What Pep Guardiola can teach business

Man City manager Pep Guardiola's pressing and possession may no longer terrorise football's elite - ask Arsenal, they've stopped flinching. But in the boardroom, tiki-taka could well be the next strategic weapon. 'Pressing' in football means a team applying pressure on an opponent in possession of the ball to win it back or force a mistake - in other words, suffocating the opponent until they cough up the ball. In business, it's the morning meeting where marketing, sales and finance gang up on product development until it's ready to launch an A-grade app. High press, high stakes.

Possession, once the hallmark of Guardiola's dominance, should now fuel corporate culture. 'Control the ball' can become 'control the narrative'. Because if you keep the conversation, you keep surging ahead of competition. Guardiola's positional play can be rebranded as 'cross-functional synergy' where everyone stays in their lane, but overlaps just enough to justify total power play. In this scheme of things, the CEO is the 'false nine' - dropping deep into 'midfield' to link up actual play, instead of staying high up in the pitch as a traditional, ivory tower 'striker'. And transitions? Now the company must 'pivot' when required.

It may be ironic that Guardiola's FC Barcelona-honed tactics, once feared for its ruthless efficiency, now serve as a corporate metaphor: press hard, possess everything, surge ahead and score. So, while Pep may be losing midfield battles, his template can win wars in MBA classrooms and company boardrooms. His legacy lives on - in quarterly OKRs and synergy summits. Football may have evolved, but corporate strategy can do well to discover the circa 2011 Barcelona playbook. It could well be the next big joy to watch - in the winning game.