by Bill Walsh
During my years as head coach both at Stanford University and with the San Francisco 49ers, I believe it is safe to say there was no single individual in the organization—player, assistant coach, trainer, staff member, groundskeeper, or anyone else—who could accurately say he or she out-worked me. Not one. I can state that with no fear of contradiction. Some worked as hard—nobody worked harder.
I never asked anyone to do more than I was willing to do, nor what I wasn’t willing to do. Nobody could ever—not once—point at me and say, “Walsh sits on his ass in his office all day while we do the work.” When that sentiment spreads through an organization, you have signaled that “sitting on your ass all day” is an accepted standard of performance.
I was fortunate in this regard, because when I was growing up my role model was a good one. The guy who set the standard for me was my father. Dad knew what it meant to really work hard. And he did. William Archibald Walsh never went past eighth grade, scrambled around as a young man to make money, and came through tough times, including the Great Depression. He struggled to make a living for his family but showed me what a man does when he has a job to do: He goes out and does it.
During the Depression, my father was paid thirty-one cents an hour to work ten hours or more a day on the assembly line at the huge Chrysler plant near our small house in south central Los Angeles. That didn’t pay the bills, so he set up a little auto body repair shop in our garage, where he worked after he got done working at the plant, late at night and on weekends.
When I was a teenager, I had to work with him on many of those evenings and weekends, long hours into the night helping him out. I hated it, but he taught me the connection between hard work and survival, between survival and success. Dad taught me that. His work ethic became my work ethic.
He paid a tremendous price for his willingness to work. It may have shortened his life—a life that offered little in the way of fun or material reward—and kept him from connecting in any meaningful way with his son. I never really got to know my father; he didn’t have time. It was all work for Dad, or his family wouldn’t survive.
Over the years, I’ve heard many theories, often complex or convoluted, on what it takes to be an outstanding leader. Most of the theories seem to take a monumental work ethic for granted, as if it is assumed or something, as if people automatically know what it is and do it. I didn’t assume it. The majority of people out there don’t know what it is. They need to be shown, and you’re the one who must show it.
Some of our great leaders come from the military, not just America’s, but those we fought against. General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, as he was known commanding Germany’s tank brigades in North Africa during World Ward II, understood the power of example in the area of effort. Here’s what he said: “A commander must accustom his staff to a high tempo from the outset, and continuously keep them up to it. If he once allows himself to be satisfied with norms, or anything less than an all-out effort, he gives up the race from the starting post, and will sooner or later be taught a bitter lesson.”
A high tempo from the outset and continuously throughout; dissatisfaction with the usual norms; insistence on all-out effort? Rommel understood hard work and the importance of demonstrating it to his troops. The same applies to your troops. You’re the one who shows them what all-out effort really means, what hard work looks like.
You cannot do that if you’re invisible, cooped up in your office instead of being out there with your team. A leader’s great work ethic must been seen to be perceived, must be perceived if it is to be the organization’s norm.
The Perfection of the Puzzle
I hate to see bad football. I hate to see a team play bad football, even on a single play—in practice, in a game, anywhere. Bad football makes me ill in the same way, I suppose, a symphony conductor hates to hear an orchestra mangle Bach or Beethoven. There’s a reverence for the art. For me, it can be described as a reverence for football as it could be played—the exquisite beauty of what can occur at its uppermost level. I think top performers in all professions have that same deep respect—even reverence—for their work.
One player, a guard, for example, making every small move perfectly on a play is a little work of art that I can watch on tape over and over again with satisfaction. Imagine then, when on a single play each one of our players does his job exactly, perfectly, totally right. It can be breathtaking. If it scores a touchdown, the points are almost incidental, frosting on the cake (unless the frosting wins a game).
When it’s done perfectly at its highest level, football is art and gives me such great fulfillment. Anything less, the botched play, casual effort, sloppy execution, inept play calling, even if it gains ground or scores points, was very disturbing—painful—to me on an aesthetic level. I was never able to take refuge in a winning score if it was produced by shoddy performance—bad football.
Thus, if we won, I cared about how we won; if we lost, I cared about how we lost. I didn’t want to lose by forty points; I’d prefer to lose by thirty-nine. If we won by twenty, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and try hard to figure out how we could have scored twenty-one points. It wasn’t increasing or decreasing the point differential that was so intriguing to me, but rather increasing the quality of our execution and decision making—the quality of the football we played.
Had I miscalculated or ignored information that was there for me to see and evaluate? Why and where did our execution break down? Where were our decisions—my decisions—flawed or dead wrong? On and on and on. It was, I think, perfection that I was pursuing.
Whatever it was, beyond the score I had a passion for figuring out how we could have performed at a higher and higher level of excellence. Good or bad, win or lose, “What caused what, and how can it be improved?” was my recurrent question, an obsession.
