Carlo Ancelotti - Quiet Leadership... & The Beautiful Game...

Two books.  Quiet Leadership: Yaddayaddayadda (QL, 2016) and The Beautiful Game of An Ordinary Genius (TBG, 2010).  One man:  Carlo Ancelotti.  With the exception of the six years that separate the two, the material is much the same in both books. In some cases it is identical and has simply been re-written.  Throughout, the difference in style is extremely marked.  Let’s start with what’s bad about QL, the major issue is the style.  The branding of this book clearly identifies it as sports-biography-cum-business-book in a manner I find only slightly less ridiculous than Peep Show’s Business Secrets of The Pharaohs.  Ancelotti is undoubtedly a capable football manager, and was a capable football player too, but what either of these things have to do with the incredibly vague term ‘business’, and further still its successful execution, is truly anyone’s guess.  What is definitely not anyone’s guess is whether or not men like sport nor whether or not there are lots of sport loving men in the corporate world.  A world that no doubt has more money and a higher propensity to read than the world of pure football fandom.  There can be little argument with the assertion that attempts to make the material more businessy have not improved it at all. Whether it's the other writers, Chris Brady and Mike Forde, who are to blame or the publishers, Portfolio Penguin, or Ancelotti himself, whoever’s idea it was it was a bad one.

            I remain decidedly unconvinced that Ancelotti's experiences in football can be relied upon as a fount of business wisdom. Football is very different to most other businesses.  Any one given business is very different to most other businesses.  Too much is made of the transferability of sports success into business success because people like sport more than work.  Some of the business reflections of QL are at best underdeveloped! For example, the following quote appears without further supporting argument and seems to have little rhyme or reason to it:

“In one way we are very lucky in football because we mostly have very clear ownership.  I look at companies like VW and see complex ownership, and maybe that’s why it’s in so much trouble with the emissions scandal” QL, p180

That's it. No further explanation! By almost all measures, VW is a far more successful business than any football club.  Also some football clubs, like Juventus, are listed and thus owned in a very similar, if not identical, fashion to VW.  Nonetheless, there were interesting ideas amongst the fun stories about players, rival managers and owners over the years. However, I would stop short of calling them leadership secrets. To make matters worse, the entire book was delivered in repulsive business jargon!

To give a flavour for the kind of management consultancy claptrap that was given free reign throughout QL one need only look to the subtitle, ‘winning hearts, minds and matches’.  Further infuriation was never far away as each chapter came complete with a nauseating MBA style, bullet point summary.  These simultaneously annoying, irrelevant and extraneous examples of management consulting bullshit gone wild purport to summarise the chapter but in reality are just inane collections of observations. They seem to add nothing. If these jargon filled bullet points are the main points in the chapter, as the summary claims, then that should be clear in the chapter itself!  Who is to say what is the most important point in a chapter, surely it depends on the reader?  The summaries give the impression that readers are considered too stupid to make up their own mind about what is important in the text and need it restated for them, inaccurately and in business speak.  Sometimes the summary introduces new ideas or even seems to contradict the points made in the chapter itself.  These useless precises are delivered in a style akin to standing in a windtunnel someone has filled with management consultants. Verbal MBA slurry such as “managing up”, “onboarding new talent” and “over communicating”, which is apparently a desirable thing, should suffice as examples.  In short, the summaries were the worst part  of the book's tripartite structure.  In first place, the interviews with players were good and gave interesting perspectives albeit delivered via jargonised text.  In second place, the chapters themselves were so-so; football stories dressed up as business exemplars. Finally, the chapter summaries and other passages written about how to interpret the book so as to reveal leadership secrets were dreadful.  

