Sir Alex Ferguson: Secrets of Success

I thought what was interesting about him

was the strength he had as a leader, combined with what was obviously

a very reflective self-analysis.

He could be the father confessor, the motivational speaker,

the priest, the judge, the jury, the Lord High Executioner,

the puppet master and the inspirational figure

all in the course of one day.

You saw where particular individuals were starting to become

far too important in their own right

and he showed and demonstrated that he could do without them.

His relentless need for success and have that desire

to do better and to make sure that we don't stand still.

You just trusted him.

That was the big thing, because he'd won so much,

you'd just think, I'm going to go with it.

What does it take to be a great leader?

That's what people flock here to the London Business School

from all over the world to find out and a lucky few today

are going to hear from one of the greats.

No, he's not a billionaire from Silicon Valley,

he's not a general who's led his troops into battle.

He's certainly not a politician.

He is, though, a man who, for more than a quarter of a century,

masterminded one of this country's greatest brands.

I have studied and analysed leaders all my life

but I never saw one quite as successful as Sir Alex Ferguson.

It's my very great pleasure to welcome Sir Alex Ferguson.

What is the secret of his success?

Professor Anita Elberse of the Harvard Business School

has studied it.

Together, they take classes,

addressing the next generation of business leaders.

Today in London,

these students are getting a crash course in leadership -

the Ferguson way.

So what we're going to be doing is a case study

like we do those at Harvard

and this is a good test to see

whether you guys are as smart as the people at Harvard.

Many regard him as the best coach in all of sports.

Why is he such a great coach?

He's sat next to me!

Um, I would say...

LAUGHTER

I would say he's won everything there is to win many times.

Er, Helena?

He's got a really strong vision. He wants to win.

And he's ruthlessly executing against that, every single time.

'It's still Ryan Giggs. He's past Keown, past Dixon...

'and has scored a sensational goal!'

Winning was what Sir Alex did again and again and again.

When he retired, he'd won an amazing 49 trophies in his career.

'Ronaldo!

'Right-footed, it's a clear header...

'and it's into the net!'

CHEERING

And I just needed a miracle.

And of course, we got one.

'He tries to spread himself as wide as he can.

'He makes the save for Manchester United!

'Van der Sar!'

No-one is likely to ever match his record

of winning 13 Premier League titles and two Champions League trophies.

I think no doubt he's one of the best coaches ever.

Not just because I was...

He was my leader,

so in history, no question, probably the best one.

What does all this have to do with business?

Why is this worthy of study at a business school?

One person who knows the answer to that question

is former Manchester United Chief Executive David Gill.

He understood that in order to have a successful football team,

and get what he wanted on the pitch,

the business of Manchester United had to be very successful.

His leadership skills meant that he could understand

what we were trying to do as a club.

I think the fact that the club was champions for so many years

and has got such a reputation across the world,

that you have to put that down to his great management

and that had the knock-on effect

of creating great financial revenues for the organisations.

It's about time I turned over to the man himself.

Please, again, join me in welcoming Sir Alex Ferguson.

Thank you.

Tomorrow, at Haydock Park,

I've a horse running called Hairdryer.

LAUGHTER True!

Sir Alex's record attracted the attention of one of the world's

most successful investors - writer and billionaire Michael Moritz

who made his money backing Apple and PayPal and Google.

Moritz has been a student of leadership for decades.

I started looking around for the people in organisations

who had been able to steer an organisation to perform

at a very high level of excellence, consistently, for a very long time.

And that's what piqued my curiosity

about Sir Alex and Manchester United.

Sir Alex is the first person to say that his world is football

but the elements and rudiments of leadership are universal skills

that are as applicable to a multi-national corporation,

a boy scout troop, a church organization

as they are to a football club.

A club made in his image, shaped by his values, forged by his character.

Sir Alex Ferguson has legendary status at Old Trafford.

As a lifelong United fan myself, I don't claim to be impartial.

Ah, welcome. Great to see you. Professor Ferguson.

'But I've always wanted to understand

'the ingredients of the Fergie Formula for success.'

As I was watching you at London Business School,

I was sitting next to a Chinese, a Russian, a Uruguayan, an Italian.

Did you ever think you would find yourself

lecturing on leadership to the young entrepreneurs from around the world?

The thing about it, the challenge is it's young people

and I've always enjoyed my interaction with young people.

I've always enjoyed my time as a manager producing young players,

because with young people, you know, it's amazing how they surprise you

when you give them an opportunity.

Now, back at the business school, you had on the whiteboard,

all those people that can crowd in on a football manager...

Yeah. ..who think they've got a right to have a say. Yeah.

And you wiped a whole series of them off.

This is a great bit. Where's that duster?

Get rid of all these. They don't mean a thing.

They don't mean anything.

Oh, sorry, fans should be there, sorry.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

What was the essence left behind? Well, there's a core.

Look at the core because you can get trapped

in the periphery of things that are happening.

Your players and your staff,

they're the important issues of the whole thing.

And, of course, you hope that, then, that transfers

your results into keeping fans happy because that's my job.

Fans just want their team to win

but Ferguson insists that his job involves a lot more than that.

Most managers go to a football club because it's a result industry.

They're there to turn the fortunes of the first team.

That's why they get the job. I never thought that way.

My philosophy was to build a football club.

Sir Alex made Man United, as a club,

to think in a certain way.

I think he modelled the club around his view,

around his personality.

I think Man United will be always influenced

by what he did

as a manager in the club.

The club was made at his image.

I think the strength of United is this great family spirit

we always created. And people who thrive and be recognised.

You don't mean the star players?

You're talking about the people round the club.

Yeah, they're no problem. I mean, the players,

you're with them all the time. That's the difference.

