The Score Takes Care of Itself (2 page)

These five, all important figures in my father’s life, were asked to contribute their analyses of the leadership philosophy of Bill Walsh to complement and expand on the comprehensive lessons my father offers in
The Score Takes Care of Itself.
Others certainly were well qualified, but these five were asked and kindly accepted the invitation to more fully explain the “genius” of Bill Walsh.

Nevertheless, there is only one person who can fully articulate what he did, why it worked, and how it may benefit you as a leader; namely, Bill Walsh. In his own words, this book is his explanation.

My father’s journey was arduous, but his dream was big: Bill Walsh wanted to be a successful head coach in the NFL more than anything else in the world. As he moved his family back and forth across the country, he chased his dream, from the Oakland Raiders and the San Jose Apaches to the Cincinnati Bengals, San Diego Chargers, and Stanford University. Ultimately, the dream came true: head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. The lessons he learned he wanted to share. My father is no longer with us, but I know he would be proud that his hard-earned lessons are now available in his book,
The Score Takes Care of Itself.

Joe Montana

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never saw a regular-season NFL game in person until I was a player in the NFL—watching from the sidelines as a rookie backup quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers during a game against the Minnesota Vikings. It was my first game as a pro. Bill Walsh was my coach.

We lost that game to the Vikings (28-22) as well as thirteen of our next fifteen games; fans were unhappy, and critics were howling and having a field day at our expense because all they could see was our 2-14 won-lost record. But I had my own opinion: Bill Walsh was special.

His mind for technical football was extraordinary, but beyond that was his ability to organize and manage his staff, players, everybody—to get the whole organization on exactly the same page.
On
that page he set the standard for how he wanted things done, and his standard was simple: perfection. That’s what he taught us individually and as a group—to believe it could be achieved and then achieve it (or come close). He had in his mind this ideal—an image of perfect football—coupled with the nuts-and-bolts details of how to accomplish it, which he then taught.

That, in my opinion, was his primary leadership asset: his ability to teach people how to think and play at a different and much higher, and, at times, perfect level. He accomplished this in three ways: (1) he had a tremendous knowledge of all aspects of the game and a visionary approach to offense; (2) he brought in a great staff and coaches who knew how to coach, how to complement his own teaching of what we needed to know to rise to his standard of performance; and (3) he taught us to hate mistakes.

Bill got all of us striving to be perfect in games
and
practice. (You didn’t want to see any balls on the ground, no fumbles, no mistakes, no turnovers.) Without all the screaming that coaches usually do, he was very focused and demanding because he was making you test yourself, take yourself to different limits. He said that if you aim for perfection and miss, you’re still pretty good, but if you aim for mediocre and miss? Well, he didn’t allow us to think like that.

That was the thing about his perspective: Being really good wasn’t good enough. He taught us to want to be perfect and instilled in the team a hunger for improvement, a drive to get better and better. We saw his own hunger for perfection, and it was contagious.

In fact, that was the biggest challenge in playing for Bill—trying to be perfect. It applied to everyone on the team, everyone in the organization, but it seemed like it especially applied to his quarterback. He expected a lot from his quarterback.

Bill just assumed I was supposed to be great and didn’t praise me routinely. The quarterback didn’t get the game ball, didn’t get a load of compliments. Win a Super Bowl? Yes, then you’d get praise from Bill, but otherwise he didn’t believe his starting quarterback needed a lot of praise for doing what he was being paid to do.

You might think that trying to meet his extremely high expectations would tighten you up, but Bill didn’t jump on you for a mistake; he came right in with the correction: “Here’s what was wrong; this is how to do it right.” Over and over, without getting all upset, he taught the smallest details of perfecting performance.

He had this little way of taking the pressure off with a comment or, on occasion, some sarcasm. Humor was one of his assets. One time, to emphasize the dress code, he had all the assistant coaches come into a meeting wearing outfits that were ridiculous. One was dressed like a bum, another like a hippie, and somebody was wearing tights, a dress, and falsies—that may have been Bill. He said something like, “Now, we don’t want to look like this on the road, do we?” He made a serious point with humor.

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.

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 within 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.