Review: The Barcelona Way
Reprinted from a LinkedIn article I first shared in 2019
How to Create a High-Performance Culture by Prof. Damian Hughes
The first in an occasional series of brief reviews of business books as I read them. I want to simplify some of the published noise on organisations, business, strategy and transformation. My chosen lens is are they Bad Business or Good Business? The reviews will be opinionated, hopefully will help you navigate to occasional insights, and avoid some of the publishing floodwater threatening to drown those who make a living from making organisations better - healthier, and more effective.
Bad Business/Good Business Score 👎👎👎
The other day I was chatting to a former elite sportsperson, now in business and public life, about creating a high performance organisation and how the challenge was similar to creating a high performing sports team. They cited the author of a well known book on elite performance, but one that addresses individuals rather than teams. On my way home from that meeting, with a long train journey ahead of me, I picked up "The Barcelona Way" at the station in the hope that it might fill in some gaps.
It didn't, for me. That's not to say that it might not work for you...
Summary
The back cover blurb says "sports psychologist Professor Damian Hughes draws on exclusive insight into the team, as well as first-hand research from organizational psychology, to set out a method to create your own high-performance culture. At the heart of Barcelona's winning culture are a set of principles...which govern how to nurture talent, prepare for change and provide the best environment to build a culture of sustained success. These principles - Big Picture, Arc of Change, Repetition, Cultural Architects and Authentic Leadership - are at the heart of Barcelona's unprecedented domination of football, and are the key to developing high-performance cultures in any team-based organization across every industry..."
The opening section introduces the importance of a culture of Commitment as the main driver of FC Barcelona's outstanding success over a sustained period, dismissing those of Real Madrid (Star Model), Chelsea (Autocracy), Liverpool (Bureaucracy) and Borussia Dortmund (Engineering) along the way, before outlining the 5 big principles listed above. The rest of the book then devotes a chapter (often divided into sub-chapters) to each principle. The descriptive/narrative sections are punctuated with more practical 'how to' exercises introducing practical tools and techniques to help you transform your organisation (presumably) into a mini-Barcelona. More on these later...
Bad Business
What didn't work for me - the book didn't hold my attention well, it raised many unanswered questions around what really drives footballing success, and it raised many unanswered questions including how unique and how replicable some of Barcelona's supposed drivers of success are.
I found the book a dreary read. It struggled to keep my attention - the confused structure, frequent repetition and alternation of narrative and 'how to' sections did not help. The 'how to' sections might be practical, but they appear from nowhere when you are trying to follow the author's line of reasoning, and by definition are not where you need them. Surely they would be better arranged in an easy-to-refer-to appendix, or at least would benefit from some kind of visual cross-referencing system that would make them easy to find (perhaps with a decision tree...if you are faced with problem x, turn to page yy for a useful framework?).
I kept asking myself questions about football. The notion that FC Barcelona has a universally applicable organisational recipe just seems too far-fetched to me. Hasn't a lot of their success has been down to some very football specific advantages? For instance: two absolutely incredible managers in Cruyff and Guardiola; a series of world-class players who would have excelled in many other teams (the likes of Andres Iniesta, Lionel Messi et al); an outstanding business strategy (the arrangement of customer offer, financial arrangements, player acquisition and development strategy etc that enables the club to make money while reinvesting in player assets in a way that is hard, but not impossible, to imitate); and perhaps most importantly a ground-breaking football game strategy (tactics if you prefer!) built around possession, speed, positional interchangeability and quick passing - the evolution of Cruyff's 'total football'. So much of this would be fascinating for a follower of football, and with graphics and appropriate data/statistics I am sure there is a great footballing book yet to be written about Barcelona's run of success.
And I kept asking myself questions about business. Sure, it's useful to ask why five times when you are trying to understand something. But is it unique to Barcelona in any way? And the elements of good speech-writing are well understood - yes Pep Guardiola exhibits many of these, but so do many others - again, is it in any way unique to Barcelona? So many good ideas seem shoehorned into the story as if they are integral to Barcelona's success, one begins to forget exactly what the special or even unique recipe is that Prof. Hughes is trying to put forward.
Good Business
What worked for me - the fact-base behind the book seems very robust, and many of the exercises could be useful in business life.
The blend of organisational psychology, with a robust academic hinterland, and clearly first-hand interviews with many key participants, brings a strong foundation to the book. I found if I distanced myself from some of the author's conclusions, the facts, anecdotes, and explanations in psychological terms were very interesting.
I've already mentioned the five whys and speechwriting exercises - there must be more than twenty altogether (I haven't counted them!) and many could be useful if you have not seen them before. Other useful ones include the Pixar approach to storytelling and the US Navy Seals approach to practice-makes-perfect. With a good visual navigation framework these would be so much more powerful.
Sum Up
Two quite interesting books in one, with little connection. It is not clear that the author has really grasped why Barcelona is so successful, nor which elements of Barcelona's model could or should be transposed to other organisations who aspire to be high-performing teams. One of the sources of my scepticism is the recent evolution of English football. Manchester City FC, with an avowedly different approach (to organisation, culture etc), has hired Pep Guardiola and thrown large amounts of money at the problem with considerable and rapid success (are business strategy, key personnel and football strategy the real keys after all?). And the bureaucracy that is Liverpool FC, with engineers Borussia Dortmund's Jurgen Klopp now at the helm, is giving Man City, and Europe, a fair old run for their money. Klopp's success again seems to be down to the footballing strategy - in particular the single-minded centring of recruitment, training and playing on the gegenpressing strategy - itself seemingly an evolution of the possession-based, fluid, rapid-passing style pioneered at FCB.
J-P Martins and the Surrey Hills Strategy Group hope to shine light on Bad Business and Good Business with the aim of enabling organisations everywhere to improve. We offer advice and leadership for transformation and transformational strategy in any organisation, large or small.
