by Bill Walsh
He was extremely demanding without a lot of noise. He was supportive. Bill and I both knew what we were trying to achieve, and his approach with me was simply to teach what was necessary to get there. He was great at making people great students.
The first time Bill ever saw me throw a football in person was across from Los Angeles International Airport at a little public park. He and his assistant coach, Sam Wyche, had flown down from San Francisco to work out James Owens, a receiver, and me. It wasn’t even a football field, just a little park with a playground for kids.
Bill and Sam had me throw to Owens for about thirty minutes. I was struck by Bill’s easy manner. He was friendly, but there was another air about him too. I could sense he was very knowledgeable, and later, when he drafted me, it was apparent that he wanted things a very specific way and that he had logical reasons for it. He had this self-assurance—not cocky, just very confident. And that didn’t change, even when we went 2-14 that first season.
Bill ran a pretty tight ship, but he knew when to let up. He didn’t beat up players mentally or physically in practice. In fact, his approach was unique because often we didn’t even wear pads in practice—there was no contact—especially as the season went on. Word got around the league, and other players wanted to be 49ers because Bill had this enlightened approach: He wanted us healthy on Sunday, so he didn’t work us to death on Wednesday like most other coaches. And that was just the start of his advanced way of thinking. Everything he did was well thought out and ahead of the curve.
Bill raised everybody’s standard, what we defined as acceptable. Perfection was his acceptable norm, and he got us thinking we could achieve it by teaching us what perfection was and how to reach it—not just how to locate a receiver, but every other aspect of doing your job at the top level, whatever that job was in the organization. It was something special, teaching a person, a whole team, an entire organization, to want to be perfect, to want to get to the next level, and the next one. And then do it.
The place you dreamed of but didn’t know you could reach? Bill Walsh taught me how to reach it. He taught all of us how to reach it.
Bill’s Final Lecture on Leadership
Steve Jamison
The phone rang four times before somebody picked it up: “This is Bill Walsh,” a voice announced. I was startled. After my calling and leaving messages on his answering machine or with secretaries many times over many months, the creator of one of the NFL’s legendary dynasties, the San Francisco 49ers (five Super Bowl championships!), the man who is perhaps the greatest coach in football history, had picked up the phone himself.
“This is Bill Walsh. Hello. Hello?” he repeated.
Briefly, I was thrown off; fortunately, he didn’t hang up.
And that’s how this book began. It was that sudden and that simple.
I started talking, explaining to him my idea for a book about his philosophy of leadership as it applied beyond football—to management, business, and corporate life. And that I would like to collaborate with him in writing it. “I think I saw one of your letters,” he said. “Sounds okay.” (Yes, I had written several letters to him over the course of those many months.) “Can you meet me here at 9 A.M. tomorrow?” he continued. I got there at eight.
His office was located on the second floor of an expansive and expensive office complex right next to the exclusive Sharon Heights Golf and Country Club, just two minutes from Stanford University on Sand Hill Road. The complex, forty minutes south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, was populated by a host of technology-related companies and some of the most successful venture capitalists in the world, including the most famous, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (friends of Bill’s).
The parking areas—beautifully designed and landscaped—looked like the crowded showroom of a Lexus or Mercedes-Benz dealer. I found an open space and parked, eager to meet Bill—nervous, in fact.
At 8:30 A.M. I walked up to his second floor office and knocked. No answer. I began staring directly down at the staircase I had just climbed, in anticipation of his grand arrival. Bill’s arrival wasn’t so grand. At exactly 9 A.M. I saw the top of a head—white hair, neatly trimmed and combed. Bill was walking up the stairs rather deliberately. Sandals (no socks), freshly pressed khaki Bermudas, a red and gold golf shirt (49ers colors). In his left hand a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee; in his right, a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts.
“Steve? C’mon in. I got some doughnuts on the way over,” he said as an introduction. He opened up the bag of doughnuts, and we started talking. Here’s exactly what he told me in the first minute: “I came to the San Francisco 49ers with a specific goal—to implement what I call the Standard of Performance. It was a way of doing things, a leadership philosophy, that has as much to do with core values, principles, and ideals as with blocking, tackling, and passing; more to do with the mental than with the physical.”
Bill talked about the need for character as a component of leadership (as well as the elements of character as he saw it); the evolution of the NFL’s most significant change in fifty years—the pass-oriented offense he created—and the lesson it offers beyond football; how he taught the intricacies of high performance to players such as Joe Montana and how they apply to high performance elsewhere.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said at one point. “I’ve got some old videotapes in the closet that might help you get the idea of what we did in practice to get all the moving parts moving in the right direction. I’ll get some for you.” Bill put his coffee down, walked to the closet behind his desk, and after a couple of minutes came out with an armful of videotapes. “Here. Take these home. They might help you get the idea. When I put all the pieces together, it looked complicated, but each piece is simple. Most big things are simple in the specific, much less so in the general.” Bill was a genius at making the complex comprehensible, the comprehensible achievable.