As a manager at Manchester United, you could easily walk by someone.

A girl came out of the office and not recognise them.

I wouldn't do that.

I would say "hello", "good morning", whatever.

And I think it's that recognition

that gives you that strength of a family.

There's a dinner lady called Carol.

She hammers him. "What you got on today? What is that?"

And he'd laugh and he'd go back at her and he'd start talking about

her hair or something or whatever.

That's the way he is. People don't see that side of him a lot,

but he was really, really good like that.

He had this unbelievable ability of remembering everyone's name.

Obviously, he knows Cath on reception and the laundry girls

and the chefs and the cleaners.

You've got 65, 70 players.

You've got to remember all their names.

Plus the schoolboys, that's another 30 or 40.

He knew all the names because he took an interest in what

they were doing and how they were progressing.

He was the top man and if he's doing it,

then everyone else should be doing it as well.

Everyone loves him there in the club.

He'd invite everyone to come for lunch, uh...

for a cup of tea.

English cup of tea.

So it is... It was a family.

It was a family with him.

And leaders often forget that, right?

That it's just as much about the ladies doing the laundry,

and making sure that they're happy

as it is about making sure

that Cristiano Ronaldo is having a great day.

The family Ferguson created at United

was inculcated with the values

he'd learnt from his family,

growing up in Glasgow in the '40s and '50s

in the shadow of the Govan shipyards.

I want to get you to look at an image

of the place you grew up.

Govan. Govan. That's the shipyards.

Of course, two cranes there.

I lived only a mile and a half from there.

Sometimes I used to go and wait on my dad coming out the gates

at around about five o'clock.

You know, even though the temperatures

and the wind that came down that Clyde,

it never stopped them from working,

never stopped them from building ships.

So toughness against the odds? Absolutely.

They would never bow, these people.

I was proud to be brought up in that kind of environment.

Let's take a look at your parents.

There we are, there's the Fergusons. Yeah.

And you see the ties? There were footballs on them.

There were... Even at that age? Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, my dad was...

My dad played for Glentoran in Northern Ireland.

He worked in Harland and Wolff in Northern Ireland for a spell.

And you didn't want to get on the wrong side of him?

Oh, no way. No, he was...

He wasn't the type who would punish you,

but his voice was enough.

He was a quiet man. But when he...

he wasn't happy with you, he raised the voice and that was enough.

So you didn't want to be on the wrong side of him,

he was a stickler for keeping time... Yeah, yeah.

Does it sound a bit familiar? Stayed with me all my life.

I love to be early. You know, I'm always early.

But there must have been clashes.

Were there moments where you thought...? Well, my dad...

..cos any teenager with their dad... Oh, yeah.

..would fall out quite badly...

We never spoke for about seven or eight months for a while,

because he wanted me to go to junior football...

You didn't speak for seven or eight months? Yeah.

He wanted me to go to junior football to protect me,

if I didn't make it in senior football.

Did you learn that sometimes keeping quiet

can be just as worrying for someone...?

Absolutely, yeah. Just as good for a leader to do.

Yeah, absolutely. Quieter moments. I remember we were down 3-0

at half-time at Tottenham Hotspurs, I never says a word.

They were ready to go out, I says, "The next goal's a winner.

"Let's score the first goal and see where it takes us,"

and we scored within a minute.

You scored within a minute, you went on to score five! 5-3, yeah.

You once said something

that I think a lot of people would find surprising -

that when you're looking at a footballer,

one of the first things you wanted to do is look at their mum and dad.

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely.

Try and find out what kind of parents they've got.

And particularly the mother.

We used to say to all the scouts, "Get the mother...

"Get the mother on your side,

"because she makes all the decisions."

The father, a lot of the time, can be entranced by his son's progress

and sort of living in their boots a little bit, you know?

They live in the glory of the kid.

The mother wants to do the best for her son.

No question about that.

So, in terms of dealing with parents,

the mother's the most important person.

He's great with people's mums.

My mum was there and my wife was there.

My girlfriend at the time, she was.

And he just made them feel comfortable

and I remember them coming out of the room, when we finished,

and went to the hotel after

and they were saying, "He was such a nice guy."

It was Ferguson's reputation as a disciplinarian

that appealed to Manchester United.

That and his record at Aberdeen.

His team beat the mighty Real Madrid

to lift the European Cup Winners' Cup.

He arrived at Old Trafford in 1986,

and before he could revive a once great club,

he had first to tackle a pernicious drinking culture.

I was a bit impulsive, I think.

I called everyone into the gymnasium, all the young players,

all the staff, all the players.

So I said to them, "Look, I've read all these stories.

"I've heard all these stories about the drinking culture.

"Well, I have to tell you, I won't change.

"You're all going to have to change. That's a fact."

I mean, how big a problem was it?

Well, I think there was a genuinely bad element

of drinking in the afternoons.

Going away from the training ground to spend all afternoon drinking.

People tell stories. People phone the manager

of Manchester United or Arsenal or Liverpool, tell them,

"I seen your pair in the pub." It happens. It happens.

That's the great networking system you have,

being the manager of Manchester United.

It's a nice word, "network". It's spies, isn't it?!

Yeah, well, you need it, you know?

And I then realised to myself,

we're not going to win the league with this team.

So we did a fire sale.

Got rid of about nine players and brought five young players in,

people who were hungry enough to accept challenge

and send the club in a different direction.

'The new leader of another failing organisation

'faced similar problems just a few years later.

'Tony Blair's Labour Party had lost four elections in a row.'

In a sense, you both did the same thing -

you took over losing teams

and you had to try and change the culture of those teams.

Is that vital for someone who's a leader?

To be prepared to challenge the existing culture,

not live with it as it is?

Yeah, always the greatest problem when you're leading an organisation

that is failing is that you take the system as it is

and you just try to make it work,

when it may be the system itself that is at fault.

So, in other words, you know,

it may be that you can't get a political party back to power

just by amending the same message.

You may have to change it completely.

You know, you may have to redraw the whole boundaries

of your organisation.

You may have to, as we had to do with the Labour Party,

fundamentally shift it.

He asks and demands discipline and respect.

It's a balanced approach.

It's not just showing everyone that he is the guy who has the power.

Step one in the Fergie Leadership Manual -

assert control and impose discipline.

The 180-degree opposite to discipline is anarchy.

Well, anarchy won't achieve a thing,

because people will just shove off in different directions,

and so discipline is essential

for any team to achieve the common objective.

And I think that's true of soccer as it's true of the army.

Sir Alex knew that if you didn't have discipline

within the organisation, anarchy would break out

and it would become unwieldy and impossible to manage or to lead.

I would get into the training ground... Be there about seven.

I would be there till God knows what time.

I would stay to watch the academy, whatever, and I was...

'He arrived very, very early.

'All the time, he was there in his office to check,'

to make the training.

And always the first one in

and always the last one to go home.

So I learned this kind of stuff with him.

And that's something that wasn't lost on the players,

so if he's in early, why are you not?

He's been doing it 25, 30 years. Why are you not in before him

or at least near the same time as him and putting the work in?

Turning up on time and training hard

were only the beginning of what the boss demanded from his team.

I wanted them to be Manchester United in terms of dress,

made sure they wore their blazer and flannels wherever they went,

in terms of away from home, in particular.

And why does it matter, though? For a leader thinking, "Well, who cares?"

Well, I think you're representing the club that way.

You walk through an airport and you see the blazer, you see that badge.

There's Manchester United. They're dressed right, you know?

So the first time I witnessed that

was going to Switzerland in a tournament for the youth team.

And we're all in our blazers and we all got told,

in no uncertain terms, that, "You're representing Manchester United,

"both on and off the pitch.

"So I want you to make sure that you behave yourself around the hotel

"cos people'll be watching you."

Your lesson, if you were back in that classroom,

is those little things matter... Yeah, details.

..just as much as the big things. Yeah, absolutely. Details. Yeah.

All points to the top of the mountain, yeah.

"Points to the top of the mountain." Everything can contribute.

Yeah, absolutely. Just like talking to the laundry girls

or the canteen staff. Yeah.

Everything makes a difference. They all matter.

They all matter. A club like United, they seriously matter.

I want to show you a photograph which might give you a thought

about some of these issues, as well.

Let's have a quick look. See if you remember this photo.

Remember those? God almighty...

Why did they do that?

When was that? That was the '96 Cup Final at Wembley.

I said to Brian Kidd, "1-0."

Those aren't your players, of course, those are Liverpool.

Yeah, it's Liverpool, yeah.

You turned to Brian Kidd, your assistant...

1-0. 1-0. What, just because of this?

Yeah.

Because of that.

I think that's...

I don't know, what would you call it?

Arrogance or overconfidence or...

I don't know. It was ridiculous.

I think it was absolutely ridiculous.

Blue shirt, red and white tie and a white suit and a blue flower.

Who designed that?

And they say it was Armani! Yeah?

I bet you his sales went down.

But I'm still working out what it was.

Was it cos they're not taking the game seriously?

Well...

I mean, Jamie Redknapp's got sunglasses on...

But, you know, the most telling part of it is

Roy Evans and Ron Moran had black suits on.

I think they were embarrassed.

Liverpool Football Club's a great club with history.

They've won the European Cup more times than Manchester United.

Between Manchester United and Liverpool,

they've won more trophies than any club in Britain.

That didn't represent Liverpool.

James gets there just first.

Cantona!

There is to be a memorable end to a poor cup final.

The Liverpool episode at Wembley,

where they were wearing the white suits, he would use stuff like that.

"Have you seen these lot? You seen what they're wearing?

"They think they've won it already."

Stuff like that would get into your heads that,

"What do you mean they think they've won it already?"

Sir Alex had other ways of getting into his players' heads,

including what became known as "the hairdryer",

a term first coined by United striker Mark Hughes.

The hairdryer...

LAUGHTER

Erm, the hairdryer obviously is a myth.

LAUGHTER

Let me just put that out there.

But that apparently was the treatment

that underperforming players received from Sir Alex.

And basically he's standing in close proximity

and he's shouting so hard that your hair goes like this.

..and shout at you and physically blow you out the room.

LAUGHTER

Can I show you a little video?

Oh, dearie me. Do you know what's coming? No.

We're not lip reading.

I wasn't well that day. NICK LAUGHS

If you were like that on the touchline,

I wonder what you were like in the changing room?

I always want to get it off my chest, out of my system

and kick on from there.

What I said to them remained in the dressing room.

I could be really angry, I could be volatile, I could be...

But it was over.

And the players knew that. They knew that. I never brought it up again.

I never held a grudge ever in my life.

And when you heard it was called the hairdryer, did you think...?

Honestly, I didn't like it at the time. Honestly.

I was a bit annoyed, you know? But now...

You have to... You have to... You can smile.

Put it in the comedy part, you know?

We played Benfica away and got beat.

We didn't play well and he was...

he was shouting at me...

and I thought I was one of our best players on the day.

And I was thinking, "What are you shouting at?"

So I started going back at him, shouting back,

and the problem is, which I failed to learn quickly,

is that the more you shout at him,

the louder he gets and the more aggressive he gets

and the closer he gets to you.

