The Score Takes Care of Itself

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by Bill Walsh


  All of this bothered my father a great deal. Regardless of what he did, it seemed the powers that be would not accord him equal status, would not recognize the legitimacy of his approach and his leadership skills. Thus, he increasingly became driven by a simple but almost obsessive goal: to prove them all wrong. And he did.

  This feeling of being discriminated against was part of the reason he created the Minority Coaches Fellowship Program while he was at San Francisco. He knew that smart, skilled black college coaches were not even being considered for head coaching jobs in the NFL because of race. He understood their plight because of his own experience of being kept at arm’s length when it came to a head coaching position. He hated it and was the first head coach in the NFL to establish a formal program to address the problem by inviting talented minority coaches to observe how he did things at San Francisco. He showed them what they needed to know to operate successfully at the top level. Later, the league followed his lead with a fellowship program that expanded on what he had done.

  In Super Bowl XLI, the Chicago Bears faced the Indianapolis Colts. Lovie Smith was head coach of the Bears; Tony Dungy was head coach of the Colts. Both are black. Dad enjoyed seeing those two great coaches running the show. (In fact, Tony had played briefly for Dad as a 49er.) In 2009, two years later, the Pittsburgh Steelers won Super Bowl XLIII. Their young coach was Mike Tomlin. By now, the fact that a black head coach was in the Super Bowl wasn’t even a big deal. Times had changed so much. My father didn’t live long enough to see that game, but somewhere, he had to be smiling.

  You might think all assistant coaches in the NFL have the same level of desire to become a head coach that Bill Walsh had, but the magnitude of his aspiration is impossible to overstate. He was a perfectionist, and he saw perfection as being most likely achieved only if his ideas and decisions weren’t filtered through and inevitably—in his opinion—misconstrued and misapplied by others. He had to be the one in charge.

  Oddly enough, he came to this conclusion as head coach at a little high school near San Francisco in Fremont, California, during his first two years of coaching—the Washington High Huskies. In short order, he turned a perpetual loser into a big winner. My father saw what happened when he did everything himself (including driving the team bus to away games). As you’ve read in his own words, this desire to “do it all myself ” eventually became an Achilles’ heel for him.

  From high school coaching he moved up by moving down: “up” to the college and NFL level, “down” as an assistant coach (i.e., secondary) position.

  Subsequently, he often saw his well-thought-out and often unconventional ideas ignored, modified, or, on occasion, screwed up by others above him. This drove him to distraction and created a smoldering desire to be in charge of everything once again—just as he was at Washington High School. Now, however, he wanted to do it at the highest level of football, where the quality of talent offered him the possibility of achieving perfection: the NFL.

  There were lots of guys in the motor pool of assistant coaches around the league, but not many developed Dad’s all-consuming passion to run the show. It finally paid off when, after many years of working for and learning from Paul Brown at Cincinnati, one of the NFL’s acknowledged great minds, Dad was put in charge of virtually everything by Eddie DeBartolo, San Francisco’s young owner, the man who must be given all the credit for seeing something special in Bill Walsh.

  Eddie was too young—thirty years old—to be part of the NFL’s good-old-boy network (the DeBartolo family had only recently purchased the San Francisco 49ers) and thus wasn’t concerned about Dad’s lack of “pedigree” or put off by the intellectual disposition of his new head coach—he liked it, in fact. Eddie was rewarded for both his perspective and his perceptive choice: Three years later, his team achieved one of the greatest turnarounds in sports history when San Francisco went from worst to best and won a Super Bowl.

  Bill Walsh loved military history, including the Civil War. He had read all of the books he could find about it, and when Dad took the family to Gettysburg one year, he conducted a tour of the battlefield for us that was detailed to such a degree a paid tour guide could have learned something. He used his knowledge of military history to motivate teams and often invoked battles when, against all odds, the troops—i.e., his team—had overcome the enemy.

  He was a PhD-level motivator with a powerful ability to get people’s attention and point them in the right direction. Military analogies were useful occasionally, but he had a full bag of other options. Some are amusing. As head coach of the San Jose Apaches, a group of cast-offs and wan nabes who all felt they deserved to be playing at a higher level (specifically, the NFL), Dad made the following statement in his first meeting with the team: “Fellas, I want you to think about something: There’s a reason you’re all in this room today.” He paused as his implied message—“Nobody out there thinks you’re any good”—sank in. Then he continued with a solemn warning: “This is your last chance to prove you don’t belong here.”

