by Bill Walsh
Competition inevitably produces randomness that can leave you grasping at straws. I attempted to reduce the randomness of my responses. Hearing someone described as being able to “fly by the seat of his pants” always suggests to me a leader who hasn’t prepared properly and whose pants may soon fall down.
When you’re forced to go to some version of a “Hail Mary pass” on a recurring basis, you haven’t done your job. Nevertheless, it’s a macho attitude to believe, “I’m at my best when all hell breaks loose.” But it’s usually not true; you cannot think as clearly or perform as well when engulfed by stress, anxiety, fear, tension, or turmoil. You are not at your best. Believing you are creates a false sense of confidence that can lead to slipshod preparation. You think, “Don’t worry, I’ll be able to put it all together when it counts. I can just turn it on.” When it counts is before all hell breaks loose.
Control What You Can Control: Let the Score Take Care of Itself
The final score of a football game is decided, on average, according to the following percentages: 20 percent is due to luck, such as a referee’s bad call, a tricky bounce of the ball, an injury, or some other happenstance. I accepted the fact that I couldn’t control that 20 percent of each game. However, the rest of it—80 percent—could be under my control with comprehensive planning and preparation.
What about the quantity and quality of talent on my team? Doesn’t that override everything? Of course you need talent, but talent is not the only factor. And at the upper levels of competition, talent becomes much more evenly distributed. Thus, for working purposes my 80/20 ratio is quite good. Additionally, regardless of the level of talent in your organization, you have got to maximize the 80 percent when it matters most—on game day.
Those same numbers, in my opinion, applied not only to the San Francisco 49ers but to our competition, as well. I recognized that my job as a leader was to get more out of my 80 percent than the opposing coach and his staff could get out of their 80 percent. I believe a parallel phenomenon holds true in business. After all, in business, every day is game day.
Contingency planning is a major determinant of who gets closest to taking total control of their own 80 percent, the closest to maximizing their organization’s assets. That explains why scripting eventually became the norm throughout the NFL, and college football as well. As you can see, it started modestly—Paul Brown asking me, “What have you got for openers, Bill?”—and gradually became a major component of my methodology.
There are many aspects of professional football that directly correspond to the subject of leadership in business. I believe scripting, adapted to your own environment in your own way, can have the same tremendous benefit for you that it did for me, and I offer this summary as a good point of reference:1. Flying by the seat of your pants precedes crashing by the seat of your pants.
2. Planning for foul or fair weather, “scripting” as it applies to your organization, improves the odds of making a safe landing and is a key to success. When you prepare for everything, you’re ready for anything.
3. Create a crisis-management team that is smart enough to anticipate and plan for crises. Being decisive isn’t enough. A wrong call made in a decisive manner is still the wrong call. I hadn’t planned for the “crisis” up in the booth against the Oakland Raiders, and we lost; I had planned for the “crisis” against Cincinnati when we got the ball with two seconds left on the clock and won. The former desperate situation was, indeed, desperate; the latter was not, because we were ready for it.
4. All personnel must recognize that your organization is adaptive and dynamic in facing unstable “weather.” It is a state of mind. Situations and circumstances change so quickly in football or business that no one can afford to get locked into one way of doing things. You must take steps to prepare employees to be flexible when the situation and circumstances warrant it.
5. In the face of massive and often conflicting pressures, an organization must be resolute in its vision of the future and the contingent plans to get where it wants to go.
6. You bring on failure by reacting in an inappropriate manner to pressure or adversity. Your version of “scripting” helps ensure that you will offer the appropriate response in a professional manner, that you will act like a leader.
Protect Your Blind Side: The Leadership Two-Step: Move/Countermove
Things take longer to play out in business than in football. In the corporate world the wisdom of a personnel decision or a competitor’s new initiative may take months or years to reveal itself. In the NFL time is compressed, and results are sometimes immediate. For example, within days of my hiring Fred Dean as a 49er defensive end, he wreaked havoc on Dallas and its quarterback as part of a 45-14 San Francisco victory. The quality of my decision—hiring Fred—was immediately evident. In fact, my hire was an important element in our success a few months later—a Super Bowl championship—during my third year as coach.
It rarely happens this fast and dramatically in business. Consequently, you may have to prompt yourself to continually and aggressively analyze not only your personnel but your organization’s vulnerabilities: What’s our blind side? What are the implications of the competition’s recent initiative? What’s our countermove to their move? Or is one even necessary?
Prompting myself was unnecessary because the hazards in football are usually evident and the consequences immediate. There is seldom subtlety on the field; results were produced fast and violently right in front me every Sunday. When one of our players was loaded onto a cart and lugged away—semiconscious from a concussion or in agony from cracked ribs or torn ligaments—it was a cue that perhaps something was amiss; maybe I hadn’t seen something coming that I should have seen. Had I been blindsided?
Therefore, as you do in your profession, I worked hard to foresee the implications of what a competitor had done “last Sunday” for our team “next Sunday.” My pass-based offense, for example, depended on a multitude of components operating with precision and timing in the midst of 250-pound defensive linemen seeking to disrupt our well-laid plans.