            The squalid stylistic state of QL was thrown into particularly sharp relief by my reading of TBG. It's style is much better suited to the material. QL contained the same material as TBG but seemingly re-written by business consultants. Whereas in TBG the other writer, Alessandro Alciato, and / or publisher, Rizzoli, have done a much better job in terms of the tone and style of the prose.  In TBG, Ancelotti is always making jokes about eating and being fat, recounting practical jokes with the relish, reliving hi jinx and teasing his former colleagues. While in QL the style is pseudo-academic, a bit patronising and quite boring.  So how do I justify the claim that TBG is better than QL and not merely more to my particular tastes?  Well, reading the various player testimonies recorded in the two books one key theme recurs; that of laughter and making light of serious situations. Maldini, Ibrahimovic and Cristiano Ronaldo all recall him making jokes before big games to calm the atmosphere.  For example, Ronaldo says:

“Carlo would joke a lot, sometimes about being angry or to make you worry.  He would sometimes say to me, ‘Cristiano, tomorrow you’re going to rest.’  Everyone knows I want to play every game, so I would be upset and say, ‘What are you talking about?’ He would tell me I must rest and we would go back and forth and then he would say, ‘You must rest at 3 o’clock tomorrow...but when the game starts at 4, you can play.’  And then he would laugh” p58

And Maldini too,  and here I’ll quote from the TBG even though the exact same interview is contained in QL re-written.  Comparing the two gives a good indication of the disparities in style between the two writing teams:

“In his management of the locker room and team meetings; Carletto remains what he has always been: an unparalleled comedian.  He manages to crack jokes even before the final game of the Champions League.  He talks about roast dinners, he cocks an eyebrow, and we go on to win, because we are relaxed.  People imagine that a coach has to make tear jerking speeches to his team at the most decisive moments, and in fact there have been tears shed at times like that - but it was always because we were laughing so hard.” TBG, Foreword

He says it himself, “I’m a friend, not a father” and advises that in high pressure situations one should try to be oneself and not who you think you should be in that moment.  As such, and of course it is a subjective judgement, I find Ancelotti the joker, the self deprecator and the bawdy raconter far more convincing and coherent than Ancelotti the dreadfully dull management consultant we encounter in QL.  Hence, while it communicates largely the same raw material in terms of content, TBG is far superior as it has an authenticity of tone that seems to depict Ancelotti realistically rather than dressing him up as something he is not.

So what can we learn from Ancelotti’s style and character?  The three key themes, that appeared throughout both books, were family, loyalty and respect. To me, it is a sensible approach; almost everyone has some conception or experience of family life and so it is a natural and readily understood model for everybody. Ancelotti talks a lot about football clubs as families, with his favourite example being AC Milan where he spent so many years as a player and as a coach.  The atmosphere he praises most highly is one where everyone must feel indissolubly linked together, targets must be set as a group, the group must joke together and tease each other but all within an environment of love and respect.  Predictably, just as eating together is held out as an important part of happy family life, culinary concerns are central for Ancelotti too.  For example at PSG:

“We organised a small restaurant in the training ground for the players to have breakfast when they arrived together and develop some team spirit.  We didn’t impose any of this.  We just organised things for the players and made it welcoming for them to stay, so that they would want to stay” p34, QL

He would also eat regularly with the senior Chelsea players and would try to mix different groups of nationalities at meal time while at Real Madrid.  Ancelotti claims to have zero tolerance for cliques, which also reminds me of family dynamics:

“You have to address this early in your relationship with the players and get them to understand that cliques are not acceptable” p71, QL

The results of this familial loyalty, claims Ancelotti, can transcend a team’s individual talent.  For example, of the AC Milan team that won the Champions Leagues under his stewardship he says:

"there were only 3 genuine thoroughbreds: Baresi, Gullit, Donadoni....What really made the difference for that team was our sense of being a group, and a strong sense of belonging, of loyalty. Loyalty to the team, to the owners, to our colours" TBG

Closely allied to these ideas of family and loyalty is respect.  Everyone within the football club should be respected, bringing a sense of harmony and relaxation to the group.  Two quotes should demonstrate this point:

“My approach is born of the idea that a leader should not need to rant and rave or rule with an iron fist, but rather that their power should be implicit.  It should be crystal clear who is in charge, and their authority must result from respect and trust rather than fear.  I believe that I have earned the respect I am shown, partly through a successful career delivering trophies for my clubs, but perhaps more importantly because of the fact that I respect those I work with.  These people trust me to do the right thing, just as I trust them with their roles in the organization” QL

“My opinion is that players do their best when they are comfortable, not when they are uncomfortable.  I have a story to tell about this.  Two people each have a horse each and they have to get their animal to jump a fence.  The first owner stands behind the horse and uses a whip to force the horse and the horse jumps the fence.  The second owner stands in front of the fence with carrots in his hand to invite the horse over and his horse jumps over it too.  They both jumped the fence this time, but if you use the whip, sometimes the horse will kick back instead of jumping.  That’s the problem.” QL p106

