Just Don’t review

In China in the 1950s, the Communist leadership decided to eradicate the entire population of sparrows (part of what became known as the Great Leap Forward) as they were eating the farmers’ seeds. Chairman Mao Zedong was in a hurry to industrialise the country and wanted to introduce the collectivisation of agriculture to free up more people to work in industry. In 1958 there was a campaign to kill all the sparrows, which was very successful. Unfortunately, there was a problem: the sparrows’ main source of food wasn’t seeds, but insects, and with no sparrows left, the locust population increased exponentially, and began to eat up the country’s crops. This, in combination with other factors, resulted in a huge famine which killed between 15 and 45 million people.

Dutch football international, Jaap Stam, enjoyed three incredibly successful years playing for Manchester United, winning practically everything that could be won, including the UEFA Champions League in 1999. In August 2001, he was driving home from a training session, when his mobile phone rang. Sir Alex Ferguson, his club manager, was calling him. ‘Where are you?’ Ferguson asked. ‘Near my house, at a petrol station,’ Stam replied. ‘Stay there.’ A little while later, Ferguson arrived, got into Stam’s car and told him that the club were going to sell him. Much later, Ferguson revealed that he had acted too quickly, as Italian club Lazio had made a very generous offer for Stam which he’d accepted; one of the biggest mistakes of his entire managing career, he later admitted. Why did he make such a big mistake? Well, at around this time, technological advances meant that there were companies that collected data on every move professional footballers made on the pitch, such as how much and how fast they ran. Ferguson had noticed that Stam, a defender, wasn’t tackling as much as he used to. Therefore, Ferguson had come to the conclusion that Stam was becoming a worse player. Whereas, in fact, he had become so experienced that he seldom put himself in situations where he needed to tackle an opponent. Ferguson was right to acknowledge the potential of the new technology; he was just too hasty to rely on it completely.

There are many books on war and about people who act on their gut feelings (such as American President George W. Bush, when he decided to attack Afghanistan following the terror attacks on September 11, 2001), but maybe there should be more like books like this one, which puts forward a credible alternative: don’t be in a hurry, bide your time and don’t be afraid of going against the grain. Maybe, in future, we should all wait before doing something without giving it a lot of thought.