Our center had to be consistent in making a good snap; linemen had to block; receivers had to run exact routes and catch the ball in traffic. But most of all, the quarterback had to execute with precision. For this to occur, Joe Montana needed a precious few seconds of protection while he attempted to locate a receiver and throw the ball. And the protection he needed most of all was on his blind side (for a right-handed quarterback it was his left side). Montana was “blind” on his left side because he turned his back to it in stepping away from center after the snap to throw the ball; he virtually couldn’t see what was coming from the left because of the mechanics of throwing right-handed. The quality of his production depended on the quality of his protection.
On his right side he could see and react to a defender bearing down on him—throw the football away, scramble, or at least cover up for the impending blow. The left side was another story. It’s called the blind side for a reason.
Consequently, our blocker on the blind side became almost second in importance to the quarterback because he was Montana’s de facto personal security guard, the lineman of last resort. If he blew it, Joe got nailed with all sorts of unpleasant consequences: lost yardage, an interception, a fumble, or, worst of all, bodily harm.
Traditionally, a blind-side pass rusher—the outside linebacker—would be defused, blocked, or delayed by a running back or tight end. However, this was made more challenging as linebackers became bigger and quicker. But “bigger and quicker” doesn’t describe a man who arrived in the NFL in my third season: New York Giants outside linebacker Lawrence Taylor—“L.T.”—a player who appeared to have more of what it took to put an end to my increasingly successful passing offense.
As an outside linebacker—the blind-side attacker—Taylor was one of those players who changed the game forever because of his ferocious aggressiveness coupled with phenomenal physical gifts, all part of an astounding
ly well-honed physique: 6 feet 3 inches, 237 pounds—most of it angry muscle.
He was a paradox: a massive human wrecking ball who was lightning quick and seemingly unstoppable because he could virtually flick a backfield blocker out of his way to execute an unimpeded assault on an often unsuspecting and defenseless quarterback. In 1985 Taylor executed a blind-side tackle that mangled the bones in the right leg of Super Bowl quarterback Joe Theismann. His career was over before the gurney arrived to transport him off the field to the emergency room. Everyone who saw it happen on Monday Night Football—the leg bones visible through the skin, blood spurting—remembers the nausea they experienced. And plenty of quarterbacks and coaches saw it.
It was a manifestation of the violence that Taylor created and the fear he instilled in a quarterback’s mind. He wasn’t bashful about furthering his malevolent image as a mindless brute who sought to mug the quarterback. He publicly bragged about his attack on Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski: “I hit Jaworski . . . with an over-the-head ax job. I thought his dick was going to drop in the dirt.”
Among other things, Taylor was trying to instill fear in the minds of opposing quarterbacks even before kickoff—to get each one looking over his shoulder for Lawrence Taylor rather than for receivers. A quarterback who gets skittish or gun-shy is finished. It takes a lot to get into a great quarterback’s mind, to really scare him. Most are not afraid to take a hit. But that changes completely when you get hit by a truck.
When Lawrence Taylor joined the New York Giants under head coach Bill Parcells, I perceived the threat to our organization’s system very quickly. Taylor had the potential to shut down my pass-based offense. It was evident that its viability was directly linked to our ability to stop Lawrence Taylor from getting to Joe Montana’s body or into his mind.
Hoping that one of our running backs or a tight end weighing fifty pounds less than the Giants’ blind-side backer could stop him was unrealistic. Additionally, my system used the tight end and running backs as receivers. Tying them down to block would greatly diminish the potential of our pass-based offense.
A solution was imperative but not evident. The most likely candidate to take on the burden was our left tackle, Dan Audick, who was closest to the area Taylor would come stampeding through on his way to Montana. Unfortunately, Dan was no match for Taylor—he was shorter, not as strong or quick, and unlikely to do much damage. I decided to make a bold move—in reality, a countermove to L.T. and the damage he could inflict.
I decided to make our left guard, John Ayers, playing next to the center , the designated defensive player who would stop Lawrence Taylor. Immediately after the snap he would check to see if anyone was attacking over center and then step back and to his left in preparation for a serious collision.
John Ayers was bigger and stronger (6 feet 5 inches, 270 pounds) but not quicker than Taylor. Importantly, John seemed to have a low center of gravity, which made it very difficult to knock him off his feet or push him around. He was a formidable presence.
I put John under the tutelage of Bobb McKittrick, our extremely talented offensive line coach, who reconfigured our assignments in preparation for an NFC play-off game at Candlestick Park against the New York Giants and Lawrence Taylor. It would be a sumo wrestler (John Ayers) trying to stop the rampage of a Brahma bull (Lawrence Taylor).
And it worked.
At first, Lawrence didn’t even know what had hit him. Boom! When he realized that he couldn’t move John Ayers around at will, he even tried attacking from the other side to avoid our creatively utilized left guard. But now Joe Montana could see him coming and react accordingly. The blind-side threat was neutralized.