He had that skill of have you got to put your arm around someone

or have you got to lose your temper to get the best out of them?

I remember him having a go at me at at half-time

and I had the sort of attitude, "Right, OK, I'll show him."

And played well the second half.

So then he quickly knew how I would respond to him losing his temper.

That followed me for the next 20 years,

so it was a big mistake early on.

Giggsy sometimes would have to do one thing wrong in a half.

Half-time comes, he hammered... He would hammer Giggsy.

But that was to show the other players

no-one's exempt from getting hammered

and you better all fix up,

cos I'll be coming for you at full-time

if you don't sort this out.

I remember sometimes when we do something bad or we lost some games,

he'd kick the chairs and he'd kick the boots, he'd kick everything,

the waters, the drinks, and he's so red

and, "BLEEP! You should pass the ball, you..."

It's unbelievable, but it was good, because we learn.

The great thing about the boss was that,

the next day, it was forgotten.

And you'd be walking towards him, approaching him,

the next day thinking, "Is he going to have a go at me?"

And he would just crack a joke or he would talk about the next game.

And how often was it you were just generally furious,

you got to tell people, and how often was there a bit of calculation?

A little bit of...

Sometimes I would lose my temper when we would win.

Now, the real reason for losing your temper is because of expectation.

I could never visualise us losing a game.

You know, by the time I picked my team,

done the tactics, had my team talk,

I was confident we'd always win the game.

But of course you don't win every game, that's a fact.

But when they drop below their expectation,

that annoyed me the most, you know?

No player was too big to be spared the hairdryer -

Ince, van Nistelrooy, Beckham,

following that famous bust-up with a flying boot.

No player, except perhaps Eric Cantona,

United's iconic French superstar, who got very different treatment,

even after a spectacular lapse in discipline.

I want you to take you back a moment, I suspect, is hard for you,

let alone anybody else, to forget. Let's just take a look.

Oh, yeah.

Did you see that?

I didn't see it at all.

I was looking at the pitch.

But, Jesus, you know, when you see what he's done.

It was a problem for the club, because it got such headlines,

it was front page,

and we decided to have a meeting at Alderley Edge the next night.

On our way, I get a phone call from Ritchie Greenbury,

the chairman of Marks Spencer at the time, Richard.

And a big United fan? Big United fan.

He says, "Well, don't let Cantona go.

"He'll give you great moments of joy."

And I said, "I know that."

But, you know, there was the mood of the board,

so I had to fight the case, "Look, we must keep him.

"We can't let him go. We can't give in to the mob."

And we decided to suspend him for four months.

And the FA were, at the time, were happy with it,

but somehow they added to it.

NEWSREEL: Ahead of Cantona, then, seven months of training.

Dull, laborious, unfulfilling.

Expediency may yet mean that with regret club and player part company.

But, as the great disciplinarian,

wasn't your first instinct to think, "He's blown it. He's a great player.

"I get on with him, but that's too much"? Yeah.

Well, he had never...

He had never given us any indication that explosion was there.

But I decided to approach it this way -

I would speak to him every day.

And I would talk to him about football all the time

and he loved it, you know?

And that's why all the players say he was my prodigal son.

But I think he needed different attention.

He needed different ways of dealing with him.

He was a different guy from everyone else.

He's an amazing human being.

But when you saw that image of him kicking a spectator,

wasn't there a bit of you that thought,

"That's exactly the ill discipline that has to stop at this club.

"I've got to get rid"?

No, there was something in me that said,

"I need to do something about him. I need to stand by him."

Because the world was after him and it was a bit like...

..no-one was there to help him.

And I said, "Well, it'll have to be me, cos I'm his manager."

I think the thing that amazed me, and used to frustrate me at times,

was his man management.

I'd never seen him have a go at Eric Cantona, for example.

Some of the players would resent that,

"Why's he not having a go at Cantona? He's missed a penalty."

Or "Why's he not having a go at Cantona? He had an awful game."

The manager knew, in the long run, that he would come good,

that he would produce the goods at the right time.

Yeah, his man management was second to none.

To have all his honesty

that allows him to be father, friend,

brother of a player.

Enemy of a player. But enemy...

for a few...a few seconds.

But then the brother comes again or the old brother or the father.

These human qualities...

are absolutely crucial to be a great leader.

The fabulous leader is a very rare individual

and that person is capable of

making an organisation do things, making the people,

persuading, cajoling, nudging,

caressing, sometimes, the people inside an organisation

to do something that they weren't, didn't think they were capable of.

What we have here essentially is a case

that is about how one person is very effective at managing teams.

That's not enough, though, for a leader.

They also need to know how to cull their teams,

how to be ruthless.

Yes, over here.

When they had big players and they had the youth team coming through,

the confidence to effect the change, sell the big players

and go with the youth players.

A good leader has to make tough decisions,

that's why he or she is a leader.

And sometimes there are things which are not very nice.

Erm, you have to lay off a whole group of people, for example.

200, 300 people, close down a factory.

In some cases,

you may have to release a very highly paid individual,

but you have to do it. It's part and parcel of being a leader.

As you go through your career, you've got to rebuild the team.

You have to be ruthless.

It's the hard part for you, because they do become like family,

you know, and the great squad of '94,

the Cantonas and the Inces and Robson

and these players, Bruce, they get older.

And the horrible thing is the evidence is on the football field,

and you can't avoid that.

Some of these issues were played out in the press,

but he wasn't afraid to make the decision which he thought

was for the long-term or medium-term benefit of the team.

And I think that ability to be ruthless is no bad thing,

but, at the same time, I think he did have compassion

and I don't think he necessarily found all these decisions easy.

And it wasn't just players past their peak who were shown

the red card by Ferguson.

