The Score Takes Care of Itself

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PORTFOLIO
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First published in 2009 by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Craig Walsh and Steve Jamison, 2009

All rights reserved

Excerpts from
Finding the Winning Edge
by Bill Walsh with Brian Billick and James A. Peterson
(Sports Publishing). Copyright © 1998 by Bill Walsh.

eISBN : 978-1-101-10901-4

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My father would want to acknowledge and thank Eddie DeBartolo Jr., the only owner who had the foresight and courage to give Bill Walsh a chance to be a head coach in the NFL.

He would also want to express his deep dedication and appreciation to all the people who wore the San Francisco 49er uniform both on the field or off—the entire organization who helped make a dream come true.

I would also like to dedicate our book to my children, Nate and Saman tha. I know their grandfather is very proud of them just as they are proud of him. This book is also dedicated to my mother, Geri, my sister, Elizabeth, and the memory of my brother, Steve.

The Score Takes Care of Itself
is dedicated with a lot of love to my mother, Mary Jean Edstrom. And, to my father, Everett, his brother, Harold, and their friend Roger Busdicker who created magic when they created Hal Leonard Publishing—my introduction to the world of publishing. Also, to Bill Walsh, Coach John Wooden, Uncle Roy Stark, David Varner, Aunt Jo Edstrom. And, lest we forget, the great publishing mind of Jeffrey Krames made it all happen.

—BILL WALSH

Craig Walsh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father, Bill Walsh, was one of the NFL’s pivotal figures, a leader, head coach, and general manager whose innovations changed the way football is played and whose San Francisco 49er dynasty—five Super Bowl championships in fourteen years—ranks among the great achievements in sports history.
The Score Takes Care of Itself
is his very personal and, at times, painful account of the leadership lessons he learned during his life as well as his conclusions on how they might be useful in overcoming your own challenges as a leader.

Obviously, every profession has many elements unique unto itself. Nevertheless, when it comes to the fundamentals of effective leadership in the context of human nature and managing people, there are great parallels among the NFL, corporate America, or a grocery store with twelve employees. At least, Bill Walsh thought so.

The applicability of what he did in the NFL to the world of business is attested to by the fact that many CEOs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere not only were among his friends but also sought his advice and invited him to speak about leadership to their executive teams. After his retirement as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, he did the same at Stanford University, where he gave lectures on leadership to graduate students at the business school. The
Harvard Business Review, Forbes,
and other magazines and business publications regularly came to him for ideas on team building and leadership beyond the context of football.

You might wonder about the origins of the title.
The Score Takes Care of Itself
was one of my dad’s oft-told sayings. Do all the right things to precision and “the score will take care of itself” sums up my father’s philosophy, which is why we thought it the perfect title for his book.

It is the ultimate guidebook to the Bill Walsh philosophy and methodology of leadership and is drawn from my father’s revealing and extensive conversations on the subject with best-selling author Steve Jamison. We have also utilized my father’s private notes, including those for his lectures at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and video- and audiotapes of talks that he gave to the 49ers, as well as intimate conversations I had with him over his years as head coach about how he was doing it—and what
it
was doing to him.

Additionally, we’ve included concise but revealing and frank opinions about my father from five key “players” in his professional life, each chosen for a specific reason: