Alex Ferguson Leadership Quotes

Once you bid farewell to discipline you say goodbye to success

There’s a reason that God gave us two ears, two eyes and one mouth. It’s so you can listen and watch twice as much as you talk. Best of all, listening costs you nothing.

You cannot lead by following.

Eleven Nobel laureates are not going to win the FA Cup.

When I was lost in my own thoughts, Cathy would always say, ‘You’re not listening to me.’ She was right.

One mark of a leader is his willingness to share information.

For me drive means a combination of a willingness to work hard, emotional fortitude, enormous powers of concentration and a refusal to admit defeat.

We had a virus that infected everyone at United. It was called winning.

very often our victories were squeaked out in the last few minutes, after we had drained the life from our opponents. Games – like life – are all about waiting for chances and then pouncing on them.

Onde you bid farewell to discipline you day goodbye to success

If they lose faith in your knowledge, they lose faith in you. That grasp of the facts must be kept at a high level, for all time. You have to be accurate in what you say to the players.

If you need one person to change your destiny, then you have not built a very solid organisation.

Peter Schmeichel, Paul Ince, Bryan Robson, Roy Keane, Mark Hughes and Eric Cantona could all start a fight in an empty house.

drive means a combination of a willingness to work hard, emotional fortitude, enormous powers of concentration and a refusal to admit defeat.

advice often comes when you least expect it, and listening, which costs nothing, is one of the most valuable things you can do.

There’s a lot of satisfaction that comes from knowing you’re doing your best, and there’s even more that comes when it begins to pay off. I

Part of the pursuit of excellence involves eliminating as many surprises as possible because life is full of the unexpected.

Inexperienced, or insecure, leaders are often tempted to make any infraction a capital offence.

The supporters were entitled to know when I was unhappy with a performance. But not an individual.

people who feel like outsiders do one of two things: they either feel rejected, carry a chip on their shoulder and complain that life is unfair, or they use that sense of isolation to push themselves and work like Trojans.

It was to set very high standards. It was to help everyone else believe they could do things that they didn't think they were capable of. It was to chart a course that had not been pursued before. It was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That's the difference between leadership and management.

There are a number of subjective and objective criteria that I use as a way to rank players. The subjective ones include their ability with both feet; their sense of balance; the disciplined fashion in which they take care of their fitness; their attitude towards training; the consistency between games and over multiple seasons; their demonstrated mastery in several different positions; and the way they add flair to any team for which they play. The objective ones that are impossible to dispute are: the number of goals they have scored; the games they have played for several of the best club teams in the world; the number of League championship and cup medals they have won, and their appearances in World Cups. When you employ this sort of measurement approach, it becomes far easier to define the very highest levels of performance. The people who are least confused about this are other players.

There are plenty of attributes that separate the great leader from the good manager. Both may put their work before family and friends, survive on little sleep, endure a lifetime of red-eye flights. Look more closely and you will find that the great leader possesses an unusual, and essential, characteristic – he will think and operate like an owner, or a person who owns a substantial stake of the business, even if, in a financial or legal sense, he is neither.

What we did at all times, in success and adversity, was make sure the training ground was sacrosanct. The work there, the concentration, and the standards we maintained never dropped. Eventually that consistency of effort will show itself on a Saturday. That way, when a United player has a couple of bad results, he will hate it. It becomes intolerable to him. Even the best players sometimes lose confidence. Even Cantona had bouts of self-doubt. But if the culture around the training ground was right, the players knew they could fall back on the group and the expertise of our staff.

Endless praise sounds false. They see through it. A central component of the manager-player relationship is that you have to make them take responsibility for their own actions, their own mistakes, their performance level, and finally the result. We were all in the results industry. Sometimes a scabby win would mean more to us than a 6-0 victory with a goal featuring 25 passes. The bottom line was always that Manchester United had to be victorious. That winning culture could be maintained only if I told a player what I thought about his performance in a climate of honesty. And yes, sometimes I would be forceful and aggressive. I would tell a player what the club demanded of them.

There were also plenty of times when I saw a player out of the corner of my eye who came as a complete, but pleasant, surprise. In 2003 I had gone to watch a young Petr Čech play in France. Didier Drogba, whom I had not heard of, was playing in the same game. He was a dynamo – a strong, explosive striker with a true instinct for goal – though he ultimately slipped through our fingers. That didn’t happen with Ji-sung Park. I had gone to get the measure of Lyon’s Michael Essien in the Champions League in 2005 during their quarter-final ties with PSV Eindhoven, and saw this ceaseless bundle of energy buzz about the field like a cocker spaniel. It was Ji-sung Park. The following week I sent my brother, Martin, who was a scout for United, to watch him, to see what his eyes told him. They told him the same thing and we signed him. Ji-sung was one of those rare players who could always create space for himself.

If you are a boy who has just had his tenth birthday, your next one seems an eternity away. That’s because the single year that stretches ahead amounts to 10 per cent of the time you have been on earth. It’s a different sensation when you turn 50, because the distance to your 51st birthday amounts to just 2 per cent of the time you have been alive. As you get older and more experienced, you start to think about how you allocate time.

the best leaders tend to be missionaries rather than mercenaries.