  And regardless of the approach he used, Bill Walsh would not degrade individuals. While he was very careful in handing out compliments (that is, he was a master of withholding praise), he constantly focused attention on the next level of commitment and sacrifice and performance. One of his tactics occurred during the team meeting the night before a game. He didn’t give a big rah-rah speech but incited players with his own method: One by one, selectively, he called players out for commitment: “Keith Fahnhorst, if I call 90-O tomorrow, can we count on you to hold your block?” Fahnhorst was a tackle; 90-O was a play that needed him to block. “Can you promise you’ll knock somebody on his ass if I call 90-O, Keith?”

  He’d go through the roster like that: “Ray [Wersching, 49ers field-goal specialist], how long can we count on you for tomorrow? Can you deliver forty-seven yards at the end of the game if we need it? Don’t say yes unless you’re sure. I need to know absolutely I can count on you, Ray. Can I?” On and on, commitments, publicly to their team, of high performance in the coming battle.

  He was also frank about admitting his own mistakes. After a game, at the next meeting, he would review what had gone right and wrong with the whole team. While he didn’t pull any punches when reviewing their individual performances, he was also forthright when it came to his own work. He would tell them where he had made mistakes: “I should have done this instead of what I called,” he’d say. There was no culture of seeking scapegoats, no failure and finger pointing. It was very matter-of-fact: We did this wrong; here’s how we do it right. He would critique himself equally hard in winning and losing, always leaving room for improvement. Improvement was his obsession—always looking for ways to improve his coaching, his team, his organization.

  Twelve O’Clock High, starring Gregory Peck, was one of his favorite movies and inspired him a great deal. Eventually, after his retirement, he described to me the similarity he felt between General Frank Savage (Peck’s character in the movie) and his own situation and trajectory at San Francisco.

  The film is about an American bomber group in England during World War II that is suffering extreme problems. Leadership is poor; casualties are high; morale is low; their luck is bad. General Savage comes in and, against long odds, turns the bomber group around, installing discipline, high performance, and good morale while leading raid after successful raid over Germany. But the personal toll is high as he sees friends killed and good men destroyed in various ways in combat.

  The raids continue day after day, until one morning, as the crews of the bomber group—the 918th Flying Fortresses—are climbing into their planes for another attack, Savage finds that he is unable to lift himself into his B-17 bomber to lead them into battle. Having led his fliers to victory, he is emotionally gutted—a basket case who is taken to a hospital ward to recover.

  Substitute the San Francisco 49ers for the 918th Bomber Group, football players for flight crews, Coach Bill Walsh for General Frank Savage, retirement fo
r the hospital ward, and you get the idea. My father loved that movie because it told the story of what he did in football, and what happened to him as a result, in the context of something he loved—the military.

  It is in the framework of this dichotomy, extreme success as a leader in the NFL and extreme distress as a person, that makes Dad’s story so compelling, his lessons in leadership so valuable. His staggering drive to prevail—to “prove them all wrong”—his ferocious competitive instinct, and his singular brilliance as a strategist, organizer, and team builder produced historic results. The blueprint for his kind of leadership is revealed in this book.

  The lessons he shares in The Score Takes Care of Itself are both a beacon for leadership and a cautionary tale—what to do and what not to do. But isn’t that the subject all effective leaders dwell on? Isn’t it the perpetual puzzle of their leadership?

  My father was a complex man, but he had a simple goal. Although the price was high, he achieved his goal, and as the years rolled by following his retirement, he gained peace and pride, great satisfaction and contentment, within himself. No longer an outsider in his mind, he saw that his philosophy and methodology were held in the highest esteem; his radical system the norm; his approach to team building commonplace. And that many considered him the greatest football coach of all time. At the end, he was lecturing about his ideas on leadership for graduate students at Stanford University.

  I’ve told people that my father didn’t need a traditional family; his real family was football. And it was almost true. His commitment to the team, his organization, and its goals was total. Bill Walsh may not have sold his soul to the company store, but he leased it to the game he loved for many years.

  My sister and I were there with my father on his final day. He was so weak, but still so strong in spirit. I whispered in his ear that it was okay to go, that the time had come and we loved him. Dad closed his eyes and was gone. He was brave as hell. I put my arms around him and my sister, Elizabeth, and I wept. His triumphs had been recognized for many years. He knew he was no longer an outsider.

  My father is gone, but his hard-earned leadership lessons remain in place, perhaps more relevant now than ever before. I know he would hope that something in his own experience, as shared in this book, is of value in your own challenges as a leader. It would mean that once again he was able to do what he loved doing and did so well: teach others how to be as great as they can be.