The scenario with Roy Keane -

there was a video that he'd done for MUTV

that the club didn't want to go out.

The manager thought that it wasn't right,

it was disrespectful, et cetera, to the team.

The next day, he told the players that Roy Keane would never come

back to Man United again.

He was captain of Man United.

'Roy Keane lifts the trophy for Manchester United.'

Best player probably Man United had for a long period of time.

That was for the next generation.

"Don't think you're ever bigger than this club, cos you're not.

"Cos you'll go.

"I've just told the captain he's never coming back again.

"What are you going to do now?"

Hey, this is ridiculous!

LAUGHTER

How do you handle a particularly difficult member of the team?

That was a question which haunted a new Prime Minister

who turned to Sir Alex for advice.

We would talk about man management

and I would say, "Look, such and such an individual is, you know...

"He might be really brilliant but he's very, very tough.

"I don't know quite what to do about it."

Of course, Alex, cos this is how he would run his soccer teams,

said "Get rid of him".

And I'd say, "Well, it's all very well, Alex,

"but how would you be if you got rid of a player

"but still found them in the dressing room every day?"

And he said, "Now that would be a problem," he said.

"That would definitely be a problem."

I said to him, "You have to keep your control."

I don't know who he was talking about at the time

but you have to keep control.

"You're the Prime Minister. You have to have control."

You must have guessed he was talking about Gordon Brown.

I didn't know, actually.

And I don't think anyone knew till later on

that there was some sort of...there was some feeling between the two.

He said to you,

"What do you do with a player who won't accept the discipline?"

And you said, "Get him out".

If they are affecting the control of you or they're disrupting

the dressing room, you have to make the decision - is it worth it?

We weren't actually talking about an individual

but a hypothetical case, as it were.

But, yeah, his attitude was it doesn't matter

if he's your best player, if he's difficult, put him out of the room.

But even Sir Alex sometimes lived to regret his decisions about players.

I always thought I was brave enough to make decisions,

maybe sometimes wrong.

I made a wrong decision with Jaap Stam. That was a mistake.

One decision we've talked about quite a bit is the decision

to let Jaap Stam go to an Italian club

and I think it was based on his belief

that maybe Jaap Stam would not come back from his injury.

It's a decision he regrets, because Jaap Stam went on to

play for six seasons at a very, very high level.

He played two European cup finals. It was a good decision, wasn't it?

LAUGHTER

Changing the team only works, of course,

if the people who replace those who are let go, the next generation,

prove to be better.

You're mentioning youth players.

What is characteristic of the Ferguson brand

when it comes to youth? Yes?

I think it's kind of giving them a lot of,

a lot of chance to kind of shine and grow as a team. Right.

MORITZ: 'No structure is going to remain standing

'unless it's built on a firm foundation,

'so, for United,

'this meant above all developing'

a pipeline of young players,

um, who, when they were signed, weren't very well-known,

or when they were purchased, were, in many instances,

affordable and cheap purchases.

Building a team around a new generation of talented kids

may look a safe bet now. At the time, it was a risky gamble.

So let's take a look at what became known as the Class of '92.

OK. Look at Scholesy. You'd think he's just out of nursery!

Well, they weren't. What ages were they there?

They would be 17. Giggs would be maybe 18.

And some people look at that group and say, "It was a one-off".

You were a very lucky man.

It is not unreasonable to say that but I have to say this.

We were scouting and trialling and coaching the best in the country.

I'm sure of that.

We were obviously characters and we were in the mind-set that once

we get in this team, we're not going out of it.

We were lucky in the fact that we had a manager who was willing

to give us a chance and was willing to gamble, really, on youth.

And remember this, some thought it wouldn't pay off.

Brilliantly done!

The trick is always buy when you're strong. So he needs to buy players.

You can't win anything with kids.

Alan Hansen, of course, told you you'd win nothing with kids.

Well, you can't win anything without them.

The secret was the development of the character that feared nothing,

so coming to the first team with me, it was a cakewalk for them.

They just sailed through it, absolutely no problem.

These young lads were old heads on young shoulders.

We worked hard to get there.

We worked hard, but, yeah, with the right material...

The first time I played, I came on as a substitute and, yeah,

I can remember the manager's last words -

"Just go out and enjoy yourself."

Um, you're thinking, "What do you mean, enjoy myself?

"Um, I'm going out to play...

"You know, I'm going out to play in front of 40-odd thousand

"and I'm 17

"and um, I'll try and enjoy it but I don't think I will!"

But, um, he always said that and, um, like I say, instantly,

you just felt relaxed.

That's part of man management and not putting too much pressure on me.

But also knowing what I was capable of.

And did you think of yourself, almost as a father figure to them?

That you were teaching them how to grow up,

how to behave in the way that your father taught you?

I think that the character-building does apply itself that way.

And there are some instances where players would come to me

with personal problems, knowing it would never go out the door,

knowing they could trust me to help them

and I was proud that the players would trust me in that way.

It was when my daddy was sick in London.

And he was in hospital, very bad.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

INTERPRETER: Coma.

In coma. In a coma?

And I had a conversation with him,

and I say, "Boss, I want to... I don't feel good."

And we had...we are in a...

a key moment in the league, in the Champions League, but I said,

"I don't feel good, I want to see my dad."

"Cristiano, if you want to go one day,

"two days, one week, you can go. I'm going to miss you.

"I'll miss you here, because you know that you are important,

"but your daddy is in the first place."

When he told me that, I feel like "This guy is unbelievable."

He was the father of football for me.

'Cristiano Ronaldo with a shot and Ronaldo finds the back of the net.

'It's a stunning goal.'

He knew what he had under his bonnet with Cristiano as well.

