Gridiron Genius: A Master Class in Building Teams and Winning at the Highest Level

Michael Lombardi and Bill Belichick

1 THE ORGANIZATION CULTURE BEATS EVERYTHING Champions behave like champions before they’re champions. —BILL WALSH

• Bill Walsh’s formula, what he called his Standard of Performance: an exacting plan for constructing and maintaining the culture and organizational DNA behind the perfect football franchise.
• His obsession with perfection meant he constantly pushed his people, regardless of experience or position in the organization, to learn more. 
• He was naturally curious, always searching for ways to fix his team or just better accomplish the simplest task, and he demanded the same thing of his staff. He never wanted us to follow familiar paths to knowledge. 
• He was trying to build a lasting, self-perpetuating culture to counter the groupthink that was then pervasive in the NFL and still is today.

Walsh told me, “If we are all thinking alike, no one is thinking.” 

• He was a master communicator, deftly asking questions he already knew the answer to as a lead-in to another lesson.
• The best way I can describe Walsh’s philosophy is that he thought of a football team as being like a brand-new automobile, believing that the finished product could be only as good as the assembly line that created it, all the way down to the tiniest bolt and the smallest detail performed by the seemingly most insignificant worker.
• It was a process Walsh was constantly thinking and rethinking as he built his culture of success. 
• His meticulousness was evident everywhere, from his spotless sneakers to his impeccable office.
• Walsh was extremely demanding in a quiet way. You never wanted to be the source of that disappointed look on his face.
• Walsh’s mind never turned off, and writing things down seemed to be the best method he had to catalog his thoughts. He used 3-by-5 index cards and short sharp pencils like the ones golfers keep score with, and when he wasn’t doodling, he made lists of things that needed to get done in an elegant left-handed handwriting that was part cursive, part print.

17 principles of the Standard of Performance -These tenets would inform the creation and maintenance of a football dynasty:

• Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement. 
• Demonstrate respect for each person in the organization. 
• Be deeply committed to learning and teaching. 
• Be fair. 
• Demonstrate character. 
• Honor the direct connection between details and improvement; relentlessly seek the latter. 
• Show self-control, especially under pressure. 
• Demonstrate and prize loyalty. 
• Use positive language and have a positive attitude. 
• Take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort. 
• Be willing to go the extra distance for the organization. 
• Deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation. 
• Promote internal communication that is both open and substantive. 
• Seek poise in myself and those I lead. 
• Put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own.
• Maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high. 
• Make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

The Standard of Performance was Walsh’s attempt to instill a winning attitude in every member of his organization. In fact, as he admitted in his book The Score Takes Care of Itself, he was far more focused on the process of creating a culture, of establishing a foundation for sustainable success, than in drawing up the perfect game plan. His Standard of Performance wasn’t a way to define his genius; it was his genius. It was the compass that guided everything he oversaw—coaching,

• And so he went about teaching the team not just what to do but how to think. The team facility was Walsh’s classroom, and before long he had schooled everyone.That authority was the key to Walsh’s system because it created a hierarchy that avoided the common organizational fissures.
• The thing is, hiring coaches like Holmgren was a convoluted path to building a staff. It required Walsh to spend lots of time and energy coaching his coaches. But he lived for that kind of challenge. That was why he hired guys who were intelligent before they were anything else, guys who were not typical products of the football industry.
• Walsh wanted men he could mold and develop. He firmly believed that coaches with too much experience in other systems would have a hard time clearing their heads of old ideas to make room for new ones. Over time philosophies become rigid. Methods and styles take root in one’s DNA, making it harder to change direction or adapt to another way. Walsh was constructing something different in San Francisco, something revolutionary even, and he knew it would be very unlikely that a fully indoctrinated coach would be able to contribute to the new 49ers culture. Therefore, Walsh opted for less experienced men who shared his curiosity and displayed a willingness to learn his system and methods.
• Walsh was a big believer in the business and leadership philosophies of Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, whom the author Tom Peters often referenced in his speeches. “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind,” Hock said. “But how to get old ones out.”

The only sign we have in the locker room is a quote from The Art of War: “Every battle is won before it is fought.” – Bill Belichick 

2 THE COACH A STUDY IN LEADERSHIP 

Flying by the seat of his pants always suggests to me a leader who hasn’t prepared properly and whose pants may soon fall down. —BILL WALSH

• Coaches are first and foremost great leaders. Good coaches may be clever play callers or demanding drill sergeants or organized middle managers. But in the ultimate team sport, real success doesn’t depend on tactics or discipline or order. It always comes down to how well a coach leads. I substituted the word leader for coach, and my research was transformed. I needed to define what made a great leader.

COMMAND OF THE ROOM 

• Followers need something to commit to. Great leaders know how to grab a team’s attention and then show them what they’re all fighting for. 
  • As Belichick says, “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes but no plans.” You can’t buy into a plan unless one is laid out clearly and plainly for the entire franchise.

COMMAND OF THE MESSAGE 

• What good is a plan if you can’t articulate it? Part of what made Hall of Fame coach Bill Parcells an exceptional leader was his brilliant communication skills. Watch clips of him as he addresses his team and listen to the simple metaphors he uses to help players understand. If he wanted better teamwork, he might say: “We’re not playing solitaire out here.” Short and sweet, it drives home the point and isn’t going to be misunderstood. Parcells was a master at using humor and metaphor. Belichick, in contrast, is better at using video to detail exactly what might happen if players don’t follow the plan. His bluntness is a beacon. “Look at this idiot, operating on his own, not doing what he should do,” he might say, pointing to the screen, with the object of his ridicule as likely to be a Pro Bowler as a third-string fill-in. Whether you use metaphors or game film, delivery isn’t as important as meaning. Players can’t accomplish anything unless they can visualize the path.