Intertwined with this idea of preferring carrot to stick is an abhorrence of blame as this would, in many cases, present an abrogation of loyalty and respect:

“Sometimes to explain a defeat people have to make something specific responsible for it, instead of thinking more coolly about it.  My preference is to find a solution, not to look for the guilty to blame.” p43, QL

Some of this philosophy is also visible in the reputation Ancelotti has of being a gentleman.  Even though he has been guilty of his own tetchy exchanges with Mourinho while both were managing in Italy, it is true that Ancelotti indulges in fewer theatrics than most high profile managers. He links it explicitly with respect:

“I take pride in behaving respectfully with my players, the club and myself.  It is not my style to defame opponents or referees in pursuit of a psychological gain.  I fight with my team on the pitch, nowhere else.” p232, QL

Prior to reading these books I had a conception of Ancelotti as a tactical maestro, the famed inventor of the Christmas tree formation instructing his players on how best to fulfil their specific roles.  However, the reality seems much more collaborative and adaptable. As Ronaldo says in his interview on Ancelotti in QL, “if a guy is faster than you and jumps higher than you, this is not tactics” (p57) and in most of his recent managerial jobs he would probably have had the players who can run faster and jump higher.  As such, it is far more important to establish tactics or strategies that everyone believes in.  Speaking about his experience at Reggiana:

“I brought the players together and said to them, ‘I have my own beliefs about how we should play and behave.  If you agree with them, we can stay together.  If you don’t agree, I don’t want to wait for the owner to sack me.  I will go now.  If we’re not together we can finish here and now’” p12, QL

Other, similar examples abound; writing a list of objectives with the players at Chelsea in the season they were knocked out of the Champions League before going on to win the double, adapting Pirlo’s role to deep lying playmaker while at AC and this example from his assistant Paul Clement:

“My favourite story about this side of Carlo was prior to the FA cup final against Portsmouth.  He put the responsibility to come up with tactics totally on the team.  I wrote it up on the board as the players were saying it and - Bam! - That was the team talk and we went and won the FA Cup” QL

However, once objectives or a strategy have been decided upon then they must become immutable and the manager’s job is to protect and defend the philosophy from deterioration:

“The negotiation and flexibility come in the decision making, but the strictness is applied once the decision has been made” p181, QL

While Ancelotti espouses bringing players into the decision making process he also stresses the need to insulate them from external pressures.  He puts it simply on p108 of QL, ‘protect the players’.  In a managerial environment that included colourful owners like Berlusconi, Perez and Abramovich, all of whom clearly get involved in their club's transfer dealings, this could be a sizeable, and highly delicate, job!  Ancelotti denies that any owner tried to influence his team selection but does recount:
“during that great run of games we lost 3-1 to Wigan.  It was just a blip, to my mind, but Abramovich came to the training ground the next morning to demand answers” and “we won the first game of the new season 6-0, but I was still summoned to Abramovich’s house that night to receive a ‘dressing down’, as they said in England, for the performance” and “The night before [CL QF vs Man U] the second leg, Abramovich addressed the players, telling them they had to win or there would be huge changes to the team” pp27-30

Ibrahimovic is full of praise for Ancelotti’s abilities to protect the players, “no matter how much chaos there was, Carlos handled it” (p89).

            Ancelotti's adaptability is another facet of his character we can admire alongside his congeniality, jocularity and ability to form a familial environment amongst his colleagues.  He always learns the language of the club where he is coaching and insists the players do the same.  This would seem to have clear benefits for the fostering unity in the group.  It also shows a willingness to adapt to the cultural norms of that club’s home nation.  While at Chelsea and Real Madrid he adopted and adapted the existing training because the players felt comfortable with it.  Furthermore, while at Chelsea he worked with the existing coaching staff rather than bringing in his own team.  At the time it was a new experience for him but he seems to reflect on it positively:

“My experience at Chelsea taught me that you don’t necessarily need what you think you want.  Working with staff who are already part of the business you are joining can be a huge advantage.  Maybe if David Moyes had given the incumbents at Man U a chance, things might have been different for him.  I thought not having my confidants around me would be a big problem, but it wasn’t because I made new ones” p78, QL

At Juventus, he abandoned his favoured 4-4-2 to accommodate Zidane in a role behind the strikers.  Equally, while at Real Madrid, Ancelotti had thought of playing Ronaldo in a 4-4-2 formation but adapted to a 4-3-3 when attacking to accommodate Ronaldo’s desire to cut in from wide positions.

