Glory, glory, Man United!

Depending on how you measure these things, Manchester United is the most successful English Football Club of all time; they are tied for first place with (my beloved) Liverpool for overall number of championships wins (18) but have won 11 FA Cups to the Merseysider’s 7.

Manchester United is also famed for an attacking style of football, in which the team focuses more on scoring goals than they do on preventing them. This distinctive style causes two things to happen.

• By focusing on scoring goals, Manchester United win football games (soccer is, afterall, about scoring more goals than the opposition.)
• There are more goals in Games Manchester United play in, because they will let an opposition team score two goals if it means they score five.

This makes for exciting football to watch, a bigger gate and more money. This is a positive feedback loop and a reason why Manchester United is the most widely supported sports team on earth.

It isn’t about ignoring costs, Manchester United only very rarely push everyone forward, and only in very special circumstances. But the framework the team uses to assess where they are in the overall game is the number of goals they’ve scored rather than the number of goals they’ve let through.

How can we start to apply this kind of strategy for our own game plans?

The truth is most people already measure personal success on achievements not set backs, but professionally many are still stuck in measuring progress with the amount of time and/or dollars consumed, and not the value those costs have created.

If we can focus our work on what we’re delivering in terms of value and not just the costs we will create positive feedback loops which we can all enjoy.