The Score Takes Care of Itself (10 page)

My new short precision pass-oriented offense was ostensibly created out of nothing. In fact, it was created out of existing assets that only needed to be “seen” and then capitalized on in new ways. There are several elements in its evolution that are worth evaluating as they pertain to your own leadership.

1.
Success doesn’t care which road you take to get to its doorstep.
The traditionalists—rigid and resistant in their thinking—who sneered at the new passing system I was creating were soon trying to figure out why it was beating them and how to copy it.

2.
Be bold. Remove fear of the unknown—that is, change—from your mind.
Respect the past without clinging to it: “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is the mantra of a team setting itself up to lose to an organization that’s
not
doing it that way any more. Paul Brown didn’t flinch when I came to him with my revolutionary ideas—a completely new system of playing offensive football. By nature he was an innovator who wasn’t afraid of change.

3.
Desperation should not drive innovation.
Here’s a good question to write on a Post-it Note and put on your desk: “What assets do we have right now that we’re not taking advantage of?” Virgil Carter’s “limited” skills, the 53.5 yards of width, and the availability of five potential receivers were all available assets even before desperation drove me to utilize them creatively. While waiting to get what you want—a “quarterback with a strong arm”—make the most of what you’ve got.

4.
Be obsessive in looking for the upside in the downside.
My evaluation of Virgil Carter’s “weak” résumé, his so-called limited assets, led directly to utilizing them productively. Why? Instead of looking for reasons we couldn’t make it work, I sought solutions that would make it succeed.

There was a time, and perhaps still is in some organizations, when all hell would break loose if someone raised his or her hand during a staff meeting and asked, “What happens if this does not work? What then?” Others—usually the boss—would brand that person as a negative thinker, maybe even a loser. Today, of course, it’s different. The marketplace is volatile, constantly changing with new products and competitors.

In your own challenges, are you receptive to new, even unorthodox ways of getting things done? Bill Johnson was when he perceived potential in a tight end who botched a play; so was the Post-it Notes guy who figured out how to sell glue that didn’t stick; so was Cincinnati head coach Paul Brown when I started bringing him my new, unconventional, nontradi tional ideas. He was a master at thinking both inside and outside the box.

Unfortunately, too often we find comfort in what worked before—even when it stops working. We get stuck there and resist the new, the unfamiliar, the unconventional.

If Virgil Carter had been a strong-armed, accurate quarterback, would I have had the inspiration to design the new offense? Had Greg Cook not been injured, would I have forged a short-pass system? Would Paul Brown have encouraged me to look for a new and even better way of doing things? It’s impossible to know.

The fact that we had seemingly
no
options forced us to come up with new options—the West Coast Offense. But should desperation be the primary determinant for seeking new direction, innovative solutions?

Without any grand vision for changing NFL football, we changed it. It was made possible, in large part, because the brilliant leader of our team, 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. Among his gifts, Paul Brown was a perceptive, astute, and shrewd listener who did not fear change.

Here’s a lesson for any leader interested in nourishing the spirit of the organization. Paul Brown, for all of his gifts, was not inclined to give credit for the new ideas I was bringing to his team. For a period of time, many on the outside assumed he was the one putting pencil to paper as architect of an emerging paradigm for offensive football in the NFL. He did not go out of his way to dissuade them; giving credit where credit was due was not something he liked to do, at least with me.

Brown was very protective of his public image as the one who made all the decisions—the boss. For example, he wanted it to look like he was calling the plays during a game, even though I was up in the booth making the decisions. For the sake of appearances, he set up a time-consuming and counterproductive process to accomplish this. I called the play down to an assistant coach on the sideline, who then relayed my decision to Brown. He would then pull aside a player and tell him what “he” had chosen, and the player would shuttle in the decision to our quarterback. Of course, the crowd thought Brown made the call himself. Obviously, this was an impediment to swift communication and hurt us from time to time. Brown was willing to pay that price to convey the impression that he was running the whole show.

When I became a head coach, the leader of my own organization, I tried to avoid his mistake and attempted to give ample credit to those working with me. Few things offer greater return on less investment than praise—offering credit to someone in your organization who has stepped up and done the job.

Here’s a story to illustrate what can happen if you don’t think things through, if you’re a leader who doesn’t have an appetite for looking perceptively into the future and then planning what to do when you get there.

The local fire department was called in to help rescue a cat stuck up in a tall tree. After a couple of hours, they got the cat down from the tree. During all the congratulations afterward, the fire truck drove off and ran over the cat. Despite their hard work, they had no plan for what to do after the cat was rescued.

Contingency planning is critical for a fire department, football team, or company and is a primary responsibility of leadership. You must continually be anticipating and preparing to deal with what management expert Peter Drucker characterized as “foul weather.” He viewed it as the most important job of leadership. He may be right, but I would expand Drucker’s category to include “fine weather”—what you’ll do if the cat is rescued.

Having a well-thought-out plan ready to go in advance of a change in the weather is the key to success. I came to understand this when I realized that making decisions off the top of my head was a recipe for a bad decision—especially under pressure.

When I was the quarterback coach with the Cincinnati Bengals, this led me to start planning our first four offensive plays before the opening kickoff. In other words, I predetermined—wrote down—our first four plays. Head coach Paul Brown would ask, “What have you got for openers, Bill?” He wanted to know what I had come up with to get us going on our first possession, when nerves are on edge and clear thinking easily muddled in the middle of all the commotion.

