yards up the road because there was that many cars there and the noise that was emulating from the house told him exactly what was going on. He stormed in and discovered that his two wingers were hosting yet another party before they were due to go out for the evening. I spoke to a number of different people over there, including one who hid in the wardrobe that night – that Ferguson still doesn’t know was present. The description was that it was like an atomic bomb had come into the house and everybody cleared and just Sharpe and Giggs were left there to endure Ferguson’s wrath.

Ferguson insisted that the players had started to lose focus and he still maintained that that was a big part beneath it. It was a lesson that he adopted and he allowed that story to become part of the Manchester United folklore for other young players coming through to insist that when it came to those moments of high pressure, your focus has to be absolute. What he maintained is that when we come under pressure, we’re only able to focus on one of three consequences. We either go into a situation expecting to lose. We either go into a situation hoping to win, or we go into a situation with the expectation that we will win. What Ferguson was great at doing was making sure that all of his players constantly have the expectation that Manchester United would win. He used the Giggs and Sharpe party to illustrate the dangers of allowing that focus to go from expecting to merely hoping to be successful.

Grant: Of course, that’s a great lesson for business, because; how many business go into meetings, important deals, hoping that they’ll get the deal rather than expecting to get the deal. How did Ferguson, the story is a great story, but what other techniques did he use did you discover in writing the book that allowed the players to expect that they would win rather than hope that they would win.

Damian: He captured that expectation of going into a situation and winning with a beautiful phrase where he said, “My Manchester United teams never get beat. We occasionally run out of time, but we never get beat.” That was the view that he would constantly expect, that relentlessness of chasing a victory and part of that is that it would encourage his players to use – it’s become a hackneyed phrase in sports psychology – but to ‘control the controllables’. He would give his players a certain amount of freedom, but expect that they would limit their personal appearances, they would limit their socializing, they would limit the amount of activity they were doing that wasn’t centered around controlling their own ability to be able to give their very best for the club and for Ferguson’s causes.

Grant: Interesting. You wonder how many business people actually take time to control the things they can control rather than just kind of run around reacting because everybody is so busy and, therefore, lose control of perhaps some of the things they can work in their favour.

Damian: Sure. There’s a brilliant study from Cambridge University in 1991 that tells us that every session lasts longer and is deeper, the more references it gets in the media. So the idea that a lot of businesses can almost talk themselves into recessions, is similar to that you can talk your way out of one. What Ferguson was great at doing was don’t read the papers, because their interest isn’t in Manchester United being successful. They want drama and controversy. He would encourage the players to focus on what they could do. That was why, for example, when he had his famous falling out with Roy Keane, he felt that Roy Keane was merely playing to the newspapers’ agenda, rather than to the agenda of focusing on getting Manchester United back to that pinnacle.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.