At 2 A.M. I’d be staring up at the ceiling or tossing around in bed. Eventually, I’d get up, pace around, sit down in the next room to write some notes. Then back to pacing, slowly analyzing before writing down additional observations or ideas.
Finally, as the sun was getting ready to come up, I’d go back to bed and try to get a few minutes of sleep. It was like this after every single game I coached at San Francisco for ten years, close to it on many other nights. By the end of the season, I was a mess physically and emotionally.
All of this had less to do with running up the score or trying to lose by fewer points than with how I perceived the entire process of leadership and striving for success. To me it was a puzzle to be solved, pieces to be found and put in place, solutions to be figured out. I had a passion for trying to determine how we could have performed at a higher level, how we could achieve perfection, or at least get closer and closer and closer.
Of course, losing is monumentally—traumatically—different from winning, but in both cases I was extremely and, at times, perhaps overly analytical of our efforts in searching for a means of closing in on perfection.
In Super Bowl XIX—the closest I’ve ever come to coaching a perfect game—two events occurred that marred it for me to this very day. Although they may seem trivial or illogical to you, they illustrate my all-consuming desire to set every single piece of the puzzle perfectly in place.
The game was played in front of 84,059 fans at Stanford Stadium, thirty minutes south of San Francisco in Palo Alto, California. Our opponents, the Miami Dolphins, were led by Dan Marino, a quarterback whose arm was so strong he could supposedly throw a football sixty yards behind his back. Additionally, he had an uncanny ability to read defenses, a trigger-fast release, and two of the greatest receivers of the time, Mark Clayton and Mark Duper.
Some viewed Miami and Marino as unstoppable, and the results supported it: a regular-season record of 14-2. While our regular season record was even better, 15-1, there was a troubling fact within those numbers; namely, in the AFC championship game to advance to the Super Bowl, Marino had thrown twenty-one completions for 421 yards against the
Pittsburgh Steelers. It was an easy win for the Dolphins: 45-28. This was relevant and very troubling because Pittsburgh had been the only team to beat San Francisco during our 15-1 regular season.
That’s why it concerned me so much—the only team to beat us had, in turn, been beaten easily by our upcoming Super Bowl opponents, the Miami Dolphins, and their young superstar quarterback, Marino. While the oddsmakers had us favored by three points, lots of bettors thought it should have been the other way around and placed their bets accordingly.
Nevertheless, after trailing 10-7 at the end of the first quarter, we began to gradually take over on both offense and defense. With less than a minute remaining in the first half, San Francisco seemed to be in control of the game and held a big lead: 28-10.
With time running out on the half, the Dolphins’ kicker, Uwe von Schamann, nailed a field goal from thirty-seven yards to bring the score to 28-13. As Miami prepared to kick off, I instructed our kickoff return team to simply fall on the ball to remove all risk of a fumble: “No runback! No runback! Fall on the ball! No runback!” I would be very happy to let the first half run down and head into the locker room with a fifteen-point lead.
The Dolphins’ kick went to Guy McIntyre, a blocker, who grabbed the ball and immediately fell to the ground, exactly as I had instructed just seconds earlier. The clock would now run out on the first half in a very orderly manner and send us into the locker room to prepare for the second half with a solid advantage.
But suddenly 49er rookie Derrick Harmon ran over to McIntyre and began screaming, “Get up! Run! Run, run, run!” Guy got up and ran. Or tried to. He immediately got hit by a Miami defender who’d been building up a full-speed head of steam for twenty yards. In the resulting collision, Guy fumbled; Miami recovered and quickly kicked another field goal. The first half—suddenly—was over.
It happened in a flash, and it was stunning to me. I felt like I’d been hit hard on the head with a metal baseball bat. Even though we still had a comfortable lead, in a space of ten seconds the Dolphins had scored twice on field goals, narrowed the margin, and completely turned things around psychologically. But in retrospect there was something else that was equally upsetting.
I felt that if our coaching—my teaching—had been better, the breakdown in discipline and execution would not have occurred. I didn’t blame Guy, nor did I really blame Derrick. I blamed myself for that high school level of execution and still do. It was bad football.
The second blemish on this otherwise near-perfect game occurred as the clock was winding down very late in the fourth quarter, with the 49ers leading 38-16. At that point, I made a decision that still gnaws at me.
With second down and less than a yard to go for a touchdown, I called off the hunt, ran the same play three consecutive times, knowing it probably wouldn’t score—variations of Roger Craig going over the top—because I didn’t want to create the impression we were pouring it on, running up the score.
As intended, we didn’t make a touchdown. Miami took possession as the clock ran out, and the 49ers won our second Super Bowl in four years: 38-16.
My decision obviously didn’t affect the final outcome of the game, but I believe it was wrong to do what I decided to do; namely, force a team dedicated to competing to stop competing. It was wrong to do that, to take the bullet out of the chamber. It was bad football, and it was my fault.
