How delighting the client overcame impossible odds: Qatar & the 2022 World Cup

How did the tiny nation of Qatar win the right to host the 2022 World Cup against impossible odds? By delighting its client!

Heidi N. Moore has an insightful article on how it was done.

The obstacles were monstrous. Qatar faced much larger and more obvious rivals: USA, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. All of them had much more to offer than Qatar. Qatar is not a soccer nation: it ranks 113^th in the world. It has a tiny population. It has few of the facilities needed for a World Cup. It was laboring under the cloud of a failed inspection and allegations of corruption.

So how did Qatar win?

Qatar chose the law firm of SNR Denton in May 2009 to help legally structure its plans for World Cup, according to Romi Nayef, an American citizen and lawyer for the firm, who worked with the Qatari bid committee. Moore talked with Mr. Nayef about what his colleagues did that helped Qatar win the World Cup bid against long odds. Three elements were key:

1.      Finding what the client wants: “Our approach to the bid was to take FIFA’s requirements and meet every single requirement,” Mr. Nayef told Ms Moore. “We did not come with our ideas. We took FIFA’s requirements and built around that.”

2.      Answer all the client’s objections: Qatar was accused of corruption and inspectors said the climate was too hot for soccer. The objections were resolved. The bid turned out to be “squeaky clean” and the air conditioned stadiums answered the heat issue. After all, Qatar is no hotter than Houston.

3.      Speak their language: Moore writes: “Qatar’s representatives made their pitches to FIFA in Spanish, French and English. The ability and willingness to speak to FIFA’s leaders in Western languages helped show that the small country could engage on a more worldly level. ‘It’s that kind of touch that gave a different perspective to what we could bring to it, that we could speak FIFA’s languages,’ Mr. Nayef said.”

Instead of starting from what Qatar's "value chain" had to offer, which was very little, (inside-out), Qatar began from what the client wanted and showed how they could provide that (outside-in).

It helped of course that FIFA was interested in having a Middle Eastern nation host the 2022 cup. But Qatar made it easy for FIFA by providing exactly what the client wanted. The client was delighted. Qatar won.

Read the full article here.

To learn more about delighting clients and radical management, read my article on the reinvention of management or my book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

POSTSCRIPT

Suggestions have been made by bemused officials from the losing countries that Qatar "bought" the win by spending $45 million making investments in the countries of the relevant FIFA officials. However the other countries also spent considerable amounts, including Australia $43 million, Russia $30 million and the US $10 million. For more details on these charges, read the Wall Street Journal article.

Comments

[tom gilb]

Thanks for this excellent case study of the Qatar bid. A useful example for me to cite.

[Bryan Murphy]

I agree Qatar did met expectations well. However the process of determining where the cup is held is widely acknowledged as flawed and subject to the potential to be the best cup money can buy.

[modeling women]

Well, they have assumed it would happen. There it is.

[Coach Outlet]

My take is that the problem is not so much that Agile and Scrum don't t scale. We now have many examples of large-scale implementations of Agile.