by Bill Walsh
I know this is true because I was there. Brown felt his teaching would be so ingrained that he didn’t need to resort to pep talks or phony slogans: “You can’t prepare a player that way [i.e., push them to high performance with a pep talk]. The only way to do it is to be so thorough in your work beforehand as to make him totally confident of himself and those around him.” I adopted that attitude in my own head coaching at Stanford and San Francisco.
One of the game’s great innovators, Paul Brown was the first (or among the first in some cases) to use IQ tests to evaluate players, establish a game film “library” and studiously analyze the footage, teach players in a formal classroom setting, send in plays from the sideline with “messenger” linemen, fit helmets with face masks, expand the network for player recruitment beyond anything that had been seen before, emphasize a wide-open and profuse passing game (especially with the great Otto Graham), and take organizing practice schedules to an almost scientific level, including assigning assistant coaching detailed duties—defined areas of responsibility for which they were held accountable. You could say he was one of the men who brought modern management techniques to coaching football.
His approach to quality control, or more accurately, controlling what creates quality, was evident even in his early years. As a high school coach in Ohio (at Massillon’s Washington High School), Brown had his football system used by all of Massillon’s junior high schools so that the youngsters would be familiar with it if they made his high school team—the Tigers.
Paul Brown was one of those pioneers who advanced the way coaches approached doing their job—not as a serious sideline, but as a profession, almost a science. That’s the environment—classroom—I was in for eight years. I didn’t think of Paul as my mentor, nor did he, but the sheer volume of coaching and leadership expertise I harvested, both consciously and unconsciously, qualified him as such.
San Diego’s Tommy Prothro, a fine coach whose greatest achievements were at the college level, where his ability to connect with his players was made into an art form (resulting in a Rose Bowl championship at UCLA and two other Rose Bowl appearances as head coach at Oregon State), demonstrated what it means to truly care about your people.
I believe Tommy’s advice when I received an offer from Stanford University—“Take the job, Bill, because a head coaching position in the Pac-10 is significant. For the good of your family and career and peace of mind, go to Stanford.”—was perhaps as close to the kind of input a mentor gives as any I’ve gotten. As noted, this lesson stood me in good stead at San Francisco.
Additionally, I had the good fortune to be a player and assistant for Bob Bronzan, head coach at San Jose State—an astute teacher of football who organized each practice almost to the minute. There was also some traditional mentoring in Bob’s relationship with me. I was young, he believed in me, and he told me so in no uncertain terms.
I was also lucky to work as an assistant coach at Stanford for John Ralston—a man with a keen mind for football.
All along the way, I was paying attention to my teachers—unofficial mentors. While I was an assistant coach teaching others how to play football, others were teaching me how to coach football. By the time I was named head coach at Stanford University, I had a virtual PhD in coaching and leadership. Stanford football—head coach for two years—was my postdoctorate.
In a sense, the day I arrived at 49ers headquarters as head coach (and soon thereafter, general manager) I could have been wearing a cap and gown and holding a parchment paper that said, “William Ernest Walsh, Doctor of Philosophy, Modern Football, Coaching, and Leadership.”
I certainly wasn’t the only head coach who had that kind of “academic” credentialing, but I was lucky to be among those who did. My expertise accumulated because I made it my job to study others, to learn along the way.
Some are lucky and find themselves blessed with a mentor who truly makes a difference throughout their life. But you can make the biggest difference of all by yourself. There are mentors in our professions teaching lessons (good and bad) that are free for your inquiring mind. You must be aggressive in acquiring what they teach and adapting it to your own leadership philosophy and playbook.
In my experience, there has never been a leader who arrived fully formed, who figured it out all by him- or herself. Ralph Waldo Emerson described a great and creative person as one who “finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective.” We learn from others.
Always there are mentors—some official, some unofficial. We apprentice when we are young, and it should continue even when we are old. A good leader is always learning. The great leaders start learning young and continue until their last breath.
THE WALSH WAY
The Fog Cutter
Randy Cross, San Francisco 49er, 1976-88
I witnessed the destruction of a venerable NFL franchise—the San Francisco 49ers—during my first three years with the team before Bill Walsh arrived. This included seeing the headquarters gutted of longtime personnel and the removal of all vestiges of former 49er teams—even pictures of San Francisco legends like John Brodie and Frankie Albert were tossed in the Dumpster by a general manager, Joe Thomas, who wanted to get rid of 49er history.
It culminated in a 2-14 season my third year, when we legitimately could lay claim to being perhaps the worst NFL team in history. It’s hard to convey how miserable our situation was as morale plummeted about as low as it could possibly go.
Then we heard this coach from Stanford University was coming in to take over—Bill Walsh. No big deal. He’d be my fifth head coach in four years at San Francisco, so I figured he’d last as long as the others; that is, not long. In fact, the whole team was skeptical about his chances. But from day one I could see things were going to be different.
We arrived at training camp and Bill came in and gave a short speech to all of us. He said, “I know what some of you guys sitting there are thinking. You’re thinking, ‘I was here before Walsh arrived, and I’ll be here when Walsh is gone.’ Well, you better think about this too: If you can’t play for me, and this is the worst team in the National Football League, where else are you going to go; who in the hell is gonna hire you?” And many of us sitting there thought to ourselves, “Hmmmm, maybe he’s got a point there.”
That was my first taste of his ability to kind of twist your mind a little bit. No rah-rah speech, no threats, no promises. Instead Bill came in through the side door. But that’s just a tiny example of his comprehensive leadership arsenal.
Of all the coaches and businesspeople I’ve been around in fifty-four years, I’ve never known a person who could get a message across, focus that message, and get people ready to perform better than Bill Walsh. He was able to do this, in part, because he was the smartest person I have ever known and the best-organized person I have ever known. And it didn’t take weeks to figure that out; it took maybe an hour. Probably less.
I saw immediately that he had a singular focus: on being first class, on being the best, on being the greatest. But lots of guys have that—the desire to be the best. Here’s the difference: Bill knew exactly how to do it, the specifics, not just for his quarterback but for a receptionist answering the phones; not just for a backup left tackle but for groundskeepers. Somehow he knew what it was, what constituted greatness for every single job in his organization. He had that in his head.
He knew what a spreadsheet looks like, what a marketing presentation should look like, and all the rest. Detailed concepts. And he hired the very best people to do the jobs that he needed them to do. And in most cases he had the good sense to get out of the way and let them do their job—a very undervalued management skill.
Bill had a plan for everything, a Standard of Performance for each one of us that was so clear he could spell it out exactly. And he did. If you were a San Francisco 49er, you were not f
oggy on what his goal was for you specifically—what he wanted you to do—and for the organization too.
Right from the start, he really got out there and coached—rolled up his sleeves and got totally into teaching what he was aiming for. And he did that every day of every year for a decade. Of course, the offense was his baby, his first love, and he was totally involved in coaching the smallest details of its execution. He was not aloof, but right in there with the troops. Sometimes he’d take a break for a few minutes and be over on the side shadowboxing and the next minute be back in the thick of things. (Shadowboxing! That got noticed.)
The year before Bill arrived, we were 2-14 and maybe the worst team in the history of the NFL. The next year, under Bill, we had exactly the same record, 2-14, but we were the best 2-14 team in the history of the NFL. We had the germinating seeds of a good offense, and we sensed it. Players are very hard to fool, and we could see things happening because of Bill.
For the first three years, when he was doing this almost miraculous turnaround of the San Francisco 49ers, from the worst in the NFL to champions, we were all like coworkers, so we could really see what he was suffering through; only two wins his first year, followed by a horrible eight-game losing streak in the middle of our second season. That streak just ate his stomach up. It was his team, his deal, and he could not figure out a way to pull us out of it. You saw how it really killed him, because he was in so close with us. We could feel it, what he was going through.
When we’d watch film and see a guard go the wrong way pulling, or a running back hit the wrong hole, or a quarterback ignore the first read, we knew we were screwing up his offense. It was ours too, but it was his first. He had created perfection on paper, and we couldn’t execute it. But he kept pushing us to get better.
He’d tell us that perfection usually wasn’t possible, but that was what he wanted us to aspire to. And the offensive plays he dreamed up needed perfection in order to work. Bill had the same high standard not just for the offense and for the defense and for the special teams, but for everything: the way the office was run, the personnel department, everything and everybody. He had his hands on everything in the organization.
After three or four years, Bill started giving each of us individually the Talk. He called you into his little office in that rat hole of a building we were in on Nevada Street in Redwood City, California, and gave you a synopsis of how he saw your future. You could tell when a guy came down from his office and he’d heard a version of reality from Bill that he didn’t like.
He called me in one time after I’d had the best season of my career and said, “Randy, you probably have five to six years left in the NFL. But my guess is that here, with us, you’ve got three or four years.” I gulped: “What?”
I came down from his office with one of those looks on my face I’d seen on others. But he was doing everybody a service, because he was absolutely right. And that’s a little piece of why he was ahead of his time. He was looking out for the welfare of organization, but also the players, by helping us deal with that harsh little reality; namely, we weren’t playing football forever, and we certainly weren’t playing for him forever. He didn’t lead us down a rosy path. He gave us the truth.
We won a Super Bowl in Bill’s third year and the following season basically tanked. After that, he pulled back from us in some ways. Not only did he feel we had forfeited his trust, but also there were veterans on the team and he was going to have to start making some hard decisions about them. So he began separating himself somewhat. From then on, he had a more arm’s-length connection emotionally, a more professional relationship than in the early days. He was still hands-on with his coaching, but he pulled back from the personal part of it. It’s hard to explain, but there was a change.
Two years later we won another championship, Super Bowl XIX—just tore through people during an 18-1 year, one of the best teams that anybody had ever seen. Once that happened, from that moment on, we had sort of set our own high-water mark. Good luck meeting that one every year. Nevertheless, the pressure on Bill got ratcheted way up by the owner, Eddie DeBartolo. A Super Bowl was the norm; anything less was not acceptable, and the pressure became crushing.