  Index

  accountability

  choice of employees

  as leadership trait

  as Standard of Performance

  actions

  documentation of

  norms and expectations for

  adversity, opportunity in

  Allen, George

  Anderson, Ken

  anxiety. See stress

  Ashe, Arthur

  attitudes

  commitment to perfection

  contagious nature of

  dignity in defeat

  fear of failure

  influence of interior leaders on

  mentoring of

  norms for

  one-point-underdog mentality

  overconfidence

  positivity

  situational

  supportiveness

  work ethic

  See also egotism; mental state

  Audick, Dan

  Ayers, John

  behavior

  effect of success or failure on

  expectations for

  hard work

  leadership by example

  mental state and

  belief

  confidence in employees

  organizational self-image

  in self

  beliefs

  leadership philosophy

  philosophy of staff members

  strength of, in decision making

  teaching of

  Benjamin, Guy

  betrayal

  by staff

  by superiors

  violation of Standard of Performance

  See also loyalty

  blind side, protection of

  Board, Dwaine

  bonding

  benefits of

  in celebration of success

  connection and extension

  Bronzan, Bob

  Brown, Paul

  directness in communication

  expertise of

  openness to change

  organization and management skills

  reluctance to share credit

  sabotage of Walsh’s career

  understanding of organizational accountability

  Bryant, Bear

  Buffett, Warren

  burnout

  Carter, Virgil

  character

  as basis for leadership

  of employees

  situational

  Clark, Dwight

  Clark, Monte

  Clayton, Mark

  Coca-Cola

  Cochems, Eddie

  collaboration

  communication

  acceptance of input

  after conflict

  to avoid isolation

  with creative employees

  directness and clarity

  for effective collaboration

  employee’s skill at

  of expectations

  within organization

  practice of

  skills for

  with superiors

  teaching

  competitors

  demonization of

  response to threat from

  rumors about

  composure

  in defeat

  as leadership trait

  performance under pressure

  rituals for

  in zone for optimal performance

  connection and extension

  contingency planning. See planning

  conventional wisdom

  Cook, Greg

  Cooper, Earl

  Cosell, Howard

  Coslet, Bruce

  Craig, Roger

  credit, sharing of

  crisis-management team

  criticism, acceptance of

  Cross, Randy

  culture of organization. See organizational culture; Standard of Performance

  Curtis, Isaac

  Dahlen, Neal

  Davis, Al

  Days of Grace (Ashe)

  Dean, Fred

  DeBartolo, Eddie

  concern for others

  purchase of 49ers

  recognition of Walsh’s potential

  DeBartolo, Eddie, Jr.

  DeBerg, Steve

  decision making

  after success

  collaboration and interaction for

  under pressure

  defeat

  adherence to failing strategy

  attitude toward

  with dignity

  fear of failure

  meaningful facts in

  as part of success

  recovery from

  shared ownership of

  transformation of behavior by

  delegation of responsibility

  demonization of competition

  detail

  attention to, as leadership trait

  as basis for discipline

  in clarification of expectations

  in communication with superiors

  contingency planning

  focus on trivial issues

  in pursuit of excellence

  scripting

  in Standard of Performance

  Dils, Steve

  distractions

  in environment

  hostile relationships

  negativity

  overconfidence

  rituals to avoid

  rumors

  trivialities

  Ditka, Mike

  Drive (offensive series of plays)

  Drucker, Peter

  Dung
y, Tony

  Duper, Mark

  egotism

  in adherence to failing strategy

  versus ego

  of employee

  exploitation of

  as impediment to communication

  injury to group unity

  limitation of collaboration

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo

  emotional state. See mental state

  employees

  character

  delegation of responsibility to

  desirable qualities

  direct interaction with

  firing of, for Standard of Performance violation

  firing of underperformers

  friendship with

  harsh and decisive treatment toward

  inner voices

  mentoring by

  personal goals

  philosophy of

  positive comments about

  respect and concern for

  responsibility for selection of

  enemies

  environment

  for bonding

  collaborative

  communicative

  creative

  distractions in

  positive and supportive

  professional

  range of moods in

  ethics, organizational

  example, leadership by

  excellence, commitment to

  expectations

  belief and confidence in people

  burnout from, to avoid

  communication of

  expectations (cont.)

  escalation of

  inflexibility concerning standards

  maintenance of, after success

  Standard of Performance

  expertise

  for effective teaching

  of employees

  mastery as process

  of mentors

  failure

  adherence to failing strategy

  attitude toward

  defeat with dignity

  fear of

  meaningful facts in

  as part of success

  recovery from

  shared ownership of

 

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