The Score Takes Care of Itself Read Free

dynasties, the San Francisco 49ers (five Super Bowl championships!), the man who is perhaps the greatest coach in football history, had picked up the phone himself .
    “This is Bill Walsh. Hello. Hello?” he repeated.
    Briefly, I was thrown off; fortunately, he didn’t hang up.
    And that’s how this book began. It was that sudden and that simple.
    I started talking, explaining to him my idea for a book about his philosophy of leadership as it applied beyond football—to management, business, and corporate life. And that I would like to collaborate with him in writing it. “I think I saw one of your letters,” he said. “Sounds okay.” (Yes, I had written several letters to him over the course of those many months.) “Can you meet me here at 9 A.M. tomorrow?” he continued. I got there at eight.
    His office was located on the second floor of an expansive and expensive office complex right next to the exclusive Sharon Heights Golf and Country Club, just two minutes from Stanford University on Sand Hill Road. The complex, forty minutes south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, was populated by a host of technology-related companies and some of the most successful venture capitalists in the world, including the most famous, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (friends of Bill’s).
    The parking areas—beautifully designed and landscaped—looked like the crowded showroom of a Lexus or Mercedes-Benz dealer. I found an open space and parked, eager to meet Bill—nervous, in fact.
    At 8:30 A.M. I walked up to his second floor office and knocked. No answer. I began staring directly down at the staircase I had just climbed, in anticipation of his grand arrival. Bill’s arrival wasn’t so grand. At exactly 9 A.M. I saw the top of a head—white hair, neatly trimmed and combed. Bill was walking up the stairs rather deliberately. Sandals (no socks), freshly pressed khaki Bermudas, a red and gold golf shirt (49ers colors). In his left hand a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee; in his right, a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts.
    “Steve? C’mon in. I got some doughnuts on the way over,” he said as an introduction. He opened up the bag of doughnuts, and we started talking. Here’s exactly what he told me in the first minute: “I came to the San Francisco 49ers with a specific goal—to implement what I call the Standard of Performance. It was a way of doing things, a leadership philosophy, that has as much to do with core values, principles, and ideals as with blocking, tackling, and passing; more to do with the mental than with the physical.”
    Bill talked about the need for character as a component of leadership (as well as the elements of character as he saw it); the evolution of the NFL’s most significant change in fifty years—the pass-oriented offense he created—and the lesson it offers beyond football; how he taught the intricacies of high performance to players such as Joe Montana and how they apply to high performance elsewhere.
    “Hey, wait a minute,” he said at one point. “I’ve got some old videotapes in the closet that might help you get the idea of what we did in practice to get all the moving parts moving in the right direction. I’ll get some for you.” Bill put his coffee down, walked to the closet behind his desk, and after a couple of minutes came out with an armful of videotapes. “Here. Take these home. They might help you get the idea. When I put all the pieces together, it looked complicated, but each piece is simple. Most big things are simple in the specific, much less so in the general.” Bill was a genius at making the complex comprehensible, the comprehensible achievable.
    I asked him about the years with the Cincinnati Bengals when he began to emerge as a quarterback coach and offensive strategist whom others around the league started to take notice of. “I got fooled at Cincinnati,” he chuckled. “Taken right down the primrose path by Paul Brown. But here’s the lesson I learned.” And