What do the Foxes say?

It was THE headline in the Sports pages of the European press last week: On May 2nd Leicester City, the underdog, became de facto champion of the English Premier League, „a competition … so infused with money that those among the biggest-spending clubs—Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United—have won all 20 league titles of the past 20 years“ (The Economist).

Sports obsessives will spend the summer debating how they did it. And the world of business will once more look to sport for lessons on management and leadership. What lessons might there be? („The success of Leicester City will be pored over for management lessons“, The Economist, May 2nd, 2016):

1. A relaxed management style may cultivate a particularly strong sense of team spirit.
2. Successful leaders learn from their failures.
3. Smaller outfits can prosper by emulating what bigger ones already do well. And, thanks to technology, this has never been so easy.
4. Not succeeding in one area can be helpful—if you can then focus on doing better elsewhere. Avoiding distractions and focusing on the “core” is a management trope.

My own experience is this: SMEs simply can’t  juggle too many balls at once. They need to focus on their target markets, concentrate on their own strengths (this is often easier than removing weaknesses, and abandonment – those, who try to please everybody, won’t thrill anyone.