Regardless of context, competitive endeavors at the highest level are fluid and ever-changing and constantly present new challenges requiring novel solutions. The advent of a Lawrence Taylor in the NFL and its existential threat to my offensive philosophy is no different from the kind of challenges a company faces regularly from competitors. 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.
When Lawrence Taylor entered the NFL, not everyone understood how much his presence changed things. I did. In fact, because our system relied so heavily on the pass, more so than any other team in NFL, Taylor posed the greatest threat to the San Francisco 49ers.
I created a countermove within our organization that blocked the threat. At least momentarily. But all solutions are only temporary. They last until your competitor makes a meaningful countermove to your own countermove. At which time it’s your turn again. They key is to quickly recognize the nature of the threat and then to creatively and expeditiously respond to it. Otherwise, the game will be over before it begins.
The Archaeology of Leadership: Seek Reward in the Ruins
“Roaring back!” would have been a perfect slogan for my third season as head coach of the 49ers: After a torturous and losing second season, the San Francisco 49ers responded in year three by winning the Super Bowl for the first time in their history.
Unfortunately, “Roaring Back!” was the official team motto, one I approved and liked, for the second season—a year in which we were outscored by almost one hundred points, suffered through that excruciating eight-game losing streak, lost key players to major injuries, and ended up in next-to-last place in the NFC West division with a 6-10 record.
One unhappy fan sent a special delivery letter to 49er headquarters suggesting that instead of “Roaring Back!” a more appropriate slogan for our second season would be “Don’t Get Your Hopes Up!” Nevertheless, my hopes were up at the conclusion of our second year. Here’s why and how it led to a Super Bowl championship thirteen months later.
Progress, or lack thereof, in sports and business can be measured in a variety of ways, some much more subtle than others. Often it takes a keen eye and a strong stomach to dig through the “ruins” of your results for meaningful facts. A season’s won-lost record (or your market share, sales figures, stock price) may not—will not—tell you what you need to know to be fully informed about the strength of your organization. Thus, I looked for clues that might indicate whether we were moving in the right direction at the right speed and, if not, what we needed to do to address the problems. In this instance, I wanted to determine what our second season’s 6-10 record really meant—good, bad, or otherwise.
I also knew from experience that it is often difficult to assess these interior, or buried, signs of progress or dysfunction, strength or weakness, because we become transfixed by the big prize—winning a championship, getting a promotion, achieving a yearly quota, and all the rest. When that goal is attained, a common mistake is to assume things are fine. Conversely, when you or the organization fall short of the goal, the letdown can be so severe you’re blinded to substantive information indicating that success may be closer than you would imagine.
Either way—delight or despair amid the accompanying din of fans (or shareholders)—you prevent yourself from searching for the truth hidden within the numbers. I could easily have done that myself, because the second season became absolute hell at times. You’ll recall that I decided to hand in my resignation on the flight back from Miami. Instead, I waited until the season ended to conduct a comprehensive evaluation that would give me an accurate perspective—a sort of “state of the union” report on my second year as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
I stuck my nose into the task of analyzing year-end statistics along with empirical evidence as it applied to my Standard of Performance. What I found, both encouraging and discouraging, set the stage for winning Super Bowl XVI thirteen months later.
Overall, we had won only six games during my second season, and even those wins had been overshadowed by our free fall during the eight-game losing streak. If those six victories had come at the end of the season, fans would have been eagerly anticipating the future. However, the wins had been split in
two by the eight consecutive defeats. All that fans and many others saw was the long losing streak and the two losses that closed out our season.
What generally got overlooked was the fact that we had won more games—six—than in the previous two seasons combined (four). Furthermore, before disaster struck—eight straight losses—we had beaten New Orleans, St. Louis, and the New York Jets. Then Atlanta had taken us down, then the Rams, Cowboys, Rams (again), Tampa Bay, Detroit, Green Bay, and the painful loss to Miami.
But two particular things stood out about the eight losses: We had eventually broken out of the losing streak with our spirits intact, and five of our defeats during the bad stretch had been by five points or less. (Winning those close games would have given the 49ers one of the best records in NFL that year.)
The 49ers went on to win three of our final five games, which was promising because in that late-season “nothing-to-gain” circumstance it would have been easy for players to throttle down their efforts. In spite of our miserable situation, the team did not quit. This was an important fact to assess in evaluating the emerging prospects and character of the players individually and as a unit. They seemed to have something special inside. Perhaps it was heart; perhaps it was my Standard of Performance. In fact it was both.
In continuing my year-end review it became apparent that our offense had started to jell—tied for eleventh overall in the NFL for points scored; up from sixteenth the year before; up from twenty-eighth (dead last in the NFL) the year prior to my arrival—a positive trend line.
The statistics also showed that quarterback Steve DeBerg, although intelligent and able, had a tendency to throw interceptions at crucial moments. This was a fatal flaw on his résumé; controlling the ball—i.e., few interceptions overall and none at critical moments—was central to my offensive philosophy of controlling the ball with the pass.