The Score Takes Care of Itself (28 page)

It can be the difference between being stabbed in the back or patted on the back.

While mollifying those who may decide your fate during a losing streak or turnaround effort—the boss, board of directors, or shareholders—you also need to be absolutely disciplined in focusing your own attention on what really matters. Here are a dozen daily reminders that will help keep you on the right track:

We learn in many ways from many sources. One of the most powerful is a mentor, usually thought of as an older, wiser person who takes you under his wing—provides ongoing teaching, counsel, direction, experience, and moral support. But being mentored can also be simply a matter of keen observation, analysis, and learning by the “student,” whether there is any intent by a “mentor” or not.

I don’t think that when I was an assistant in the NFL—first at Oakland, then Cincinnati, then San Diego—any head coach or general manager I worked for thought of himself as my mentor. Nevertheless, they served as such because I consciously assimilated as much of their great know-how as I could—asking questions about the logic supporting their decisions; analyzing their behavior in managing others; drawing my own conclusions about how to incorporate it into my own approach to coaching and leadership.

In this way I cultivated and benefitted from their expertise nearly as much as if they’d taken me “under their wing” as a special friend they were mentoring.

At Oakland, Al Davis introduced me (and anyone else on his staff who cared to pay attention) to an approach to preparation and execution unlike anything I’d ever seen. He was obsessed with achieving superior organizational performance and professionalism. His devotion to quality became Oakland’s official team motto: “Commitment to Excellence.” And it wasn’t just a marketing slogan. Al Davis was deeply dedicated to achieving it; he didn’t just mouth the motto, he personified it.

“Ohhhhh,
this
is how you do it,” probably summed up my early reaction to seeing him run things.

He loved the pass—the long pass especially—and expanded on the creativity of Sid Gillman’s breakthrough approach, which included all sorts of pass patterns to multiple receivers. Consequently, at Oakland I was in a milieu where passes—especially deep passes—were “in the air,” the coin of the realm, and I loved it.

Al had a tremendous football background, including being a player personnel assistant, an assistant coach, a head coach, and much more. I saw it manifested in his decisiveness, boldness, and advanced thinking. While he never put his arm around my shoulder and offered tutoring and career counseling as a mentor might, it didn’t matter. I was paying close attention; I did lots of learning—the high standards of organization, the embrace of modern passing concepts, and the dedication and loyalty to his players. I learned like a studious apprentice serving a master craftsman.

In a sense, my eight years as Paul Brown’s assistant in Cincinnati were like attending a graduate school in leadership and modern football. He taught me so many things, most of them good.

He was by nature extremely meticulous and organized, a severe man whose mind constantly probed for better ways of doing things, whose teams at the high school, college (Ohio State University before Woody Hayes), and NFL (Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals) levels were all known for their precise execution. In fact, at Ohio State he was dubbed “Precision Paul.” It was an apt nickname; he was precise—punctilious—in every aspect of his leadership.

Here’s his own description of what he did and how he did it: “We were painstaking in our preparations and even practiced
how
to practice. I took one complete session to show our players exactly when and where they should go on the practice field and those routines remained the same whether it was a practice day or a game day.”

I know this is true because I was there. Brown felt his teaching would be so ingrained that he didn’t need to resort to pep talks or phony slogans: “You can’t prepare a player that way [i.e., push them to high performance with a pep talk]. The only way to do it is to be so thorough in your work beforehand as to make him totally confident of himself and those around him.” I adopted that attitude in my own head coaching at Stanford and San Francisco.

One of the game’s great innovators, Paul Brown was the first (or among the first in some cases) to use IQ tests to evaluate players, establish a game film “library” and studiously analyze the footage, teach players in a formal classroom setting, send in plays from the sideline with “messenger” linemen, fit helmets with face masks, expand the network for player recruitment beyond anything that had been seen before, emphasize a wide-open and profuse passing game (especially with the great Otto Graham), and take organizing practice schedules to an almost scientific level, including assigning assistant coaching
detailed
duties—defined areas of responsibility for which they were held accountable. You could say he was one of the men who brought modern management techniques to coaching football.

His approach to quality control, or more accurately, controlling what creates quality, was evident even in his early years. As a high school coach in Ohio (at Massillon’s Washington High School), Brown had his football system used by all of Massillon’s
junior
high schools so that the youngsters would be familiar with it if they made his high school team—the Tigers.

Paul Brown was one of those pioneers who advanced the way coaches approached doing their job—not as a serious sideline, but as a profession, almost a science. That’s the environment—classroom—I was in for eight years. I didn’t think of Paul as my mentor, nor did he, but the sheer volume of coaching and leadership expertise I harvested, both consciously and unconsciously, qualified him as such.

