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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Bill Walsh
Read between
July 19 - August 9, 2018
His mind for technical football was extraordinary, but beyond that was his ability to organize and manage his staff, players, everybody—to get the whole organization on exactly the same page.
he had a tremendous knowledge of all aspects of the game and a visionary approach to offense; (2) he brought in a great staff and coaches who knew how to coach, how to complement his own teaching of what we needed to know to rise to his standard of performance; and (3) he taught us to hate mistakes.
He taught us to want to be perfect and instilled in the team a hunger for improvement, a drive to get better and better.
He was extremely demanding without a lot of noise. He was supportive.
Bill raised everybody’s standard, what we defined as acceptable.
“If you’re up at 3 A.M. every night talking into a tape recorder and writing notes on scraps of paper, have a knot in your stomach and a rash on your skin, are losing sleep and losing touch with your wife and kids, have no appetite or sense of humor, and feel that everything might turn out wrong, then you’re probably doing the job.”
Now the line of scrimmage put us out of field-goal range and forced us into a passing situation;
Failure is part of success, an integral part. Everybody gets knocked down. Knowing it will happen and what you must do when it does is the first step back.
The competitor who won’t go away, who won’t stay down, has one of the most formidable competitive advantages of all.
To put it bluntly, I would teach each person in the organization what to do and how to think.
I came to the San Francisco 49ers with an overriding priority and specific goal—to implement what I call the Standard of Performance.
Regardless of your specific job, it is vital to our team that you do that job at the highest possible level in all its various aspects, both mental and physical (i.e., good talent with bad attitude equals bad talent).
philosophy is the aggregate of your attitudes toward fundamental matters and is derived from a process of consciously thinking about critical issues and developing rational reasons for holding one particular belief or position rather than another.
Your philosophy is the single most important navigational point on your leadership compass.
Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement;
I sought to channel the concentration of the 49ers toward improving performance on
I directed our focus less to the prize of victory than to the process of improving—obsessing,
During this early period I began hiring personnel with four characteristics I value most highly: talent, character, functional intelligence (beyond basic intelligence, the ability to think on your feet, quickly and spontaneously), and an eagerness to adopt my way of doing things, my philosophy.
Individuals who didn’t measure up in various ways were removed without fanfare (usually), and those who challenged my authority did so at risk.
In a very real way, everything I did was teaching in some manner or other.
I was insisting that all employees not only raise their level of “play” but dramatically lift the level of their thinking—how they perceived their relationship to the team and its members;
appreciated that when Jerry Rice caught a touchdown pass he was not solely responsible, but an extension of others—including
Victory is produced by and belongs to all.
And this organizational perception that “success belongs to everyone” is taught by the leader.
That’s extremely important because when you know that your peers—the others in the organization—demand and expect a lot out of you and you, in turn, out of them, that’s when the sky’s the limit. It’s why egotism can hurt group pride and unity so much. An individual who acts like a big shot, as if he or she is solely responsible for what the team has accomplished, has taken over ownership of the group’s achievement.
The leader’s job is to facilitate a battlefield-like sense of camaraderie among his or her personnel, an environment for people to find a way to bond together, to care about one another and the work they do, to feel the connection and extension so necessary for great results. Ultimately, it’s the strongest bond of all, even stronger than money.
The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.
In a way, an organization is like an automobile assembly line; it must be first class or the cars that come off it will be second rate. The exceptional assembly line comes first, before the quality car.
Very talented individuals had been hired; malcontents, underachievers, and the unmotivated were being rooted out and replaced;
the organization’s behavioral “infrastructure” was essentially built.
between the ups and downs, the good times and bad, there are ongoing challenges to keep everyone firing on all cylinders at all times.
My high standards for actions and attitudes within our organization never wavered—regardless of whether we were winning or losing.
But, the organization, our team, came first.
The intense focus on those pertinent details cements the foundation that establishes excellence in performance.
The key to performing under pressure at the highest possible level, regardless of circumstance, is preparation in the context of your Standard of Performance and a thorough assimilation by your organization of the actions and attitudes contained within your philosophy of leadership.
He liked tight management principles and wanted things clear and easily understood.
He was simply unbelievable in the way he could spot potential in a person and then develop it.
swish-and-sway.
Unfortunately, too often we find comfort in what worked before—even when it stops working.
Without any grand vision for changing NFL football, we changed it. It was made possible,
Paul Brown, was a great facilitator. Paul Brown allowed me to be creative, encouraged and listened to my ideas (many of them counterintuitive), and put them into practice with the Cincinnati Bengals.
Michael Ovitz, a top talent agent in Hollywood for many years and later president of the Walt Disney Company, recognized the link between scripting and success: “Every detail is important. Where do you have a meeting? What is the surrounding environment? People who don’t think about these things have a harder time in business. It’s got to be the right place. It’s got to be the right color. It’s got to be the right choice. Everything has to be strategized. You have to know where you’re going to come out before you go in. Otherwise you lose.” (New York Times, May 9, 1999.) Scripting and
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Things take longer to play out in business than in football.
When a threat like this occurs, we cannot allow ourselves to hope for the best or wait to see how bad the damage might be. A leader must be perceptive and respond swiftly.
Progress, or lack thereof, in sports and business can be measured in a variety of ways, some much more subtle than others.
Instead, I waited until the season ended to conduct a comprehensive evaluation
What Bill Walsh did is easy to describe: (1) He could identify problems that needed to be solved; and (2) He could solve them.
In football they’re called locker-room leaders,
Every organization has them, influential people who’ve got your back—or are putting a knife in it.
Bill was smart enough, strong-willed enough, to get rid of talented people if they were contributors to a negative organizational culture—not team players.