COMMAND OF SELF 

• Personal accountability is the ultimate sign of strength. When a leader admits mistakes, it shows the team that he expects as much from himself as he does from his players. When a coach cuts a high draft pick or an expensive free agent, it may look bad in the media, but it has a big impact in the locker room. 
• No one ever complains about the long hours in New England because Belichick’s car is always the last to leave the team parking lot. He never asks players or staff to do more than he’s willing to do. 
• In his play Antigone, Sophocles sums it up best: “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.” Ego is the leading cause of unemployment in the coaching world. Those who thrive in this profession don’t place their needs ahead of the team’s. Of course, some ego is essential. It becomes a problem when it gets in the way of your decision making. The right kind of ego demands perfection, not praise.
• Walsh most definitely had an ego; he did not deny the “genius” label that others gave him. He loved attention, but it never clouded his vision for the franchise. 
• Belichick has. He is not worried about where an idea comes from; he cares only about whether it makes the team better. 
  • you will constantly hear Belichick proclaim to his staff and players, “I screwed that up” or “That’s on me.” Command of self means sharing the blame and the credit alike, and this offers the advantage of allowing Belichick to step in at crunch time and say, “We did it your way, and it didn’t work—now we’re going to do it my way.”

COMMAND OF OPPORTUNITY 

• • To this day, people ask me what the difference is between the Cleveland Belichick and the New England Belichick. My answer is always the same: very little. Okay, so he inherited a better team in New England and picked a Hall of Fame quarterback in the sixth round of the draft. (Some might say Tom Brady fell into his lap; nonetheless, he made the pick that everyone else had the chance to make, too.) But Belichick as a leader and the core beliefs he instilled were the same in both places. The difference people perceive is not with Belichick but with the owner. In New England, Robert Kraft approved of, even demanded, a culture change and gave Belichick nearly total control of football operations to achieve

• Luck is the residue of design

COMMAND OF THE PROCESS 

• None of the other pillars matter if a leader is not fair and consistent.
• When rules don’t apply to everyone, the ensuing chaos collapses whatever foundation a leader has tried so hard to build.
• What separates good coaches from great ones is often trust and accountability

3 TEAM BUILDING IN SEARCH OF PROGRAM GUYS 

We are not collecting talent; we are building a team. —BILL BELICHICK

• The game of football might be ruled by perfectionists, but at its core, success in the NFL comes down to managing the maddening, inexact science of talent evaluation and team building. And when it comes to predicting human performance on a football field, the only thing for certain is that nothing is ever for certain.
• The imperfect nature of team building is why Walsh and all the other great football minds I’ve been around have approached the eternal puzzle of personnel the same way: Instead of trying to “solve” or perfect the draft, they have figured out how to create an edge by developing methods, strategies, and insights—things such as deeper background checks, better character evaluations, and more thorough off-season evaluations—that minimize risks and improve the odds of building a better team. Few mastered these techniques better than Walsh.
• For starters, there’s just no place to hide against competition that good. And if a player performed a skill once in such elevated company, coaches assumed that they could get him to replicate that in the pros. We looked at how quickly players learned new techniques and, most of all, how much they improved in the week leading up to the game. If a player could get better in four days, it was a safe bet he would take much bigger strides once he was being tutored full-time in the league.
• The second destructive form of bias we see all the time in NFL team building is “scouting blinders”: whenever drafted players are kept around long after it has become obvious that the evaluation that got them where they are was dead wrong.
• Nate Silver’s popular website FiveThirtyEight has calculated the success ratio of every position in every round. Drafting a quarterback in the first two rounds has less than a 50 percent chance of succeeding, and with each round those odds dwindle. Overall, the chances of finding a franchise quarterback in any round is closer to 40 percent.
• Belichick relies on professional outside help. Bob Troutwine is a Ph.D. based in Kansas City, Missouri, and a cofounder of The Right Profile, creators and administrators of unique physiological profiles that “tap” the heart and mind of prospective players. We liked the TAP—Troutwine Athletic Profile—so much that we made everyone applying for a job in the organization take it.
• A or B. It’s the simplest way to break down the issues at hand. But though that might work at their level, general managers like Belichick can’t fall into this “false duality” trap. They know there are often more than two solutions to any problem.
• Belichick lets the coaches talk first, but invariably he has questions. He’s in search of the right answers, not just any answers, and so he takes the time to listen to many different thoughts and ideas before coming to a conclusion. It’s listening that leads to a clear choice when he is faced with a tough decision. In the end, Belichick is brutal in the decision making regarding his roster:
• He encourages everyone to have an opinion as long as there is data, insight, or experience to support it. No one dares to operate by the seat of his pants for fear of being called out by the boss. In essence, Belichick’s open and transparent process at the beginning of each off-season helps remove personal biases so that the room can reach clean conclusions on how to spend the rest of the off-season.

Skill without the proper mental state gets you nowhere, and Belichick knows

• Belichick takes all the information from the initial off-season meetings and synthesizes it into three lists—for offense, defense, and special teams—prioritizing the most deficient positions in each unit. Then we spend the rest of the spring and summer fixing those problem spots.

8 WHILE I HAVE YOU MY BIGGEST PET PEEVES 

I’m not looking to be consistent; I am looking to be correct. —AL DAVIS

• Realistic optimism is the offspring of confidence and self-assurance,
• because at their core they knew exactly who they were, and they knew those traits were unique and extremely valuable in a copycat league such as the NFL.
• both men killers: drive, decision making, and realistic optimism.
• But mimicking success rarely earns success.

Practice execution becomes game reality. – Bill Belichick