I asked him about the years with the Cincinnati Bengals when he began to emerge as a quarterback coach and offensive strategist whom others around the league started to take notice of. “I got fooled at Cincinnati,” he chuckled. “Taken right down the primrose path by Paul Brown. But here’s the lesson I learned.” And he told me the lesson. He talked about winning his first Super Bowl and how it destroyed the next season: “But here’s the lesson I learned.” And he told me the lesson. Bill talked about his final game as an assistant coach with the Bengals, when he became flummoxed in the last moments of a game against the Oakland Raiders: “But here’s the lesson I learned.” All those lessons, all that accumulating leadership expertise.
This went on for three hours until he called our conversation—a lecture on leadership—to a halt because of a scheduled lunch with friends at the Sundeck Restaurant across the parking lot. Our discussions in that office continued for several months as he expanded on his core concepts of leadership—with accompanying anecdotes—for this book. Along the way there were more videotapes, notes, lessons of all sorts that he had learned along the way.
We would talk. I would write. He would review. We would talk some more. That’s how we worked. Quickly, this book developed. Along the way I came to better understand Bill and how and why he did things as a leader, who he was as a person. Let me share a few observations.
Bill Walsh was brilliant almost beyond comprehension. His ability to analyze an intractable problem and come up with a solution (the West Coast Offense, for example) was stunning. It applied not only to touchdowns but also to managing and organizing individuals. Of course, how he did the latter facilitated the former. He was a master at it. Bill’s analytical intelligence was coupled with an immense creativity that allowed him to see things differently. The result moved NFL football, in many ways, from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century. If there is such a thing as a Renaissance coach, he was it: truly enlightened when it came to directing an organization’s attention and best effort to achieving goals he defined.
Bill Walsh held the need to treat individuals w
ithin his organization fairly almost sacrosanct (in return, those individuals were expected to consistently work at their most productive level). It stemmed from his own professional experience of being treated unfairly, which he describes here in detail. This did not preclude harsh—at times, seemingly ruthless—action when someone in the organization behaved in a manner contrary to the team’s best interests.
He did not view the organization and the individuals within it as two separate entities, but as one and the same: “People are the heart of your organization,” he instructed me. This perspective affected his leadership profoundly.
Bill Walsh loved lists, viewed them as a road map to results. That may sound simplistic, but I believe it was an important part of his astounding deductive-reasoning ability. When confronted with a “problem”—for example, how do we score touchdowns without a good running game or a strong passer? what is our communication process on the sidelines during a game when crowd noise becomes overwhelming? what are the specific duties of my executive vice president for football operations? and hundreds and hundreds more—Bill Walsh dissected the issue into its relevant parts, found a solution, and then taught the solution to the appropriate individuals. His creative and commonsense brilliance as a problem solver was unsurpassed and a major component in the installation of what he called the Standard of Performance.
I kidded him once that he was so obsessive about lists that he probably had lists of the lists in his file cabinet. He didn’t deny it. I found a list of directives for his speech to receptionists at 49er headquarters that was two pages long with bullet point after bullet point. Here’s bullet point number seventeen: “Your job is not civil service or even big corporate business. We exist to support and field a football team. In other words, we don’t ‘exist for the sake of existing.’ We are not maintaining.” He told me this addressed his concern that most people simply go through the motions at their jobs, just putting in time—existing—with a “business as usual” attitude. Not if you’re on his team.
The meticulous manner in which he detailed specific actions and attitudes of his Standard of Performance as applied to secretaries and receptionists was true throughout the organization but in increasingly exponential quantities.
Bill Walsh was cautious in part because he was savvy. One day I started asking him about the leadership characteristics of other outstanding coaches—first Tom Landry, then Mike Holmgren, next Jimmy Johnson. Initially, he was open and insightful (as you’ll read later). But then, suddenly, he decided this was a subject he did not like, namely, talking about his peers—that I was taking him down a path that could cause problems for him. And that was the end of that discussion. The atmosphere in his small office chilled: “I’ve got to make some calls,” he said brusquely as he broke off his description of Bill Parcells and picked up the phone. And without his saying so, I knew he had dismissed me for the day. (I noticed as I was leaving that he put the phone down, never made a call.)
Bill had sensed, incorrectly, that I was looking for some dirt or critical comments on other coaches. He was a very careful man.
Bill Walsh was an educator—a teacher. He accumulated great knowledge because he was a Grade A student of leadership, paying close attention along the way to some of football’s most outstanding and forward-thinking coaches, most of all Paul Brown (of the Cincinnati Bengals). Bill absorbed their good ideas, learned from their bad ones, applied his own even more advanced concepts, and then reveled in the process of teaching what he knew to his teams. I came to believe that the part of football he enjoyed best was teaching, or more accurately, identifying outstanding talent and teaching that player, assistant coach, or staff member how to be great. He loved it.
Bill Walsh was without pretense, almost soft-spoken. While his comportment was never chummy—there was a reserve to his manner—he was easy to talk to and be with unless I hit a nerve. For all the attention and glory that had been heaped on him during and especially after the dynasty years, he was normal—coffee-and-doughnuts normal; although not laid-back or casual, he was unaffected. You’d think you were talking to a very successful and focused midlevel corporate executive unless you noticed the picture on the wall of Bill standing next to Joe Montana holding a Super Bowl trophy, or the picture on the other wall of Bill standing next to Joe Montana holding a different Super Bowl trophy.
