đź‘‹ Hi I'm Mathieu!
These are my key notes from The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, Steve Jamison, and Craig Walsh.
Sorry for typos.
<aside> 💡 Do all the right things to precision and “the score will take care of itself”. pX
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<aside> 💡 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. pXIV
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<aside> 💡 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. We saw his own hunger for perfection, and it was contagious. pXIV
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<aside> 💡 “Here’s the lesson I learned.” All this lessons, all that acclimating leadership expertise. pXXV
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<aside> 💡 Pursuing your ambitions, especially those of any magnitude, can be grueling and hazardous, and produce agonizing failure along the way, but achieving those goals is among life’s most gratifying and thrilling experiences. The ability to survive and overcome the former to attain the latter is a fundamental difference between winners and losers. I’ve observed that if individuals who prevail in a highly competitive environment have any one thing in common besides success, it is failure — and their ability to overcome it. “Crash and burn” is part of it; so are recovery and reward. p2
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<aside> 💡 Do you know how to tell if you’re doing the job? If you’re up at 3 A.M. every night talking into a tape recorder and writing notes on scraps of paper, have a knot in your stomach and a rash on your skin, are losing sleep and losing touch with your wife and kids, have no appetite or sense of humor, and feel that everything might turn out wrong, then you’re probably doing the job. p5
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<aside> đź’ˇ Failure is part of success, an integral part. Everybody gets knocked down. Knowing it will happen and what you must do when it does is the first step back. p10
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<aside> đź’ˇ Regardless of your specific job, it is vital to our team that you do that job at the highest possible level in all its various aspects, both mental and physical (i.e., good talent with bad attitude equals bad talent). p15
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<aside> 💡 My Standard of Performance — the values and beliefs within it — guided everything I did in my work at San Francisco and are defined as follows: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the later; show self-control, especially where it counts most—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 (don’t get crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); 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; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark. p16
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<aside> 💡 How the players dressed at practice and the appearance they gave to others when taking the fields was very important to me. I wanted our football team to look truly professional—impeccable. Thus, shirttails tucked in, socks up tight, and more were requirements. Jerry Rice was a professional and looked like a professional. And it all helped him in some way to think and perform like a professional. That « perfect » appearance—“appropriate appearance” is more accurate— applies to others in the organization as well, because it is part of the motif that directs thinking into a mode I view as conductive to high performance. That perfect appearance was a predicate of perfect performance. p17
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<aside> 💡 Victory is produced by and belongs to all. The trophy doesn’t belong just to a superstar quarterback or CEO, head coach or top salesperson. And this organizational perception that “success belongs to everyone” is taught by the leader. Likewise, failure belongs to everyone. If you it a member of your team “drops the ball”, everyone has ownership. This is an essential lesson I taught the San Francisco organization: The offensive is not a country into itself, nor is the defensive team or the special teams, staff, coaches, or anyone in the organization separate from the fate of the organization. We are united and fight as one; we win or lose as one. “You can’t let your buddies down. Demand and expect sacrifice from yourself, and they’ll do the same for you.” That is the measure, in my opinion, of any great organization, including a team of football players—that willingness to sacrifice for the team, to go the extra mile, the extra five or fifty miles. And it starts with the leader and your leadership staff. p23
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<aside> 💡 At San Francisco our first twenty or twenty-five plays of the game would be scripted, along with a multitude options, alternatives, and contingency plays depending on the situation and circumstance. Among other things, it plugged me into the future; I was visualizing the game ahead, “seeing” what would happen. I could close my eyes and literally see all twenty-two men running and responding to some specific play I had drawn up. I was the first to employ scripting to this extent, and it gave us a stunning tactical offensive asset that no other teams were utilizing at that time. Scripting was a most effective leadership tool in fair and foul weather. In a very calculated way, I began calling the plays for the game before the game was played. It took years for other teams to fully implement the concepts I had been developing for a long time. The motto of the Boys Scouts, “Be Prepared”, became my modus operandi, and to be prepared I had to factor in every contingency: good weather, bad weather, and everything in between. I kept asking and answering this question: “what do I do if. ?” p50
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<aside> 💡 The final score of a football game is decided, on average, according to the following pourcentages : 20 percent is due to luck, such as referee’s bad call, a tricky bounce of the ball, an injury, or some other happenstance. I accepted the fact that I couldn’t control that 20 percent of each game. However, the rest of it—80 percent—could be under my control with comprehensive planning and preparation. Contingency planning is a major determinant of who gets closest to taking total control of their own 80 percent, the closest to maximizing their organization’s assets. That explains why scripting eventually became the norm throughout the NFL, and college football as well. As you can see, it started modestly—Paul Brown asking me, “What have you got for openers, Bill?”—and gradually became a major component of my methodology. There are many aspects of professional football that directly correspond to the subject of leadership in business. I believe scripting, adapted to your own environment in your own way, can have the same tremendous benefit for you that it dit for me, and I offer this summary as a good point of reference:
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<aside> đź’ˇ He truly believed that in the end, your ultimate assignment as a leader is getting those on your team totally ready for the battle. After that, you have to let winning take care of itself. p234
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