Enda McEvoy: Brian Cody's 15 rules of management

When he isn’t plotting Kilkenny’s continued world domination, Brian Cody, who tonight reaches his 80th championship match in charge, moonlights as a public speaker.

He’s on the books of Speaker Solutions, a company in Dublin, and he gives orations to business types. Having honed his routine over many years he speaks for 40 minutes without the aid of notes and is very good indeed.

Albert Camus, an enthusiastic amateur goalkeeper at home in Algeria before he got all existential, once declared that everything he knew about life he had learned from soccer. By a similar token, everything Brian Cody knows about business he has learned from hurling. What follows here are some of Cody’s leading rules of management, in no particular order, accompanied by their genesis.

To win you must have a killer instinct at the core. You must have the savagery to want to win.

Savage. A favourite in the Cody lexicon. Best illustrated when Kilkenny were at their apogee in 2008-09. They praised their opponents beforehand, then came to bury them. Leading comfortably at half-time? Then finish these guys off altogether on the resumption. That “splinter of ice at the heart” as referred to by Graham Greene. No let-up. No mercy. Savagery.

Have true confidence in your own ability

Not a problem for Cody the player, who by the age of 22 had won All-Ireland senior, minor, under-21, colleges and club medals. It may initially have been an issue for him as an inter-county manager, given that he famously hadn’t won a Kilkenny title as boss of James Stephens. Then he started to win All-Irelands.

Go in and do things your way. No one else has done it like that before.

A neat touch of the Oscar Wildes about this one. By 2002, or certainly by 2003, Cody had discovered how to do things his way. Winning All-Irelands can be of assistance in that regard.

As manager, you must surround yourself with experts.

All inter-county teams have integrated interdisciplinary backroom units. Not all of them work, either because of poor-quality personnel or because the manager doesn’t understand what they’re trying to achieve and hence doesn’t allow them to do their job properly.

Show Cody you know what you’re doing and you win his confidence. Noreen Roche, the Kilkenny nutritionist, has been there as long as he has and he wouldn’t dream of telling her how to do her job. Cody’s choice of experts, and constant renewal thereof, has helped keep Kilkenny ahead of the pack.

You as manager take responsibility for setting standards of excellence. Any training centre or pitch should be just that, a centre of excellence in every way.

Which is what Nowlan Park has become, to the extent that people visiting Kilkenny during the summer to watch the team train have emerged as a small but acknowledged boost to the local economy.

As a leader the first key to success is turning up.

... And turning up first. For a 7pm training session Cody will be on the field by 6pm. Everything the manager does must become a standard. Being sloppy with people means getting sloppiness in return.

If you don’t win it is because you are not good enough.

Cody doesn’t make excuses. He has never blamed the referee (not in defeat at any rate) and has never argued that Kilkenny were unlucky on a given day.

Lack of focus contributed to their first two championship defeats on his watch, versus Cork in 1999 and Galway two years later.

For their seven subsequent defeats, however, there wasn’t even the shadow of an excuse. They simply weren’t good enough.

But you just know that on each occasion Cody wound up back home having a conversation with himself. “Why weren’t we good enough? And what do I do to ensure we’ll good enough next time out?”

If you take your eye off the ball you will be blown away.

No prizes for guessing the basis of this maxim: The 2001 All-Ireland semi-final. Galway 2-15 Kilkenny 1-13. By now the match and its implications have been parsed to such a degree that further comment is superfluous.

If Cody ever has nightmares they surely consist of a freeze frame of Richie Murray horsing into the Kilkenny midfielders at the throw-in that day.

There are no superstars and never were in KK hurling.

Exhibit A: Henry Shefflin. He might have been a superstar in another county but he wasn’t a superstar in the only place that really mattered — at training in Nowlan Park. Cody made sure of that. Alex Ferguson once said that a manager has to ensure he’s the most important person at the club. Shefflin and, before him, DJ Carey were never left in any doubt as to whom the most important person in Kilkenny was.

As leader, know the importance of humility because the absence of ego is what sets leaders apart from others.

An interesting one because, modest though he is, Cody possesses a healthy ego. Given his treasure trove of All-Irelands as player and manager he has to. Who in his situation wouldn’t have?

Thing is, he’s smart enough to keep his ego well hidden. It’s always “the lads”, never “me”.

He rarely uses the personal pronoun and at last year’s All-Ireland media evening in Langton’s he resisted a question about how he’d cope as a player in the current game; he saw the potential headline a mile off and promptly made the irrefutable excuse that - sorry, lads — the All-Ireland final was about the players, not about him.

Know when to weed out people and make tough decisions.

The overriding lesson of the All-Ireland victories of 2002-03. Cody bit the bullet on issues involving Charlie Carter, John Power and Brian McEvoy, his own clubman – and lo, it worked.

Would anyone other than Cody have dropped Richie Power for the 2007 All-Ireland final, for instance? The willingness to make tough decisions became a virtue. Only once – with Shefflin in the 2010 final – did he let heart rule head.

No one owns the jersey. It has to be earned at each training session

Those nights in Nowlan Park. ‘Nuff said.

Build a genuine spirit and work at it daily. You are the ambassador for that spirit.

Cody had, he has frequently stated, one aim when he took over as Kilkenny manager. To create a spirit that would be unbreakable, in defeat as well as in victory. Thus it has proved.

They’ve lost matches. They’ve lost All-Ireland finals. Carter walked away. Denis Byrne defected behind the Iron Curtain. DJ Carey grew old. Most improbably of all, Tommy Walsh lost form and ended up human. Even Shefflin retired in the end. Kilkenny’s spirit carried them through and above it all. Man gets tired; spirit don’t. Man surrenders; spirit won’t.

As leader, you have to develop leadership qualities in others. Leadership is in everyone, you just have to bring it out.

Two words. TJ Reid. Came on in the 2008 and ’09 All Ireland finals and scored.

Captain for the 2010 final and was taken off. All Star in 2012 but couldn’t make the team for the championship opener against Dublin the following summer.

Now he’s Hurler of the Year. Was it that Shefflin’s departure liberated him? Perhaps, but Cody’s role in helping Reid find his inner leader shouldn’t be underestimated. Not all Indians become chiefs. This one did.

Leaders need to define not what that they seek to do today but what legacy they will leave for the future.

Kilkenny as market leaders, the gold standard, hurling’s first hyperpower. Legacy enough.