The Principles of Principles (+School Principles)
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
I’m a Liverpool Football Club supporter.
When I was a boy I was a fan of the players.
But it gradually dawned on me that 20 year-old’s that had focused their entire childhood on kicking balls, had nothing of any value to say.
It turns out that the most interesting characters in this sporting soap opera were the managers.
Liverpool have a great history of success and were an awesome team when I was a child.
But for the bulk of my life they were a bang average team, except for a few brief moments when through sheer willpower Steven Gerrard was able to drag the rest of the team through to win a cup.
Then in 2015, after a run of particularly dire managers, they hired Jürgen Klopp.
Klopp had a forgettable career as a footballer, “I never succeeded in bringing to the field what was going on in my brain. I had the talent for the fifth division, and the mind for the Bundesliga. The result was a career in the second division.”
But his top division mind started paying off when he slipped into the manager role.
He first managed Mainz 05, the club he’d spent almost his whole playing career at, immediately saving them from relegation from the second tier of German football.
Three seasons later Mainz were promoted to the top tier for the first time in their history.
Next he was hired by a much bigger club, Borussia Dortmund, who had significantly underperformed finishing in 13th place in the top tier.
Three seasons later his Dortmund team won the league, interrupting the almost constant reign of Bayern Munich as the most dominant team in Germany.
Then they won it the following year too.
Along with the domestic cup competition.
But he then experienced a terrible run of unlucky results and left the role.
Liverpool jumped at the opportunity and tracked him down on his holiday to recruit him.
Klopp brought with him a wealth of exciting principles about how football could be played.
Heavy Metal Football
Football managers have to be strategists, tacticians and motivators.
But what separates the truly great managers from the rest is their focus on having a clear picture of how they want their teams to play and the ability to convey that to their players.
It works almost irrespective of the actual plan itself because managers can be highly successful with very different systems:
Johan Cruyff with Total Football, introduced controlled chaos through completely fluid positioning.
Pep Guardiola with Tiki-Taka and Juego de Posición, dominated games through short, rapid passing and constant movement.
Helenio Herrera with Catenaccio, won with the ultra-disciplined, ruthless defense that dominated Italian football in the 50s and 60s.
Diego Simeone (the highest paid football manager in the world) with Cholismo uses extreme defensive discipline, relentless work rate, and emotional intensity.
Whatever ideas they choose, these most successful managers go all in, because a little of something is nothing.
Principles are the simplified way to convey those core ideas to the players.
These were Jürgen Klopp’s principles:
Heavy Metal Football - He wanted his teams played in an intense, high-energy, and improvisational way to swarm other teams and pounce on opportunities.
When Klopp was managing Dortmund, he was asked to contrast his style with Arsène Wenger’s and he responded, “He likes having the ball, playing football, passes. It’s like an orchestra. But it’s a silent song. But I like heavy metal more. I always want it loud. … Fighting football, not serenity football, that is what I like.”
Gegenpressing - The moment his teams lose the ball is the moment they should immediately and aggressively swarm the opposition to win it back.
For Klopp a good counter-pressing situation is "the best playmaker in the world," because it wins the ball back close to the opponent's goal when they are most disorganised.
The Klopp Hug - He embraced his players to offer psychological safety, because innovation and creativity is only possible if people feel safe enough to fail.
His famous bear hugs were a public declaration of support as Liverpool goalkeeper Simon Mignolet remembers, “it gives you a good feeling because it means you know he is behind you and supporting you. That’s what you need as a player; the confidence of the manager and the whole staff, that they’re behind you and we’re working in the same direction.”
Mentality Monsters - He wanted his teams to have high levels of emotional resilience to play to win all the way to the last moment.
After Liverpool came from behind to win a crucial league game against Southampton in April 2019, Klopp said in his post-match interview, "and then the third goal, wow. … It was just an amazing moment. Really, the boys are mentality monsters – I love that."
Under Klopp, Liverpool’s mentality monsters scored 17 Premier League-winning goals in the 90th minute or later, breaking the record of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United.
A month after the Southampton game, Liverpool faced a crunch game with Barcelona in the Champions League Semifinal after being soundly beaten in the first leg 3-0.
Liverpool overawed Barcelona in the second leg winning 4-0 in one of the greatest comebacks in football history with an emotional leader declaring, "These boys are fucking mentality monsters. It’s unbelievable, it’s unbelievable.”
With these principles the players understood how they should react to whatever was happening on the pitch and it led to an amazing period of success.
Liverpool went through to win the Champions League that season.
And then they won the Premier League for the first time in 30 years. Klopp eventually won every possible major trophy possible with Liverpool.
Principles of Principles
“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” - Harrington Emerson
Principles are not rules (or methods).
A rule tells you what to do or how to do it, they only work only in exactly the same situations and if circumstances change the rules stop working.
A principle explains why you are doing it, it means they are adaptable to different contexts and they remain valid over time.
Klopp’s principles of high energy, decisive action, physiological safety and resilience could work for other football teams, and they will work at any point in the future, but they’d also work in other sports and some are valid even in the world of business.
We’re constantly faced with situations that we need to react to and if we treat every single one as if we’re facing for the first time, we’d get swamped.