Now, those two incidents might cause you to say, “Why in the world would you worry about it, Bill? Guy McIntyre’s response to Derrick Harmon’s yelling to get up and run was just good aggressive instinct, and your calling off the hunt at the end of the game was just good sportsmanship.”
But as the years have passed, both situations have come back to me in a negative way that I don’t feel good about. Neither should have occurred; both marred an otherwise perfect game. And that’s the point: Our game was very close to perfect.
Those two incidents will live with me forever because otherwise it was as flawless a football game as I’ve ever coached, as close to putting all the pieces in place for the full four quarters of a game.
Achieving success in a competitive environment requires solving a very complicated puzzle. This is true in all big-time competition. The winners know how to get more pieces of the puzzle in place than the losers. I still regret that those two final pieces of the puzzle prevented it from being solved perfectly.
I also know that the degree of drive an individual has to solve the puzzle perfectly, no matter how complex or difficult, is directly related to attaining higher and higher levels of success. It’s that desire that wakes you up in the middle of the night reaching for a pen and paper next to your bed—an insatiable hunger to capture inspiration and answers that all highly driven people share.
Where that drive comes from is often a mystery. Here’s what Arthur Ashe, one of the greatest tennis players in history, had to say about it: “Who knows what force gnaws at us, telling us that our accomplishments, no matter how sensational, are not enough; that we need to do more?” (Arthur Ashe, Days of Grace.)
I sought perfection, and 99 percent isn’t perfection. Why “almost perfect” wasn’t enough for me is something I can’t explain.
The Gladiator Mentality: Get Your Mind Right
The gladiator mentality is common in sports, especially football at all levels. Although it’s played out differently in business, I think there is a similar phenomenon—that is, the effort to “get your mind right,” totally focused—before a significant event, whether it’s a major sales presentation or something else. Among other things, it involves the preparation, the “ceremony” before the main event. Top performers utilize this opportunity to get ready for battle.
There is a ritual, sort of a crescendo, that takes you to the very peak of preparation and readiness. The gladiator is thinking, mentally narrowing his focus, as he goes through the ritual before the game. It draws him upward smoothly into the increasing intensity and pressure of the event like a high-performance car going from zero to sixty, the gears shifting seamlessly and without notice.
In addition to our pregame discussions, I had my own ritual as a coach before each kickoff and did it almost unconsciously. I always went to my locker first and then walked through the locker room, taking exactly the same route each time. I would sit in my office and watch another NFL game on television for five minutes or so—not really paying much attention to it, just distracting myself. Then I would leave my office, and just before going out to the field I would shake hands with every single player on our team. If I got done and had missed one of them, I somehow knew it and would search him out and shake hands.
It was that ritual that helped me to create the mind-set I wanted before each game. It helped me to focus on what I was about to do, allowed me to methodically narrow my concentration to the point where I could block out everything but the game plan and its execution. The routine was part of the grounding process in which I sought to eradicate worry, excitement, stress, distractions, hopes, fears, and all personal issues. It was like walking into a completely different room mentally, like being on a different planet. And it didn’t end when I left the locker room.
I Never Sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”
During “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the opening kickoff, I would stand at attention with my hand over my heart, but I wasn’t singing. It was during this brief moment that I would remove myself mentally from the activities and considerable energy around me on the sidelines—compose and focus myself, extend what I had begun in the locker room.
I visualized that I was looking at the football field through a big plate-glass window, removed, in a sense, so I wouldn’t get overly involved emotionally and could stay with what I had prepared prior to game. Clear thinking and overly charged emotions are usually antithetical.
I actually think my heart rate may have gone down as the opening kickoff approached. Rather than getting more and more excited, pumped up and emotional, a sense of calm came over me
. If a person can be extremely intense, extraordinarily focused, and completely composed all at the same time, I guess that’s the state I was in by the time I was through not singing the national anthem.
By the opening kickoff, I had blocked out crowd noise (and the crowd) and all the crazy energy and activity on the sidelines, which are disruptive to good decision making. It may have been as pleasing a sensation as any I ever got as a coach. Winning a Super Bowl championship was great, but the emotion I felt in victory was often more relief than anything else, especially as the years went on.
The state of mind I could achieve as a game was about to begin was pure, so free of dissonance—it was just the best. The ritual created it. It was the gladiator mind-set, free of stress, distractions, and emotionalism, that got me ready for the competition and allowed me to work at my highest level.
“Getting your mind right” has application beyond a football game. Those events where you’re putting it all on the line—a big sales presentation, an important conference with your team (or your boss), and many other occasions—all require that your thinking be at its best. The prep erformance “ritual” that you develop can help make it happen just as it helped me to do my job to the best of my ability.
My Strengths?
I have a passion for what I do. Also, if I’m honest about it, I’d say that I have an ability to communicate and relate to others in the context of work, to express myself clearly, and to do that in all circumstances, especially under extreme pressure.
