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Short essays by former San Fransisco 49er’s Head Coach Bill Walsh on organizational performance and competition.

Seek solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing in a competitive environment. When you do that, the score will take care of itself. - Bill Walsh

Select quotes from Bill Walsh essays follow.

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  • Seek solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing in a competitive environment. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.
  • Professional football, in my opinion, is the moral equivalent of war. The stress, wear and tear, and assault on a person’s spirit and basic self-esteem are incredible.
  • I will try to give you insights on what a fellow traveler experienced during my own competitive journey.
  • The ability to survive and overcome the former to attain the latter is a fundamental difference between winners and losers.
  • You must know what needs to be done and possess the capabilities and conviction to get it done.

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  • 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.
  • Make no mistake about it; my first commitment was to nurture an organizational conscience with this very high internal code of ethics.
  • An environment developed in which adherence to the details of my Standard of Performance became second nature as we worked to become absolutely first class in every possible way on and off the field.
  • I directed our focus less to the prize of victory than to the process of improving—obsessing, perhaps, about the quality of our execution and the content of our thinking; that is, our actions and attitude.
  • I knew if I did that, winning would take care of itself, and when it didn’t I would seek ways to raise our Standard of Performance.

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  • During this early period I began hiring personnel with four characteristics I value most highly: talent, character, functional intelligence (beyond basic intelligence, the ability to think on your feet, quickly and spontaneously), and an eagerness to adopt my way of doing things, my philosophy. These included assistant coaches I was very familiar with—managers—to install and nurture my organizational values and job criteria. I sought intelligence in employees, not just for the obvious reason, but also because a dull-witted staff member who’s aggressive creates anarchy.
  • The leader’s job is to facilitate a battlefield-like sense of camaraderie among his or her personnel, an environment for people to find a way to bond together, to care about one another and the work they do, to feel the connection.
  • It’s often the case that a “game changer” takes a while to change the way the game is played.
  • Be bold. Remove fear of the unknown—that is, change—from your mind. Respect Instead of looking for reasons we couldn’t make it work, I sought solutions that would make it succeed.
  • Here’s a story to illustrate what can happen if you don’t think things through, if you’re a leader who doesn’t have an appetite for looking perceptively into the future and then planning what to do when you get there.

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  • Among other things, it plugged me into the future; I was visualizing the game ahead, “seeing” what would happen.
  • It’s the same for you, of course: “What do you do if . . . ?” Most leaders take this no deeper than the first level of inquiry. You must envision the future deeply and in detail—creatively—so that the unforeseeable becomes foreseeable. Then you write your script for the foreseeable.
  • There was tremendous flexibility, creativity, and adaptability applied to what I had on the clipboard you cannot think as clearly or perform as well when engulfed by stress, anxiety, fear, tension, or turmoil.
  • Bill was smart enough, strong-willed enough, to get rid of talented people if they were contributors to a negative organizational culture—not team players.
  • The leader who will not be denied, who has expertise coupled with strength of will, is going to prevail.

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  • This is when you find out if you’re a leader.
  • Leaders are paid to make a decision. The difference between offering an opinion and making a decision is the difference between working for the leader and being the leader.
  • A leader must be keen and alert to what drives a decision, a plan of action. If it was based on good logic, sound principles, and strong belief, I felt comfortable in being unswerving in moving toward my goal. Any other reason (or reasons) for persisting were examined carefully. Among the most common faulty reasons are (1) trying to prove you are right and trying to prove someone else is wrong. Of course, they amount to about the same thing and often lead to the same place: defeat.
  • And you must never second-guess yourself on decisions you make with integrity, intelligence, and a team-first attitude.
  • It creates a false and fatal sense of accomplishment, a trap with serious consequences because it keeps you from addressing the key thoughts don’t assume because of odd circumstances that everything will somehow sort itself out.

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  • Rather, play for keeps all the time.
  • The great leaders in sports, business, and life always have the most powerful and positive inner voice talking to them, which they, in turn, share with and teach to their organization.
    • We can win if we work smart enough and hard enough.
    • We can win if we put the good of the group ahead of our own personal interests.
    • We can win if we improve. And there is always room for improvement.
    • I know what is required for us to win. I will show you what it is.
  • The kind of leader you would put your faith in and follow into battle. And it was something that is especially applicable that a person’s reputation, status, or credentials entitled him to special treatment. When you worked with Joe, you were treated as an equal. This comfort zone is dangerous because it creates an often almost imperceptible lowering of intensity, focus, and energy, which leads directly to reduced effort, additional mistakes, and diminished performance.
  • Effective leaders often have this quality. They understand that if you’re predictably difficult or predictably easygoing, others become predictably comfortable. In a highly competitive environment, feeling comfortable is first cousin to being complacent.