He knew he had the potential to be a world star,

best player on the planet.

And he knew there were certain aspects of his life

that he needed to take care of and help him with,

and I think you see that in the way Cristiano

speaks about the manager now, even after all these years have gone by.

He refers to him as his father in football, which is testament,

really, to the way the manager dealt with him.

Is that power?

Yes, you have all the power. Yeah.

Right, a bit of advice.

I don't think power is very important. I really don't.

I think the thing I was always after was to make sure I kept my...

My control.

Ferguson imposed that control, not just on the pitch, but off it too.

When I first signed for United,

I twisted my ankle in my first-ever game,

so I was out for about six weeks.

So I got to know the city a little bit better than

I probably should have.

And just as I got back to fitness, I went out on the training pitch

and I saw the manager was just waiting there for the players

to come out, and he said, "Rio, let me talk to you, son,"

I said, "All right, boss?" He said, "How are you enjoying the city?

"Is it all right? Have you been out anywhere or anything?"

I said, "Yeah, not been out, to be honest with you, Boss,

"I've just been to a couple of restaurants and just taking it easy,

"just chilling out, really." He said, "Oh, good."

He said, "Um, just make sure we get off on the right foot.

"Um, I know you've been overindulging in the nightclubs,

"going out here and there and people tell me these things.

"You can't hide none of this from me. Just to make sure now

"you know that I know and it doesn't happen any more,

"if you want to stay at this club for a long time.

"Go on. Go to train."

I was like, "Oh, my God!"

The only thing I ever worried about was

the control of Manchester United.

The control of the players, the dressing room.

That is paramount to me.

And I only worried if I ever lost that control.

He controlled everything, I think.

The transfer policy, the decisions, the players' contracts.

The staff, I think everything was in his hands.

And I think it's a fantastic way to do it,

especially if you are surrounded by good people,

because when you say you are in control,

it doesn't mean that you don't share.

I think his belief is that in order to lead a football team

effectively, you have to be the biggest personality.

You can't have players that are the bigger stars,

that are the bigger egos in the dressing room.

This is probably also the most controversial lesson

and I am honestly not entirely sure

whether we can translate this to many other business settings and

I think the business world nowadays, if you as a manager come in

and say, or as a CEO and say, "I demand absolute control

"and anyone who steps out of my control, they're fired",

that's a pretty harsh stance

and it might not work very well in the business climate

that we have nowadays.

I never thought about these guys as star players. It never bothered me.

And one thing I did say to a star player,

"Remember one thing. Your reputation is always on the line on Saturday.

"So the expectation is bigger for you.

"You have to show you've worked as hard as all the rest of the players,

"because that really is a truly great player."

Motivation, teaching the value of teamwork,

they were also crucial to Ferguson's success,

even if his methods could be a little unusual.

There was one photograph you had on your office wall.

Let's just take a look at it. I want to know why you had it.

There you are. Every year, I'd bring the apprentices in to my office.

One day, I says, "Right, tell me,

"what do you think of that photograph?"

And they'd look at it and, of course, they're all twitching,

nervous, that I've set a trap. And I said, "Well, there's 11 there.

"There's 11 members of the team."

I says, "They built the Rockefeller Centre back in the '20s

"and they lost lives.

"One or two would try to save them

"and lost their lives through that." I says,

"There's no bigger sacrifice than giving your life for a team."

I remember he had this picture of 11 guys sitting in the wind

but without, er, how you say?

No ropes for safety. Exactly.

It quite surprised me when I looked at the frame,

I said, "Wow! It's unbelievable frame,"

and he say, "Cristiano, this is what team should do it.

"We should be together, we should work together, we should do it...

"Everything together, if you want to win something,"

and he gave the example all the time

because it was 11 guys in that picture, so it was...

Fantastic memory.

I remember right now in my eyes,

I remember his office and this frame.

There was another image you used to use quite a bit, I think.

Oh, yeah. Geese. Yeah.

It's a fantastic story.

It's how they fly 4,000 miles from Canada to some warm climate.

They go in two Vs.

And the ones at the front do most of the flying, then they change over,

and if one goes away, another two have to look after it.

The birds overhead flying and it would be in the middle of training.

He'd stop the training, he'd go,

"Right, look. All look. Have a look up to the sky."

So we'd be all looking up at the sky, "See them birds."

And they all went like an arrow formation. "That's teamwork."

You can just imagine 22 players or 20-odd players just looking

up at the sky, thinking, "What's he going on about?"

And I'd say to them, "These geese fly 4,000 miles to get a bit of sun.

"All I'm asking you to do is play 38 games to win the league.

"I don't think I'm asking too much."

Other teams in other sports wanted one of Fergie's inspirational talks,

so when Europe was fighting to retain the Ryder Cup,

the captain called in Sir Alex.

I was never one of the superstars,

so dealing with the likes of Rory McIlroy and how he was going

to feel in that situation was something that was alien to me

and he was the one that I thought could really help me with that,

so, and I looked around, I thought, you know,

"There's a guy that really got it right, in terms of success."

Paul had spoke to me a year before the tournament

and asked if I'd like to contribute with the team.

So I did it, had a motivational talk with them.

He spoke to the caddies before he came up to the players,

which was great, and that was a lot of fun for the caddies

and it made them very much included,

because the caddies were a huge part of what we did.

The caddies. Goodness me, that was fantastic.

There was a caddie called Billy Forster, big Leeds United fan,

and he gave me stick.

He says, "You got Cantona for nothing!"

As we were listening to the speech, I could hear the laughter

coming from the caddies' room and the players didn't know but

I could hear the laughter, so I knew things were going well done there.

So when he came in, first of all, he knew everybody's name

and addressed everybody personally.

Sir Alex told the Ryder Cup team the story that had worked

so well at Old Trafford.

I did the bit about the geese. And I think that was an important one.

The Ryder Cup team, although they were favourites, it wasn't going

to win them the tournament, cos the work ethic, the concentration.

They've got the talent, it's the 12 best golfers in Europe

without question.

And they just need to focus on the things

that are going to matter in the game.

And that became a kind of a something that we, as a team,

mentioned a number of times during the week. And it was...

It was a phrase that we used, "remember the geese".

And the ironic thing about it is, when we won

and we were getting our photograph taken, this perfect V of geese

flew right over their heads and over the club house right behind.

I never changed as a human being, as my style of management,

my decision-making, my discipline - never changed that.

But I was always looking to change to make things better.

Leadership is actually a balance of listening, learning and leading.

You know, you have to listen

and absorb what are the lessons going on out there.

You have to be prepared to learn those lessons

and look at what the trends are and what the changes are that

are happening in your country, in your society, in your profession and

then you have to be prepared at the end to take control and to lead.

Tony Blair says that leadership is a balance of listening,

learning and leading.

Is that a good summary?

Yeah, I think these are accurate statements, no doubt about that.

And you went to different places to learn.

You went to the SAS on one occasion.

Years ago, I took the team down there for a day

and we stayed overnight.

It was fantastic, because you're speaking to a body of men

where the concentration levels have to be 100% all the time.

So I was impressed with what I saw down there.

Did the players identify with them, or did they just...

Oh, they loved it. ..look at them as if they were a different world? They loved it.

I'll always remember, they took us into the hostage room

and they put four players with their heads down on the table

and all the rest of the players were behind the rope, you know.

They just pulled me out. Me, Paul Ince.

There's cardboard cutouts and...we're the hostages.

The cardboard cutouts are the people holding us hostage.

So we were just sat there at the table - next minute,

the lights just went off.

We heard, "Get down! Get down!" Which we instantly did.

And all of a sudden, a smoke bomb comes in.

Everything goes dark and within seconds, bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

A couple of bullet sounds and then the lights come on and right

next to us was four or five soldiers, SAS gear, night goggles.

I saw one of the soldiers with a gun against Paul Ince's head

and Incy, I tell you... HE LAUGHS

What did Incy do? He went, "Aaaaargh!"

He absolutely, honestly, he nearly died. It was brilliant.

Yeah, it was a great experience.

Great experience and one that we never forgot.

GUNFIRE

What I hope Sir Alex and his team would have seen and appreciated

was a very high degree of professional skill and ability,

an utter dependence, one upon another,

in other words, the team actually brought to a very high pinnacle

of mutual dependence and respect.

The Ferguson formula produced year after year of success

that one victory, one match, one extraordinary moment

seemed to capture its essence.

Let's take a look at one night.

One night in Barcelona.

In 1999.

'Beckham crosses from the left.

'Right footed, it's a clear header and it's in the net!

'Solskjaer has won the European Cup for Manchester United!'

So United were 1-0 down,

going into injury time.

That gesture - was that disbelief?

I think it was a bit of that, but when it went to 1-1,

Steve McClaren came to me and says,

"Well, we're back to four-four-two in extra time."

I says, "No, the game's over. They'll never recover."

And we scored the second goal. They were gone.

Bayern were absolutely gone.

Those three minutes, in a sense,

are like the whole Ferguson formula boiled down, aren't they?

Well, that particular team was a team that never gave in.

And through that season,

they continually won games in the last few minutes.

To win the league once is very difficult.

But to do it over 26 years, I think, is simply amazing.

I was able to plan three, four years ahead,

because I was there long enough.

Even having won the coveted treble,

Ferguson set about dismantling his team and creating another.

I think his greatest legacy is that he had success over

a quarter of a century

and that he was able to build

and rebuild four or five truly great teams.

For me, that is something that no manager has matched.

The rebuilding of the organisation was consistent

and often people, when they've built a structure or got

an entity into a winning position, they forget what took them there

and they stop doing the renovation, they stop doing the repairs.

Sir Alex didn't stop

and he rebuilt the club on perpetual four-year cycles.

You smile inside, because he say, "You're still hungry.

"You still want to win. You're still motivated to win trophies,

"to go to the trainings with 62 years old, 63, 64, 65."

He is still hungry. He still wants one more title.

He still want that team play good every weekend,

so this is, for me, it was a surprise.

But the lesson for a leader,

is at the very moment you reach the top, is what?

When you're at the top... It's like climbing a mountain.

You go up there and the view is beautiful.

In normal circumstances, you have to come down the mountain.

Not in football.

For Manchester United, you have to stay up there and look at the view.

You can't come down.

Of course, you don't win every league,

but the important thing is to be challenging every time.

That was a big thing at Man United. It was never about,

"Oh, we've won, let's celebrate for days on end, months on end

"and really enjoy it."

You never got the sense that we really enjoyed it

as much as we maybe should have, now I've retired.

I think if I did enjoy it too much,

cos I did quite like enjoying things,

maybe I wouldn't have been able to climb the mountain again

so soon and so consistently.

You have some managers that you work hard for

because you fear them

and you have other managers that you work hard for

because you love them.

Where on this line is Sir Alex?

LAUGHTER

Some people are pointing.

Where on this line is he? Yes, over there.

I think he's more towards the love side.

ALL: Aw!

It's a fact.

OK, you need to stop talking right now.

LAUGHTER

So, for you, was it more fear or was it love or maybe both?

Both. Both.

In the beginning, it's kind of...

not scared but it's...

respectful.

You respect because you say,

"He can smile, but he can be angry too, so let's do the right things."

