The high performance of team Orange (The Dutch national soccer team) at the World Cup at Brazil does ask for an explanation of the unexpected results from a Best Value perspective.

 Is the Dutch coach Louis van Gaal, a manager of a leader. According to Best Value a manager applies the traditional leadership model and a leader the new leadership model.

The traditional model is change the people to fit in the system, Manage direct and control, the leader is the constraint, inefficient and use a lot of resources. Needless to say that the new leadership model is the opposite of these.

The question is how Best Value is van Gaal?

The conclusion must be that van Gaal is by far the best Best Value expert in the Netherlands.

The new leadership model is about changing the system and not the people. Van Gaal changed to Dutch 4-4-3 system to the defensive Italian 5-3-2 system. In fact he did not change the people to fit into the system, he looked at his forwards and his defenders and observed the 5-3-2 system is the best system.

Van Gaal is the constrain, he is the leader and must know when to talk and when to listen. It is what he did at the water breaks during the Mexico game. His top players did the coaching and motivation speech, van Gaal just listened. 

Than there are the silos, each soccer player is a silo. He ignored it, each silo is as important as any other silo. Even if it requires substituting your best player (van Persie of and Huntelaar on), only Best Value coaches see that such a substitute is required.

All the players admire van Gaal is ability to see into the future and see events happen before they do. All van Gaal does is use logic and common sense, simple because if a team scores the first goal it is either 1-0 or 0-1.  So if the unexpected event happens that we are one down, it is obvious van Gaal knows what to do. He has his mitigation plan ready. Same situation in the final games, if no goals are scored eventually it comes down to the shoot out lottery. You need your best penalty killing keeper, so make the substitution 10 seconds before the end of the game.

And than the tricky question is van Gaal Best Value in all aspects? Well to be honest although his learning cycle is pretty fast regarding soccer coaching it has been slow in killing his own silo thinking. Van Gaal has been in the anti-press silo for a very long time, he just recently is over that.