San Diego’s Tommy Prothro, a fine coach whose greatest achievements were at the college level, where his ability to connect with his players was made into an art form (resulting in a Rose Bowl championship at UCLA and two other Rose Bowl appearances as head coach at Oregon State), demonstrated what it means to truly care about your people.

I believe Tommy’s advice when I received an offer from Stanford University—“Take the job, Bill, because a head coaching position in the Pac-10 is significant. For the good of your family and career and peace of mind, go to Stanford.”—was perhaps as close to the kind of input a mentor gives as any I’ve gotten. As noted, this lesson stood me in good stead at San Francisco.

Additionally, I had the good fortune to be a player and assistant for Bob Bronzan, head coach at San Jose State—an astute teacher of football who organized each practice almost to the minute. There was also some traditional mentoring in Bob’s relationship with me. I was young, he believed in me, and he told me so in no uncertain terms.

I was also lucky to work as an assistant coach at Stanford for John Ralston—a man with a keen mind for football.

All along the way, I was paying attention to my teachers—unofficial mentors. While I was an assistant coach teaching others how to play football, others were teaching me how to
coach
football. By the time I was named head coach at Stanford University, I had a virtual PhD in coaching and leadership. Stanford football—head coach for two years—was my postdoctorate.

In a sense, the day I arrived at 49ers headquarters as head coach (and soon thereafter, general manager) I could have been wearing a cap and gown and holding a parchment paper that said, “William Ernest Walsh, Doctor of Philosophy, Modern Football, Coaching, and Leadership.”

I certainly wasn’t the only head coach who had that kind of “academic” credentialing, but I was lucky to be among those who did. My expertise accumulated because I made it my job to study others, to learn along the way.

Some are lucky and find themselves blessed with a mentor who truly makes a difference throughout their life. But you can make the biggest difference of all by yourself. There are mentors in our professions teaching lessons (good and bad) that are free for your inquiring mind. You must be aggressive in acquiring what they teach and adapting it to your own leadership philosophy and playbook.

In my experience, there has never been a leader who arrived fully formed, who figured it out all by him- or herself. Ralph Waldo Emerson described a great and creative person as one who “finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.” We learn from others.

Always there are mentors—some official, some unofficial. We apprentice when we are young, and it should continue even when we are old. A good leader is always learning. The great leaders start learning young and continue until their last breath.

Randy Cross, San Francisco 49er, 1976-88

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I witnessed the destruction of a venerable NFL franchise—the San Francisco 49ers—during my first three years with the team before Bill Walsh arrived. This included seeing the headquarters gutted of longtime personnel and the removal of all vestiges of former 49er teams—even pictures of San Francisco legends like John Brodie and Frankie Albert were tossed in the Dumpster by a general manager, Joe Thomas, who wanted to get rid of 49er history.

It culminated in a 2-14 season my third year, when we legitimately could lay claim to being perhaps the worst NFL team in history. It’s hard to convey how miserable our situation was as morale plummeted about as low as it could possibly go.

Then we heard this coach from Stanford University was coming in to take over—Bill Walsh. No big deal. He’d be my
fifth
head coach in four years at San Francisco, so I figured he’d last as long as the others; that is, not long. In fact, the whole team was skeptical about his chances. But from day one I could see things were going to be different.

We arrived at training camp and Bill came in and gave a short speech to all of us. He said, “I know what some of you guys sitting there are thinking. You’re thinking, ‘I was here before Walsh arrived, and I’ll be here when Walsh is gone.’ Well, you better think about this too: If you can’t play for me, and this is the
worst
team in the National Football League, where else are you going to go; who in the hell is gonna hire you?” And many of us sitting there thought to ourselves, “Hmmmm, maybe he’s got a point there.”

That was my first taste of his ability to kind of twist your mind a little bit. No rah-rah speech, no threats, no promises. Instead Bill came in through the side door. But that’s just a tiny example of his comprehensive leadership arsenal.

Of all the coaches and businesspeople I’ve been around in fifty-four years, I’ve never known a person who could get a message across, focus that message, and get people ready to perform better than Bill Walsh. He was able to do this, in part, because he was the smartest person I have ever known and the best-organized person I have ever known. And it didn’t take weeks to figure that out; it took maybe an hour. Probably less.

I saw immediately that he had a singular focus: on being first class, on being the best, on being the greatest. But lots of guys have that—the desire to be the best. Here’s the difference: Bill knew exactly how to do it, the
specifics
, not just for his quarterback but for a receptionist answering the phones; not just for a backup left tackle but for groundskeepers. Somehow he knew what it was, what constituted greatness for every single job in his organization. He had that in his head.

He knew what a spreadsheet looks like, what a marketing presentation should look like, and all the rest.
Detailed
concepts. And he hired the very best people to do the jobs that he needed them to do. And in most cases he had the good sense to get out of the way and let them do their job—a very undervalued management skill.