Early on in my career, definitely fear.

As a 17-year-old seeing this figure

who was so intent on discipline and quality.

But also fear from me, fear of failure.

But then as the career and the relationship grew,

more towards the love aspect.

There can be occasions where fear came into it

and occasions with a bit of love.

But in the case of fear,

if you look at the way Manchester United played,

the players played and the teams played,

there was no way that fear was in that team.

In terms of my time at United,

I often wondered whether it was hate, fear, love.

I didn't pay great attention to it,

but I still was always concerned about the balance of it.

I have to say this, it's right there - respect.

'I think love or fear is an inappropriate statement,

'quite frankly. It's respect.'

I think that people should respect you.

If they don't respect you, then you've lost it.

You've basically lost it. It's as simple as that.

Ferguson was to win the respect of his rivals as well as his own team.

I played against Man United with Porto.

The respect started when in that Man United-Porto,

the first time, the opposite manager knocking my door

to congratulate my players.

Sir Alex walks in? Yeah.

That, in our Portuguese culture, was...

It doesn't belong to our culture.

From that moment, I owe him respect

and I always gave him my respect and my admiration.

Sir Alex retired in 2013 to be with his wife Cathy

following the death of her sister.

Champions!

He went out at the top after winning his 13th Premier League title.

We kept it quiet. Nobody knew. Not even my sons, nobody knew

until David Gill wanted to see me on a Sunday afternoon.

He came along and he says, "I'm retiring."

I said, "Phew, so am I."

LAUGHTER

I remember being asked in the late-'90s

when I was a finance director going around the City as,

presenting the results we were quoting on the stock exchange then -

what's going to be happen when Alex Ferguson retires?

What's going to happen?

Without doubt, when Alex left, it was going to be...

It was a sea change for the club.

You don't have a person as important and as influential and successful

as that for many, many years without being a sea change.

With people and what's happened,

there was always a bit of uncertainty.

He went out after a very successful season and, I think...

Personally, I think it was the right decision.

He told me a huge secret.

Not many people knew,

like, one month or two months before the decision to be made to stop.

I know that he trusts me, because if he doesn't, he doesn't tell me.

But I was... I was scared.

I was scared, so when finally he informed the media

about his decision, it was a sense of relief.

The man chosen to replace Ferguson was no big name, no proven winner.

David Moyes survived less than a year.

Many blamed Sir Alex for appointing his friend.

Now one of the biggest issues for any leader is when to go,

when to call it a day, and how to plan the succession.

Did you get it right?

On the succession...

..when I'd announced my retirement, do you honestly believe

that one man could decide the future of Manchester United?

It's absolute nonsense. There was a good process.

They're a professional football club,

they know what they're doing, the Glazers, David Gill.

Jose was going back to Chelsea,

Carlos Ancelotti was going to Real Madrid,

Jurgen Klopp had signed a contract at Dortmund,

Louis van Gaal was staying with Holland at the World Cup.

Probably every manager in the world looks at Man United as a huge club,

but I wanted to come to Chelsea.

We didn't bring that into the table, because we were so open.

He knows so much about myself that he knew

that, for almost a season,

I wanted to leave Real Madrid and I wanted to come to Chelsea.

The other thing was I took Pep Guardiola for dinner

in New York on the September

and had no idea I was ever going to retire.

I said to him, "Give me a call, tell me what you're going to do."

No answer.

I don't think we made a mistake at all.

I think we chose a good football man,

did a great job at Everton, 11 years there.

We picked the right man.

Unfortunately, it didn't work for David.

Sometimes people say, don't they, the critics?

"Well, it was impossible for David Moyes

"because he'd inherited this team and you'd stopped trying."

There's this continual thing about we'd left an old team

and all that nonsense.

We won the league by 11 points.

It was unbelievable.

The average age of my teams consistently in all the years,

the 20 years from when we started winning the championship,

was 27-28. Every year.

If Ryan Giggs had retired say six or seven years ago,

say he'd retired at 35...

it's quite likely that I'd have made him my assistant

and quite likely he could move right into the job with the experience of

being an assistant manager to me,

as he's doing in helping Louis van Gaal at the moment.

But I would never ask a player to quit.

He said that?

I mean...I obviously played until I was 40.

It's obviously a completely different job,

completely different mind-set going from playing to coaching,

so it would have been great for me personally to work under Sir Alex...

..to see how he worked behind the scenes,

because you don't really see that as a player.

We'd like to have spoken to many managers, believe me,

because that's the process.

We'd like to have asked them what they felt

about leaving a big club to go to a bigger club,

to come to Manchester United.

But it wasn't there for us.

I think we did the best under the circumstances we were in.

We have come to the end of the session.

Let's give it up for Sir Alex Ferguson.

APPLAUSE

Now, we've spent a long time analysing your leadership

and the lessons for others.

How would you sum it up?

Well, I think consistency is...

I think it probably sums me up.

I think that in the 26-and-a-half years I was there,

I never changed my conviction or my philosophy or my attitudes.

That consistency created players who were consistent,

the club were consistent,

and that's what's made them the best club in the world, without question.

My day job is in investment banking,

so I learnt a lot from how he's dealt

with very highly-paid individuals.

What really came across was his passion.

You could see how much he loved what he does.

The key thing is how to lead

very young teams of very talented people

and being able to get them to deliver the most.

Understanding about how to manage a talent pipeline,

bringing players in.

His ability to constantly renew himself.

I think that's a great lesson in it for all of us.

Live At The Apollo... ..is back. Yay!

Yeah! Back for a brand-new... ..series...

Oh, fantastic! ..on BBC Two.

Big respect. The future. This is going to go very well.