Leadership lessons from the man who set Barcelona alight

Leadership lessons from the man who set Barcelona alight

A year ago, one of Barcelona's vice-presidents mused over lunch at the Nou Camp stadium that perhaps Josep "Pep" Guardiola should be the club's next coach. It seemed a weird idea. Guardiola was then 37, and had never managed a professional football club, let alone the biggest on earth.

True, replied the veep, but Guardiola was a Catalan, and "Barça" longed to have a home-grown coach. After all, she added, when the Catalan Victor Valdés became Barcelona's goalkeeper, he wasn't yet a world-beater, but he learnt doing the job.
I never wrote about the conversation because I assumed she was fantasising. But months later Guardiola got the job. He then transformed last season's jaded Barça team into what the great Italian coach Arrigo Sacchi calls "the most beautiful footballing cause of recent years". Next month the team meets Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
Guardiola's inspired appointment offers two lessons to any company: how to choose a boss, and how the boss should choose his team.
The key point about Guardiola is that he has been identified with Barcelona almost from birth. He comes from a Catalan village and has spent most of his life in the square kilometre of the Nou Camp. As Jimmy Burns writes in Barça: A People's Passion , locals still remember Guardiola as a skinny 15-year-old ballboy illegally running on to the pitch and hugging a player during a European semi-final in 1986. They remember him as a skinny playmaker, standing on the balcony of the Generalitat building in 1992, holding aloft the European Cup, and saying in Catalan, " Ja la teniu aquí " ("Here you have it"). The phrase gave many in the crowd goosebumps, because it deliberately echoed the legendary " Ja soc aquí " ("Here I am") of Josep Tarradellas, the Catalan president, when he returned from French exile after General Franco died.
In other words, Guardiola, a reader of Catalan poetry, is such a perfect Catalan hero that he is practically a character from a 19th-century poem himself. Cynics mockingly call him "The Myth". But most Barça fans always hoped that one day The Myth would return as their skinny coach.
This background matters because it helps Guardiola govern with the grain of the club culture. He understands how the fans want Barcelona to play: the attacking, quick-passing football down the wings that the Dutchman Johan Cruijff introduced at the club. In Guardiola's phrase, Cruijff painted the chapel, and subsequent coaches must merely restore and improve it.
The fans agree. By governing with the grain, Guardiola wins instant acceptance in this club of tireless warring factions. It's like the unknown from the ranks who is chosen as CEO because everyone likes him and he understands the company. He contrasts with the "star" CEO or coach from outside, who often tries to overturn the existing corporate culture: José Mourinho, for instance, won prizes at Chelsea but was never accepted there largely because his defensive tactics offended English football culture. The moment Chelsea stopped winning, Mourinho had to leave.
Star players obey Guardiola because they know they have no chance of forcing him out. They stick to the three-page "code of good conduct" he wrote before the season, stick to their zones on the field, and when the great striker Samuel Eto'o dares talk back at training, he is banished to the showers. Barcelona's players are so good that as long as they serve the collective, they will win prizes.
And that is the main lesson from Guardiola's work: he kept his best players. A year ago everyone expected Barcelona to sell the difficult, underperforming Eto'o and Thierry Henry. But Guardiola knew that football's scarcest resource is talent. Instead of buying lesser, more dutiful players, he dared to persevere with class. He melded Eto'o, Henry and Lionel Messi into football's most thrilling attack.
Only one step remains in Guardiola's career path: displace Sant Jordi as the skinny patron saint of Catalonia.