Instead if we can categorise them and apply the principles to deal with them we can make better decisions faster, stripping away the noise of a specific situation to reveal the underlying signal.
A good principle takes years of experience and compresses it into a single memorable sentence.
“Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success. All successful people operate by principles that help them be successful.” - Ray Dalio
Principles allow you to continuously learn and improve.
To excel in any field, whether it is football, business, or life, the most effective strategy is to study the foundational principles.
By mastering these core concepts, you can effectively select, adapt, or create the methods needed to succeed in any situation.
You learn how to think, not just what to think.
Principles are the building blocks of mindset.
You can choose to adopt a principle and with repeated use it can become the default way you approach the world.
School Principles
In 2016 researchers assessed the performance of 160 secondary schools in England observing the tenure of 411 head teachers.
It’s a great insight into comparable management techniques and the value of principles.
They found that the head teachers could be categorised into five groups:
Surgeons act decisively to try to turn around schools and increase results. They exclude an average of 28% of the final-year students, fire around a tenth of staff and focus all efforts on final-year examinations. As one surgeon explained, “We can’t help everyone.”
Architects are planners and doers who focus on instilling improved educational principles, improving behaviour standards, developing teachers and engaging the community. They only expel 1% of children and slowly replace poorly performing staff.
Philosophers try to lead and inspire by example instead of seeing themselves as managers, they discuss a lot of teaching ideas but they don’t actually make changes to the strategy, student body or the staff.
Accountants focus on financial turnaround, growing the size of the school to improve the balance.
Soldiers also focus on financial turnaround, and they seek to cut short-term costs to meet the school's budget constraints.
Surgeons are the stars.
Surgeons deliver an immediate 10% improvement in examination results with only a slight negative effect on finances.
Surgeons are the most sought-after heads and the best paid, earning £154,000 a year on average (£51,000 more than the next highest paid group) and almost two-thirds have a national honour, like a knighthood.
But things get interesting after the Surgeons move on with their new stellar reputation to their next exciting and highly rewarded turnaround.
One year after their departure the results are terrible.
The short term results bump and focus on final year exams has long-term negative consequences on the younger children whose education was neglected.
Meanwhile the schools that had principles instilled by Architects continue to deliver both great examination and financial results.
Three years further down the line the schools formerly led by Surgeons have managed to recover.
Accountants improve the finances, but barely change the exam results.
Soldiers also don’t shift the exam results, and as soon as they leave the costs bounce back because the cuts were too deep to sustain.
Philosophers have negligible effect on results or finances but they are almost as good as the Surgeons at self-publicity with 30% receiving national honors.
But the schools that were run by Architects continue to exceed the performance of all the other groups.
The only approach that has a real positive long-term effect on results are the ones that were led by clear principles.
“Principles endure, formulas don’t.” - Bill Bernbach
Principled Leadership
You see the same effects in the world of business where leaders are incentivised and rewarded by short-term bonuses and quarterly cycles.
The wrong leaders can rise to prominence.
And just like in schools it can result in negative outcomes.
Surgeons are the ultra competitive zero-sum leaders who are great at marketing themselves. Lee Iacocca is a good example. As the CEO of Chrysler he was the corporate superstar of the 1980s, slashing costs, boosting profits, fronting TV commercials and writing multiple leadership books. But the quick flashy fixes didn’t last. By 1998 Chrysler was on its knees and needed to be rescued by Daimler-Benz.
Philosophers are the all-talk thought leaders who are deeply obsessed with methodologies. Ron Johnson the man that launched the Apple Store was hired to revitalise the department store chain J.C. Penney. He had a strong individual vision of how retail should be and immediately stopped all sales discounts and vouchers without testing. Within 17 months sales had plummeted 25% and the company went into a tailspin.
Soldiers are people like "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. In his one-year as CEO of Scott Paper he cut 11,000 jobs, slashed R&D and corporate overhead, the stock price tripled and he sold the business to Kimberly Clarke. Cutting only works for so long. Dunlap immediately ran the same play in his next role at Sunbeam, but unable to find a quick buyer to hide the damage, the company collapsed into bankruptcy and accounting fraud.
Accountants are roll-up acquirers like "Fred the Shred" Goodwin at Royal Bank of Scotland. He went on a massive acquisition spree to build the biggest bank in the world, culminating in the buyout of ABN Amro. But he didn’t build a better business. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, RBS's poorly integrated, debt-laden empire collapsed, resulting in the largest corporate bailout in UK history.
Architects are the principles leaders like Jürgen Klopp. He rebuilt Liverpool as an ecosystem that slowly built on a shared and sustainable identity. In his first press conference he asked people to give him four years to build a winning culture, and he systematically followed through until the organisation was robust enough to win. Liverpool won that first Premier League title exactly four years after he was hired and in the year after he left Liverpool won the Premier League once again.
"It's not important what people think when you come in, it's much more important what people think when you leave." - Jürgen Klopp
Principles build mentality monsters.
Hill, A., Mellon, L., Laker, B., Goddard, J., “The One Type of Leader Who Can Turn Around a Failing School”, Harvard Business Review 2016
