Leadership the Sven‐Göran Eriksson Way: How to Turn your Team into Winners, 2nd ed.

Citation

Murphy, A. (2006), "Leadership the Sven‐Göran Eriksson Way: How to Turn your Team into Winners, 2nd ed.", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 27 No. 8, pp. 717-718. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730610709318

This book was written by two experienced management experts, though with different backgrounds. Julian Birkshaw is Associate Professor at the London Business School and a Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research. Stuart Crainer is co‐founder of Suntop Media and author of bestseller on business and management.

The book is aimed at managers and leaders in both business and sport, drawing lessons from analysis of Sven Göran‐Eriksson's leadership style as a soccer manager in general and as manager of the English soccer team in particular.

The book is as much about soccer as it is about leadership. It is as much a tribute to Swedish management culture as it is a criticism of English soccer. In its structure, language and choice of analogies it is playfully serious with a seductive logic of its own: a logic sometimes based on unquestioned assumptions about “others”.

The contents page gives a hint of what is to come with chapter titles such as: Swedes 2 Turnips 1, Never Walk Alone, and Open Goals. In the Acknowledgements an associate is thanked for “providing funky inspiration”. Indeed this is a somewhat “funky” book about management and leadership. It is certainly not a standard academic guidebook or training manual. The basic argument is that Sven Göran‐Eriksson represents a mature style of leadership which is thoughtful, consensus‐based, democratic, simple but not simplistic, open, adaptable and delegatory. This argument threads throughout the chapters drawing on details of Eriksson's track record as a player, coach and manager. The Swedish approach to management, as exemplified by Eriksson, is argued as the ideal type for contemporary business. Swedish companies such as IKEA, Tetra Pak, SAS and Scandia and Ericsson are held up as exemplars from which the rest of the world could usefully learn. This ideal Swedish management model is contrasted with the predominant models in the UK, Germany, France, Japan and the USA, with more than a little national stereotyping for hyperbolic effect in support of the argument.

The book draws on popular management theory and well‐known case studies to extract seemingly simple lessons about leadership and management styles. These “lessons” are offered in summary boxes throughout the chapters with frequent invitation to “Sven Yourself” in relation to the lessons and in relation to the theories. In a way, a clever and accessible triple didactic perspective is created by this structural device: the perspective of leadership theory, the perspective of soccer management and the perspective of the reader/manager.

The referencing system in the book is somewhat unorthodox, with end‐of‐chapter footnotes for sources in the main text and additional published sources provided within the lesson “boxes”. The eight‐page index includes page numbers for the key leadership lessons presented in the book as well as names of people and places.

The writing style throughout is jargon‐free and informal, with more than a hint of humorous intent in sub‐headings such as “When silence is golden”, “Controlling fuss”, “It takes two”, “1966 and all that”, and “When in Rome”.

The success of the book from a reader's point of view depends to an extent on familiarity with English soccer over a number of decades, familiarity with particular national and international soccer games, and familiarity with the different styles of English soccer managers over the last 20 years. It could be suggested that this is essentially a man's book, an English man's book, even a male soccer supporter's book. There are few women business leaders or managers mentioned. But as an Irish female academic accustomed to reading education management books, and with a passing interest in English soccer, I found the book to be accessible, entertaining and cleverly structured. It has that amusing Anglocentric quality of viewing the global from the local while claiming to do otherwise! It is a useful, if time‐bound, contribution to the literature on leadership development which could usefully be read by undergraduates, sports leaders and business managers alike.