Recently released documentary about the tennis legend Novak Djokovic – Wolf in Winter is made by Jason Hehir, who shot to fame with his documentary of the Chicago Bulls team of the 90s – The Last Dance. That documentary is considered a lesson in management in many ways. This article argues there is plenty to learn about management from sports documentaries than expensive MBA courses at business schools. “A boss seeking instruction on corporate turnarounds can start with one about Liverpool’s comeback in the 2005 Champions League final, which with a running time of 78 minutes is far longer than the comeback itself, which took about six minutes. An executive mulling expansion into new markets could consult “Norway: The Dark Horse”, which follows the country’s national side, for a quick primer on Scandinavian management. “The Bus: A French Football Mutiny” is a textbook tale of a toxic workplace.”
But arguably the most successful manager in football history is Pep Guardiola who has dominated three leagues. “Amazon’s recent “A Beautiful Obsession”, which follows Josep “Pep” Guardiola during his final season in charge of Manchester City, a top English football team, is a rare management gem. He is responsible for a big operation (the club has annual revenues of about $1bn). His performance is scored every week. And as the custodian of a brand with both a local and a global identity, Mr Guardiola answers to Noel Gallagher, of the band Oasis, and Khaldoon al Mubarak, of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign-wealth fund, whose chairman owns the club.
…Ideas that seem novel in business schools are common sense on the touchline. In a paper published last year researchers use “neural network-based machine-learning” to show that bosses are aged by the stress of managing firms during difficult periods. Mr Guardiola uses his fingernails to scratch his head when he is under intense pressure, leaving red marks that demonstrate the same point. His methodology even bears a number of marks of “digital transformation”—a model considering 43 different measures rates players and informs personnel decisions—though professional sports remain the last bastion of the whiteboard.
Mr Guardiola’s dressing room will strike most bosses as an inhospitable and unfamiliar place. They should ask themselves why. One reason is that it contains no women. But it is mostly because people care less about winning than Mr Guardiola. That is quite all right: a firm where middle management adopted his style in the pursuit of, say, selling car parts, would be a dreadful place to work. Still, much of the economy is driven by organisations, such as AI labs and hedge funds, which rely on the maximal use of the rare talents of a very small number of prima donnas. Views into the workings of such firms are extraordinarily rare, which is what makes Mr Guardiola worth watching.”
The article concludes with the current AI context: “Sports teams are special institutions. They are, of course, the ultimate trophy asset for those with billions in the bank. But they are also a vehicle for commerce, and one which many believe is mostly immune from the disruptive potential of AI. The narrow version of this argument is that, unlike movies or television shows, live sports cannot be created by AI models. The expansive version is that we are approaching a world where the jobless need something to fill their time, and that most of their attention (and perhaps their identity) will revolve around sports teams. In such a world the team manager becomes society’s foremost philosopher, and the fly-on-the-wall Netflix series his magnum opus.”
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