For my last 15 years at United I had a rolling one-year contract and an agreement that if I was sacked I would be entitled to two years’ salary, even if I turned up and started managing Manchester City the day after I was fired. That was more than enough for me.

One particular game sticks in my mind: in March 2007 we went to Middlesbrough during a three-month period when we had the Swedish striker, Henrik Larsson, on loan from Helsingborgs. I could not have asked more from him when, under real pressure, he abandoned his attacking position and fell back into midfield just to help dig out the result. When Henrik appeared in the dressing room at the end of the game, all the players and staff stood up and spontaneously broke into applause for the immense effort he had made in his unaccustomed role. At the end of the season we requested an extra Premier League winners’ medal for Henrik, even though he had not played the ten games that at the time were required to obtain the award.

Perhaps it is just very difficult to have more than a few close friends because these sorts of relationships build over a long time and lots of shared experiences. As my father always said, you only need six people to carry your coffin and, as I have got older, I have become ever more appreciative of that remark.

These days the television coverage is drenched with possession percentages, assists, shots on goal – and what your dog had for lunch on Easter Sunday ten years ago.

The way to win battles, wars and games is by attacking and overrunning the opposing side.

Jamie Carragher trained with United as a youngster. When he was with us he was a midfielder and a mundane, run-of-the-mill player.

You would have thought that I had left 11 corpses on the steps of a funeral home.

For me drive means a combination of a willingness to work hard, emotional fortitude, enormous powers of concentration and a refusal to admit defeat. At

There is a psychological dimension also to handling indiavidual players. With errant behaviour it helps to look for a moment through their eyes. You were young once, so put yourself in their position. You do something wrong, you're waiting to be punished. What's he going to say?' you think. Or, What's my dad going to say?' The aim is to make the biggest possible impact. What would have made the deepest imprint on me at that stage of life?

If you're examining successful people, look at their mother and father, study what they did, for clues about energy and motivation.

One obvious aspect of management is identifying people who can help you get where you are trying to go. Talent-identification sounds like a straightforward business. If it were, every team would be successful.

When I won the League for the first time in 1993, I didn't want my team to slacken off. The thought appalled me. I was determined to keep advancing, to strengthen our hold on power. I told that 1993 side: 'Some people, when the have a holiday, just want to go to Saltcoats, twenty-five miles along the coast from Glasgow. Some people don't even want to do that. They're happy to stay at home or watch the birds and the ducks float by in the park. And some want to go to the moon.' 'It's about people's ambitions.

Success is often cyclical, with doldrums.

Mike Phelan, Sir Alex Ferguson’s last assistant manager, said that one of his greatest contributions to the Ferguson leadership was to make his boss laugh. In my interviews, the same comedic quality was attributed to another of Ferguson’s coaches, Steve McClaren, to both John Prescott and Alastair Campbell for Tony Blair, and Nicki Chapman for her many artistes. Funny Cs can break down the structure of A opinion, and put it back together somehow modified, all in a pleasurable whirl.

Many people cannot stop long enough to listen - especially when they become successful and all the people around them are being obsequious and pretending to hang on their every word.

Nobody had ever explained to me that working with, and through, others is by far the most effective way to do things - assuming, of course, that they understand what you want and are keen to follow. I gradually began to understand that this is the difference between management and leadership.

Faced with the need to confront a player who had performed below our expectation, I might have said: That was rubbish, that.' But then I would follow it up with, 'For a player of your ability. That was for picking them back up from the initial blow. Criticise but balance it out with encouragement. 'Why are you doing that? You're better than that.

The one thing I could never allow was loss of control, because control was my only saviour.

The thing every good leader should have is an instinct.

Origins should never be a barrier to success. A modest start in life can be a help more than a hindrance. If you're examining successful people, look at their mother and father, study what they did, for clues about energy and motivation.

In those moments of defeat and acceptance, there would be a dawning, for me, of where we needed to go. My feeling was always: 'I don't like this, but we'll have to meet the challenge. We'll have to step up a mark.' It wouldn't have been me, or the club, to submit to apocalyptic thoughts about that being the end, the finish of all our work. We could never allow that. Every time those moments poked us in the eye, we accepted the invitation to regroup and advance again. Those were motivating passages. They forced me on. I'll go further: I can't be sure that without those provocations I would have Enjoy the job so much.

I don't like admitting, we were beaten by a great team, because we never wanted to say those words. The biggest concession we ever wanted to make was: two great teams contested this final, but we just missed out. Our aim was to attain that level where people said we were always on a par with Europe's best.

when you're managing change, you have to accept the quieter spells and acknowledge that transformations take longer than a year.

I couldn't take sides against mu players. I had to find solutions other than castigating them in public. Sometimes I had to fine or punish them, of course, but I could never let it out of the dressing room. I would have felt I had betrayed the one constant principle of my time as a manager: to defend. No, not to defend, but to protect them from outside judgments.