And what of the negative side of Ancelotti? Abramovich criticised him for being too weak and advised him to be “stronger, tougher and more rigorous with the players” (p31, QL) but this would seem to go against the central tenets of his leadership!  However, there is a slightly more roguish side to Ancelotti revealed in both books, which may be partially displayed by his favourite film: The Godfather.  For someone who condones openness, honesty and fair-dealing in other passages of his books, Ancelotti’s signing for AC Milan is hardly a shining example.  Having been sacked by Juventus, Ancelotti is negotiating a return to Parma with whom a contract is all but signed. He receives a phone call from AC Milan, promptly switches off his phone so Parma can’t get in contact with him and signs for AC Milan!!  Hardly honourable behaviour.  I assume that the world of football, like politics, is so dirty that this sort of thing is considered completely normal.  All the same, this incident and his various flirtations with other clubs rather spoil the image of the consummate gentleman!  He might well complain that football clubs are hardly model employers for their head coaches either!  Interestingly, when Real Madrid approach him while he is at AC Milan he insists that no deal can be done without AC’s consent, a far cry from the communication blackout that Parma were treated to!  Perhaps there is some secret, mafioso pact with Berlusconi and other Milanese made men?  The last example of Ancelotti’s wise guy tendencies occurs while he still a player and may be, therefore, unfair. A young Ancelotti tried to influence a referee he knew (Lo Bello) before a game to ensure that he wouldn't get a yellow card and be suspended for AC's game against his former club Roma. The referee rebuffs his totally inappropriate and illicit advance.  During the game he got a card, subsequently swore at the ref in the tunnel and got written up in the match report both for swearing and his pre-match visit to the referee's room.  As such, Ancelotti seems wholly culpable for this regulatory and disciplinary fuck up but then has the audacity to call the referee in question "a traitor" in the book for writing him up! As if he has somehow violated his rights as a made man!

In conclusion, while the content is much the same one book is delivered in a jocular, locker room style, which all the evidence suggests is closer to Ancelotti’s personal demeanor, while the other tries to turn fun football stories into MBA case studies with the unsurprising result that they sound forced and lose authenticity in translation.  Quiet Leadership may sell more copies because of this rebranding but The Beautiful Game Of An Ordinary Genius is a far better book!

George Orwell - 1984

I’ll start with what I didn’t like because there wasn’t that much of it.  Perhaps it’s the speed with which Orwell constructs a whole world, complete with politics, economics, social customs and habits and some semblance of history, within a few hundred pages but I felt some parts of the narrative where left unsatisfactorily unexplained.  In learning about Winston Smith’s life in dystopian Oceania we encounter memories of his passionless, party fanatic wife.  Meanwhile he is currently in the throes of an illicit love affair with Julia.  I should say, I presume it to be illicit given the rigamarole involved in its execution.  However, this begs the question as to why it’s forbidden.  Is it because she is too young?  Or because he is married?  How did he meet his last wife? How does one court in a party approved manner?  How did they separate?  Where is she now?  Smith indicates that he knows she is alive but there is scant explanation of the means he uses to acquire this knowledge.  How did they part ways? Could he get a divorce?  Would there be a way of him meeting other women in a party sanctioned fashion after that?  Why does the party disapprove of his relationship with Julia so long as they both love Big Brother and are loyal party members? In short, the wife raises more questions than she merits given her importance as a character and I found this annoying.  In any case, the separation is problematic and clumsily handled insofar as it goes almost totally unexplained.  I almost expect a party maniac, as she is described, to take vengeance on Smith for the failure of their marriage.  The possibility is discussed and the wife is dismissed as too stupid to realise her husband’s dissent although this isn’t totally convincing.