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  • Leadership, at its best, is exactly that: teaching skills, attitudes, and goals (yes, goals are both defined and taught) to individuals who are part of your organization.
  • Looking back, perhaps the lesson I would draw is this: If you don’t love it, don’t do it. I loved it—teaching people how to reach in deep to fulfill their potential, how to become great.
  • A relatively high—but not manic—level of energy and enthusiasm and a personality that is upbeat, motivated, and animated.
  • Repeat winners at the high end of competition are rare, because when success of any magnitude occurs, there is a disorienting change that we are unprepared for.
  • Nevertheless, the ongoing and ultimate safeguard against attitudes that are detrimental to the team is your dedication and monumental adherence to the Standard of Performance you have created. This is always the way to win, the road to a goal even more elusive than success; namely, consistent success.

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  • In building and maintaining your organization, place a premium on those who exhibit great desire to keep pushing themselves to higher and higher performance and production levels, who seek to go beyond the highest standards that you, the leader, set.
  • Your competitor must never look at you across the field, conference table, or anywhere else and conclude, “I not only beat you, I broke your spirit.” The dance of the doomed tells them they’ve broken your spirit. That message can hurt you the next time around. And almost always there is a next time around.
  • The most powerful way to do this is by having the courage to say, “I believe in you,” in whatever words and way are comfortable for you. These four words—or their equivalents—constitute the most inspirational message a leader can convey.
  • It was wrong to do that, to take the bullet out of the chamber.

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  • 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. l
  • I should have had more of a plan or commitment to move other people into different roles and to let them emerge, to loosen my grip on control, but I couldn’t, and the exhaustion I experienced, the track I was on, was partially the direct result of not being able to delegate more intelligently.
  • The lesson is simple: When you make a mistake, admit it and fix it. Don’t let pride, stubbornness, or possible embarrassment about your bad decision prevent you from correcting what you have done. Fix it, or the little problem becomes a big one.
  • A pretty package can’t sell a poor product.
  • In your efforts to create interest in your own product, don’t get carried away with premature promotion—creating a pretty package with hype, spin, and all the rest. First, make sure you’ve got something of quality to promote. Then worry about how you’re going to wrap it in an attractive package. The world’s best promotional tool is a good product.

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  • Aggressively looking for the positive elements, however small, can dilute the toxic pressure of personalizing the results by allowing you to take pride in your strategies, tactics, effort, and execution even when they don’t produce victory every time.
  • And, of course, you must derive satisfaction and gratification from winning without letting it define your self-worth, just as you cannot allow defeat to define you as a person. There has to be a balance. You can’t put yourself in a smaller and smaller box where there’s only the infliction or avoidance of pain—a personal torture chamber.
  • The time to do it is before your tank is empty.

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Do’s for High Performance

  1. Do not isolate yourself.
    • While your spouse and family can be extremely important for support, they may not be equipped to deal with the magnitude of your professional issues in this area. Thus, develop a small, trusted network of people whose opinions you respect and are willing to honestly evaluate.
    • My own make-up resisted this. As I marched forward as head coach, I became isolated, increasingly separated, even lonely. Keep your lines of communication open with mentors and professionals in your business whom you trust, even a professional counselor. (I had one for a while.) They can help you restore perspective and help clarify and prioritize situations and responsibilities. Be very discreet about whom you confide in. Crying on somebody’s shoulder, if it’s the wrong “somebody,” can have negative repercussions.
  2. Delegate abundantly.
    • If you’ve done your job in leadership, you’ve brought on board individuals who are very talented. Allow them to use their talent in ways that serve the team and lighten your load.
    • If you’ve hired and taught them well, they will do their job. I confess it was hard for me to amply delegate, even though I was surrounded by exceptionally talented people. I hired them, added to their expertise, and then had trouble turning some of them—especially on the offensive side of the game—fully loose to do their jobs.
    • I was like a man dying of thirst who was sitting on the edge of a mountain stream. I denied myself what was available.
  3. Avoid the destructive temptation to define yourself as a person by the won-lost record, the “score,” however you define it.
    • Don’t equate your team’s “won-lost record” with your self-worth.
  4. Shake it off.
    • Marv Levy lost four straight Super Bowls as head coach of the Buffalo Bills and was able to keep it in perspective: “It hurts like the devil for ten days or two weeks and then you bury it and go back to work and look ahead.”
    • Bud Grant lost four Super Bowls as head coach of the Minnesota Vikings and was able to keep it in perspective: “I’ve got a 24-hour rule. You only let it bother you for 24 hours and then it’s over.”
    • Your effort in the beginning is part of a continuum of effort; your Standard of Performance is part of a continuum of standards. Today’s effort becomes tomorrow’s result.