In Bill’s final season, his tenth, he really got put through the wringer. We were 6-5 at one point and being written off by everybody. After a one-point loss at Phoenix to the Cardinals, Eddie stormed into our locker room immediately after the game and was livid. He dressed down everybody verbally, I mean really hard. Threatening us. That wasn’t such a big deal; we’d been screamed at as a team before, nothing new there. But this time Bill himself was targeted in the threats and dressing-down. He got screamed at along with the rest of us. That was an eye opener right there—a first for us. It had to really hurt him—to be humiliated like that. Looking back, I don’t think Eddie would consider it one of his sterling moments.
But that’s what that place was about as the years went on. We weren’t there to be good, we weren’t there to win a lot of games, we were there to win Super Bowls. Otherwise, get out. And personally, I think that level of expectation is productive. It’s the only way to go about doing it, even though it cost Bill a couple of years on his career and maybe some more Super Bowls.
Under the pressure he had on him during the last few years, there was no way he could keep going. At the end he would have needed a six-month vacation all by himself on a desert island—making him sleep all the time, making him relax, making him chill out—if he wanted to continue under that load and that pressure.
Throughout the years, Bill’s passion was so evident. It became the passion of his team and the staff and everybody in the organization. We stepped up to his level of dedication, his standard, his vision, and his ability to get the job done. And brother, if he detected anything less than an equal kind of passion from any one of us, we’d get the sharp end of the stick.
That’s why I chuckle when I see all these pictures of Bill, that image of him being a professor, pensive, the “thinker” with his hand on his chin, contemplating the exact words of his next lecture. Nobody on the outside ever saw the other side that he could summon up. Bill Walsh could burn a hole right through you with his eyes. Right through your bones and everything. His eyes could knock you out.
We saw a whole different guy from the professor. He could present a whole different vocabulary when he wanted to—like a longshoreman. But it was part of his passion for greatness.
Bill Walsh had the ability to change the way people thought—not just how we performed a task, but how we thought and felt about who we were. In the beginning, when we were as bad as we were, nobody was thinking about a Super Bowl. Our goal in life was just to be pretty good. Bill’s goal in life was to convince us that we could be great. And he did; and we were. That’s why he was such a great leader.
PART V
Thin Skin, Baloney, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”: Looking for Lessons in My Mirror
How You Get Good: No Mystery to Mastery
If you’re Jerry Rice, the greatest receiver in NFL history and, according to some, the greatest player, you’re practicing a slant pass pattern at 6 A.M. over and over with nobody within a mile of you—no football, no quarterback, nobody but Jerry working to improve, to master his profession.
Why is the NFL’s greatest-ever receiver doing this? Jerry Rice understands the connection between preparation and performance; between intelligently applied hard work and results; between mediocrity and mastery of your job. And Jerry has the skill coupled with the will to do it.
Joe Montana, perhaps the greatest quarterback in NFL history, in his last season as a professional, when he was playing for Kansas City, would spend two hours a day every day at the same little practice field at Menlo College near San Francisco. I would work with him on basic fundamentals that would bore a high schooler to death. Joe had four Super Bowl rings. How did he get them? Why was he on that little practice field? Joe Montana understands what mastery means.
; You never stop learning, perfecting, refining—molding your skills. You never stop depending on the fundamentals—sustaining, maintaining, and improving. Jerry and Joe, maybe the best ever at their positions, at the last stages of their careers were still working very hard on the fundamental things that high school kids won’t do because it’s too damn dull.
It wasn’t dull to Jerry and Joe, because they understood the absolute and direct connection between intelligently directed hard work and achieving your potential. We all do; you do; I do. Everybody who’s a serious player knows what it takes. The difference is how much you’re willing to give to get there.
For us, there is no mystery to mastery. And it applies to football players and coaches, general managers and executives in sports or business. It applies to anyone anywhere who wants to get really good—who wants to master his or her profession. It applies to you.
Sine Qua Non: Your Work Ethic—What William Archibald Walsh Taught His Son
For me, the starting point for everything—before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience—is the work ethic. Without one of significant magnitude you’re dead in the water, finished.
Among other things, I knew the example I set as head coach would be what others in the organization would recognize as the standard they needed to match (at least, most of them would recognize it). If there is such a thing as a trickle-down effect, that’s it. Your staff sees your devotion to work, their people see them, and on through the organization.
Obviously, it’s not enough for you alone to work hard; there must be a similar organizational work ethic for anything of significance to occur. You—the one in charge—are the reference point for what that means.
What does total effort and 100 percent commitment and sacrifice look like? The leader—head coach in my case—is the one who answers that question by example for the entire team; you demonstrate in your behavior what it looks like. Just talking about it, exhorting those in your organization to “give it all you’ve got” is close to meaningless. It’s like telling someone what constitutes a great movie. They’ve got to see it to know it. Same thing with a voracious appetite for work. Most people don’t have it; many people can achieve it; one person is charged with setting the standard and demonstrating what it means: you.