As well as the topic of romantic love, the topic of familial love is treated in an unusual and radical way.  People still hold attachment to children, albeit in a nightmarish inversion of normality, and have not surrendered them to common ownership but are said not favour their children over the interests of others or the Party.  This strikes me as highly unlikely because you can see from the example of Communist countries that many people still favour their families even when it is strictly against their system of government; indicating it is a deeply held inclination.  Possibly to the extent it is genetically hard-wired.  Also, characters in the book express some tenderness or preference for their own children including Smith’s detestable next door neighbour who’s proud of his daughter for reporting him to the secret police! Another example might be the man Smith sees in prison who offers to kill children in exchange for not being taken to room 101, which seems to indicate the offer still held currency as demonstration of a last resort.

These are two very minor criticisms of an otherwise impeccably constructed nightmare!  Orwell’s wonderful, readable prose captures a dark, oppressive, anaemic impersonation of normal life and shows it to us in depressing, dystopian detail.  It is beautifully constructed, from the foundation of the political-economic functioning of the world, to the frightening familiarity of “newspeak” and “doublethink”.  If the under-explanation of love and family in Oceania stood out to me it is largely because so much is explained in such a lucid way.  Orwell has captured the feeling of being in a country like North Korea, China, Vietnam or Russia and reproduced it via amazing details like the smell of cabbage everywhere that may not literally be true but bring to mind the exact mental sensation one experiences even in the absence of that particular smell!  In this sense, it seemed to me to be quite a pro-capitalist novel.  Smith’s joy at purchasing items on the black market seems to be a strong endorsement of the beauty and happiness that can arise from capitalism especially when considered in comparison with Oceania.  

Underlying the political functioning and aesthetics of this New World, Orwell masterfully riffs on the seemingly infinite adaptability and changeability of humanity.  Most of the menace in 1984, for me, comes from the fact that it is all entirely possible!   Our link with the past and historical truth are very fragile and subjective and could easily be manipulated.  As O’Brien mansplains in such chilling detail, the past doesn’t exist in any location, only in memories and in historical records.  So if you can change these you can change the past.  As O’Brien says:

"only the disciplined mind can see reality Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you.  But I tell you Winston that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else"

Or even more terrifyingly, during one of their sessions in Room 101 when they discuss how many fingers O’Brien is holding up in front of Smith:

"sometimes Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane"

We are what we believe and, in a very real sense, this must accord quite closely to what others think or else we risk exclusion from society as insane or, in the case of Oceania, re-education or death.  These are terrifying and interesting questions for anyone, in any society to ponder.  The explanation of how dissidents are ‘vapourised’ to avoid leaving any historical trace that could later be construed as a martyrdom is suitably ruthless and efficient.

The need to continually foster war and feelings of hatred seemed to me to capture very succinctly the necessary mental climate for successful oppression:

"fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph"

This phrase would be equally at home in descriptions of Nazi Germany, Communist China or ISIS governed Iraq.  The psychological strategy is the same and, if executed correctly, it can be remarkably effective.  On a slightly lighter note, the treatment of boot production statistics reminded me a great deal of watching Bloomberg TV while a stream of meaningless statistic are blabbered out in frenzied tones:

"62m was no nearer the truth than 57m, or than 145m. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared"

Although in our society, we DO care even though the statistics in question maybe almost as dubious. Does that make us akin to jibbering party fanatics because we aren’t questioning the source or purpose of what is being presented to us as fact?  Again, interesting questions for anyone, regardless of their beliefs about what type of society they inhabit!

At the end of the book, I felt an instinctive repugnance to the solution offered to Smith by O’Brien in Room 101.  If reality is simply perception, what’s the difference between choosing O’Brien’s perception over one that we held prior to that?  However, again, I feel an instant impulse to reject this and argue for the primacy of my own free, empirical experience even though I know this too could be defective.  Even though Smith’s decision to yield is rational and understandable.  I still feel sad, like something has been lost in a battle between truth and falsehood despite having no clear concept of who is fighting this battle or where it is taking place!  Rationally, I think it probably doesn’t matter what version of reality you choose to believe in as time will march on and it will all eventually signify nothing.  But then why does invoke such strong feelings to the contrary?  Perhaps that is some evidence of the power of Orwell’s story.