The Score Takes Care of Itself Read Free Page A

he told me the lesson. He talked about winning his first Super Bowl and how it destroyed the next season: “But here’s the lesson I learned.” And he told me the lesson. Bill talked about his final game as an assistant coach with the Bengals, when he became flummoxed in the last moments of a game against the Oakland Raiders: “But here’s the lesson I learned.” All those lessons, all that accumulating leadership expertise.
    This went on for three hours until he called our conversation—a lecture on leadership—to a halt because of a scheduled lunch with friends at the Sundeck Restaurant across the parking lot. Our discussions in that office continued for several months as he expanded on his core concepts of leadership—with accompanying anecdotes—for this book. Along the way there were more videotapes, notes, lessons of all sorts that he had learned along the way.
    We would talk. I would write. He would review. We would talk some more. That’s how we worked. Quickly, this book developed. Along the way I came to better understand Bill and how and why he did things as a leader, who he was as a person. Let me share a few observations.
    Bill Walsh was brilliant almost beyond comprehension. His ability to analyze an intractable problem and come up with a solution (the West Coast Offense, for example) was stunning. It applied not only to touchdowns but also to managing and organizing individuals. Of course, how he did the latter facilitated the former. He was a master at it. Bill’s analytical intelligence was coupled with an immense creativity that allowed him to see things differently. The result moved NFL football, in many ways, from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century. If there is such a thing as a Renaissance coach, he was it: truly enlightened when it came to directing an organization’s attention and best effort to achieving goals he defined.
    Bill Walsh held the need to treat individuals within his organization fairly almost sacrosanct (in return, those individuals were expected to consistently work at their most productive level). It stemmed from his own professional experience of being treated unfairly, which he describes here in detail. This did not preclude harsh—at times, seemingly ruthless—action when someone in the organization behaved in a manner contrary to the team’s best interests.
    He did not view the organization and the individuals within it as two separate entities, but as one and the same: “People are the heart of your organization,” he instructed me. This perspective affected his leadership profoundly.
    Bill Walsh loved lists, viewed them as a road map to results. That may sound simplistic, but I believe it was an important part of his astounding deductive-reasoning ability. When confronted with a “problem”—for example, how do we score touchdowns without a good running game or a strong passer? what is our communication process on the sidelines during a game when crowd noise becomes overwhelming? what are the specific duties of my executive vice president for football operations? and hundreds and hundreds more—Bill Walsh dissected the issue into its relevant parts, found a solution, and then taught the solution to the appropriate individuals. His creative and commonsense brilliance as a problem solver was unsurpassed and a major component in the installation of what he called the Standard of Performance.
    I kidded him once that he was so obsessive about lists that he probably had lists of the lists in his file cabinet. He didn’t deny it. I found a list of directives for his speech to receptionists at 49er headquarters that was two pages long with bullet point after bullet point. Here’s bullet point number seventeen: “Your job is not civil service or even big corporate business. We exist to support and field a football team. In other words, we don’t ‘exist for the sake of existing.’ We are not maintaining .” He told me this addressed his concern that most