Sir Alex Ferguson has unveiled his managerial blueprint – while admitting the conditions that allowed him to be so successful at Manchester United are unlikely ever to be replicated. Over a series of interviews with the Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse in 2012, Ferguson went into detail about what he believed to be the eight key elements of his job. In doing so, Ferguson said he did not believe a manager would be given four years to achieve success, as he was at United, and that the manager should always remain in control of the dressing room, a situation that does not apply at all clubs. He also outlined his natural instinct for taking risks, which led to so many dramatic late victories and, in direct contrast to his successor David Moyes, said he felt observing training sessions, rather than running them, was essential to his own managerial ability. This is an edited version of his theories, which appear in full in the October edition of the Harvard Business Review. 1 Start with the foundation “From the moment I got to Manchester United, I thought of only one thing: building a football club. I wanted to build right from…