Brian Clough is my hero and if you’re in leadership or management, he should probably be yours too.
Never heard of him? Think of him as the Vince Lombardi of English football... if Lombardi had a sharper tongue, a bigger ego, and had won the Super Bowl with a team no one had heard of.
Clough didn’t manage the big-name clubs. He took small, under-resourced, overlooked teams and turned them into champions. He led Derby County from the second division to the top of English football. Then did something even more impossible: he took Nottingham Forest, a team that had never won anything, and made them European Champions. Twice.
That’s like taking the Jacksonville Jaguars and beating the Chiefs in back-to-back Super Bowls.
And he did it his way.
Clough didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t care about legacy clubs, FA politics, or what the press thought. He built teams around belief, discipline, and execution. And he told the truth.......loudly.
Some of his finest lines:
• “I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.”
• “Resignations are for people who’ve got a conscience. I haven’t.”
• “Players lose you games, not tactics. There’s so much crap talked about tactics by people who barely know how to win a game of dominoes.”
• “If a chairman sacks the manager he initially appointed, he should go as well.”
• “If a player disagrees with me, we talk about it for 20 minutes and then we decide I was right.”
• “Rome wasn’t built in a day. But I wasn’t on that particular job.”
He was funny, brutal, and fearless. The results spoke for themselves.
In private equity, we love frameworks, scorecards, and safe hands. But Clough is a reminder that real value creation doesn’t come from playbooks, it comes from people with a vision and the conviction to drag everyone else there.
Hire people who know how to win. Then back them, even if they don’t play by the rules.