From England’s Manchester United to the startups of Silicon Valley, success leaves clues and famed venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz has successfully identified many of them.
Moritz is one of the most intriguing people I’ve interviewed in years. It shouldn’t come as a surprise since the billionaire investor and chairman of Sequoia Capital has served on the boards and has been involved in the initial investments of companies such as: Google, Yahoo, PayPal, LinkedIn, and Airbnb. Moritz hasn’t simply enjoyed a front-row seat to the greatest innovations of our time; he’s helped to grow and to guide them.
I caught up with Moritz to discuss the new book he co-wrote with (and about) Sir Alex Ferguson, the former manager of Manchester United Football Club, who coached the soccer team from 1986 to 2013. The book is aptly titled, Leading, because it reveals the traits that made Ferguson the most successful coach in all of professional sports and the qualities he looked for in his players. In nearly four decades of managing, Ferguson won an astonishing 49 trophies and helped to grow Manchester United into one of the biggest commercial brands in the world (the club’s Facebook page alone has 66 million fans).
As a communication specialist I was especially intrigued by the book’s epilogue, forty pages where Moritz makes the connection between Ferguson’s approach to building winning soccer teams and Silicon Valley’s approach to building winning businesses from scratch. Here are several takeaways from the book and my conversation with Moritz that apply to any leader—in sports or business—who wants to build and inspire championship teams.
Great leaders can make a difference. As a journalist at Time magazine in the late 1970s and the author of the first book on Apple, Moritz became increasingly interested in how one person can shape an organization and inspire others to achieve the seemingly impossible.
“I was a young reporter when I first met Lee Iacocca at the end of the 1970s. And when he assumed the top job at Chrysler, everybody had given up the company for dead. It was not a topic I thought about very much prior to witnessing what happened at Chrysler under his leadership. That was the beginning of my belief in the power of an individual to shape an organization and to lead.”
Great leaders communicate goals clearly and consistently. Great leaders like Alex Ferguson or the individuals who lead the companies that Moritz has invested in have “a clear sense of the ultimate goal” and are skilled at communicating that goal to others. “You cannot lead an individual—let alone a team or an organization— without being able to clearly communicate the direction in which you want to go,” Moritz told me. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s the 45-minute second half of a soccer game or the next five years of a company. The leader has got to be able to clearly enunciate where he or she wants to go.”
Great leaders speak simply to hide complexity. A great leader may run a complicated business, but he gives simple directions that strip down the business to its essence and is instantly understandable, memorable, and actionable. Speaking of Alex Ferguson, Moritz writes, “His directions tended to be short and concise because barely anyone, whether they work in a hospital or a steel mill can remember more than three instructions. Long-winded monologues do not strike the target in the way that brief talks relaying precise and concise instructions do.”
Great leaders infuse their teams with an unmistakable purpose. Moritz is a strong believer in a clear, simple purpose that acts an organization’s guiding light. Sir Alex Ferguson’s vision [what companies might call their mission statement] was profound in its simplicity and communicated so consistently it was “burned between the ears of every newcomer to the club,” according to Moritz.
The mission was this: At United we expect to win every game.
“It’s clear, it’s unmistakable, and with that sort of purpose and mission, it’s a message that infuses itself into every nook and cranny of an organization.”
Moritz and his team at Sequoia also look for the simplicity of message in the entrepreneurs they support. A short, one-line mission is memorable and, ultimately, inspiring. According to Moritz, “The best summary I ever heard of a business was from Sandy Lerner, the co-founder of Cisco Systems, who, in 1986, when the company had just eight employees, was asked to communicate her company’s purpose. Her answer was as terse as a Glaswegian’s: ‘We network networks.’ It sounded deceptively simple, but it served as the company’s north star for the ensuing 25 years.”
Moritz reminds us that simplicity is hard work. “It’s why poetry is so much more difficult to write than prose,” he says. “Most people—most listeners—don’t concentrate, or they tune out, or they have short memories. So burning the message into their skulls is a rare art. In order to do that it must be memorable, clear, vivid, and have an element of emotion associated with it.”
At nearly 400 pages, Leading contains endless lessons on all aspects of leadership, but I was struck by how much of the content addressed effective communication. Sir Alex explains why when he says, “My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That’s the difference between leadership and management.”
Success leaves clues and Moritz and Ferguson— two of the most successful leaders in sports and business— are obsessed with piecing those clues together.