I never really thought of taking it much beyond that until an event occurred in my final game with Cincinnati—an AFC play-off against the Raiders in the Oakland Coliseum. The winner would advance to the AFC championship game with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

In the closing moments, we recovered a fumble on Oakland’s forty-yard line. We were trailing by three points, 31-28; a field goal would send us into overtime. My job was to figure out how to get us within range of a field-goal attempt quickly. Unfortunately, the severe pressure and absolute pandemonium—thousands of Oakland’s fans howling and throwing half-eaten hot dogs, half-empty cups of beer, crumpled-up game programs, and even clothes and shoes up at the booth where I was sitting—destroyed my thinking. Raiders fans in those days were rowdy.

I completely forgot the plays we had practiced that would have worked best under those circumstances, but equally important, I recognized (in retrospect) that I had no specific plan for what to do in that “foul-weather” circumstance. Thus, Oakland regained possession of the ball. Surprisingly, we still got one last chance to score with fifteen seconds to play.

But again, no plan. I was flying by the seat of my pants; we lost. “Never again,” I vowed, “will that happen to me.” That’s when I got serious about scripting; never again would I walk into the future unprepared for foul weather.

Consequently the number of plays I planned out—scripted—increased substantially the following year when I was with the San Diego Chargers as Tommy Prothro’s offensive coordinator. The next year, when I was head coach at Stanford University, the number increased again, and the impact was startling. In fact, during my second season, Stanford scored on our
first
possession eight times in eleven games. Typically during a season a team might score once or twice on the initial drive of a game.

This success wasn’t an accident; I had written the script for our success. Informed preplanning—looking perceptively into the future and getting ready for it—gave the Stanford football team a distinct advantage. I took that advantage with me when I was hired by the 49ers.

At San Francisco our first twenty or twenty-five plays of the game would be scripted, along with a multitude of options, alternatives, and contingency plays depending on the situation and circumstance. Among other things, it plugged me into the future; I was visualizing the game ahead, “seeing” what would happen. I could close my eyes and literally see all twenty-two men running and responding to some specific play I had drawn up.

I was the first to employ scripting to this extent, and it gave us a stunning tactical offensive asset that no other teams were utilizing at that time. Scripting was a most effective leadership tool in fair and foul weather. In a very calculated way, I began calling the plays for the game before the game was played. It took years for other teams to fully implement the concepts I had been developing for a long time.

The motto of the Boy Scouts, “Be Prepared,” became my modus ope randi, and to be prepared I had to factor in every contingency: good weather, bad weather, and everything in between. I kept asking and answering this question: “What do I do if . . . ?”

It’s the same for you, of course: “What do you do if . . . ?” Most leaders take this no deeper than the first level of inquiry. You must envision the future deeply and in detail—creatively—so that the unforeseeable becomes foreseeable. Then you write your script for the foreseeable.

I learned through years of coaching that far-reaching contingency planning gave me a tremendous advantage against the competition because I was no different from anyone else; it was almost impossible for me to make quick and correct decisions in the extreme emotional and mental upheaval that accompanied many situations during a game. I defy you to think as well—as clearly—under great stress as you do in normal circumstances. I don’t care how smart or quick-witted you are, what your training or intellect is; under extreme stress you’re not as good. Unless, that is, you’ve planned and thought through the steps you’re going to take in all situations—your contingency plans.

With the 49ers I began asking my offensive coaches to give me their twenty-five scripted plays; then I’d revise and add my own to their ideas. We’d go over the new list with the team; they wanted those plays and would raid my office to get them. Randy Cross, a big offensive lineman and one of only a few to play on San Francisco’s first three Super Bowl teams, would come in and say, “I want those plays, Bill, where are they?”

Randy and the others wanted them so they could start thinking about them. During a practice I’d tell them, “This is the first play of the game on Sunday.” Right away the expectation level would pop up. Now they connected practice with the game. The scripted plays extended that.

The players and coaches could sleep a little better because I had alleviated some of the deep anxiety caused by uncertainty prior to the competition; they were somewhat relieved because they could anticipate what we’d do in the opening stages of the battle.

I took scripting very seriously; my preplanning was done in a clinical atmosphere on Thursday and Friday—sometimes Saturday, the day before a game. Planning even one day ahead was usually much better than trying to make a decision in the heat of the contest amid the clatter and chaos. In doing so, I reduced the possibility of panic-driven, ill-conceived decisions.

Developing the plays may have taken more energy from me than the game, but once the scripting was complete, I felt we could breathe easier; now all we had to do was perform. It made it possible for me to almost always get a good night’s sleep before the opening kickoff—even a Super Bowl.

Scripting was a preprepared format, a
flexible
blueprint that I used to navigate through the turmoil, uncertainty, and stress of competition. “If this situation arises, we do this; if this happens, we do that.” On and on. It was almost by the numbers; the minute those new situations came up, I’d go to the contingency play that I had worked up in advance and printed on the script on my clipboard.

If I’d done my work properly, little would arise that hadn’t been anticipated; we’d seldom be caught off guard or have to come up with a plan in a panic. Of course, there’s always something you can’t anticipate, but you strive to greatly reduce the number of those unforeseeables. A good example of readiness for anything, one of many hundreds I could refer back to, occurred in the last moments of a game between San Francisco and my former team, the Cincinnati Bengals.

With two seconds remaining on the clock, trailing 26-20, the 49ers took possession of the ball on the Bengals’ twenty-five-yard line. We had time to run one play. While this might suggest a last-ditch-effort mode, some version of a “Hail Mary pass,” it was not. I had a contingency plan scripted for a situation exactly like this—time enough for one play, ball on the opponent’s twenty-five- to thirty-yard line, needing a touchdown. (The scripted play was called “tandem left 76 all go.” Three receivers lined up on the left side; a fourth, Jerry Rice, on the right. Joe Montana took the snap, dropped back five steps, looked left, pump faked, turned right, and threw to Rice, who was almost alone in the end zone.) Touchdown; point after; final score 27-26.