All of the above became apparent to me as we proceeded to write this book revealing Bill’s leadership philosophy. Along the way, I secured a generous offer from a publisher eager to share the “wisdom of Walsh”—when it came to building a top team in business or elsewhere. And then, boom! Just as simply and suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. No book.
Bill—retired from the NFL for ten years—had accepted an offer to return in an executive capacity to the San Francisco 49ers. On the same day that I received a lengthy contract from a publisher, he called with the news that he was going back to the NFL. I knew what that meant, because in our earliest conversations he had laid out only one stipulation: “If I go back to the NFL, I don’t want this book coming out. I don’t need the headache.” It was a handshake deal. And so, no book.
As writers do, I put my writing and notes and tapes and collected articles and interviews and research material into boxes, put the boxes into storage, and then forgot about it—or tried to. It was great stuff on leadership that Bill had shared in our conversations, and it seemed a shame to pack it up and move on. But that’s what happened.
Bill lent a hand to resuscitating the moribund 49ers for several years (his towering San Francisco 49er dynasty had fallen into disrepair and he was called back to duty) and I continued work with UCLA’s legendary basketball coach, John Wooden. A book we had written earlier was becoming a best seller, and it led us to a productive professional association and friendship, including more books, television presentations, seminars, and even a best-selling publication for children.
My boxes marked “Bill Walsh Leadership” were collecting dust. And then one day my phone rang. “Hello, this is Bill Walsh,” the voice said. “I’m very interested in getting that book finished up, Steve.” As with our first phone call, I was almost at a loss for words. He was no longer working for the 49ers and, in fact, was lecturing on a regular basis to corporate groups and students at Stanford University about leadership. It was time, he said, to get his book on leadership published. Ten years had gone by.
I was delighted: “If you’ve got some time next week, I’ll meet you at Stanford and you can review the manuscript again before I go back to publishers.” That sounded good to him: “Fine! Oops, wait a minute. I’m going into the hospital for some tests next week. But if you want, it’s probably okay to meet me there.”
I don’t like hospitals and didn’t particularly want to impose on Bill while he was wearing a gown: “No, no. Let’s wait a week. Is it anything to be worried about, the tests?” I asked. He assured me that it was routine, nothing serious, just a series of tests to check on something that had been going on for a while. I said, “Okay, I’ll talk to you after you finish up at the hospital. Good luck.” He replied, “I’ll see you then.”
Not long after that, Bill was dead—leukemia. The greatest coach in football’s history was seventy-five.
I had come to feel close to him over the years, first as a fan watching Bill lead the 49ers to multiple Super Bowl championships; later working with him on this book; and still later watching him from afar as he wrestled once again with the problems of a struggling team. Through it all he had exhibited poise, intelligence, and a basic decency.
Bill and I certainly were not buddies, but from the start he treated me right. (I learned recently that Bill had plenty of friends, associates, and a ton of great working relationships but almost no buddies, intimates with whom he could bare his soul.) He was unpretentious, forthright, no BS; his composure and presence were so unique and appealing. As Joe Montana told me, “You knew immediately there was something special about him.”
And I had g
rown to appreciate—be astonished by—his incredible story of overcoming impossible odds in the NFL with the singularity of his leadership brilliance, management acumen, and football creativity and the force of his will.
There also was his willingness to talk about the personal issues, his emotional meltdown in the second season, the toll of not just getting to the top, but staying there, triumph and burnout, and, of course, all the insights into leadership—“but here’s the lesson I learned.”
I had, in my own small way, gotten to know and greatly respect Bill, and his death hurt; it knocked the wind out of my sails for the book; I’m not sure why. He was a good guy, a real guy. So, sadly, once again I put our manuscript back in boxes. This time for good. Or so I thought.
Several months after the public tributes and a big memorial service at Candlestick Park (where Bill had worked his leadership genius) had been concluded, a friend of mine, Peter Fatooh, a successful local executive and big-time fan of the 49ers, started telling me how much he respected Bill Walsh as a leader, how far ahead of everybody he had been in his thinking. I mentioned casually that I had been working on a book with Bill at the time of his death but wasn’t going to publish it now—that I had kind of lost heart, gotten the wind knocked out of me by his death. “Would you mind if I read it?” Peter asked. “I’d like to know what Bill says about leadership.”
I offered to let him read the manuscript if he promised not to pass it around. “It’s just for you to read,” I told him. He agreed. One week later I saw him again at the San Francisco Tennis Club (where Bill used to play a frustrating game of tennis occasionally), and Peter was eager to tell me the following: “Steve, you’ve got to get Bill’s book published. It’s great. Just great.” He returned the manuscript and said, “Now I know why he was so exceptional. I’ve already started using some of his ideas myself.” Somehow, Peter’s honest and positive opinion got me back up and running.