12 strategy lessons from the best NFL head coaches
Original Publish Date: Jan 6, 2020
I’m a huge fan of football. Any fan of football knows that the coach plays a big role in building a culture of success. Given the NFL’s focus on creating parity among teams; it’s hard for one team to create lasting success or even stay in contention every single year. Therefore, the coach needs to be a master strategist and a clever tactician not only during the regular season but also during the off season.
My football fascination always gets me to seek out different books/articles that talk about the thought process of the best NFL coaches. ‘Gridiron Genius’ is one such book written by Michael Lombardi who worked with Bill Walsh (49ers), Al Davis (Raiders), and Bill Belichick (Patriots).
I understand that the ideas from football strategy may not always translate perfectly into the corporate world since a company isn’t simply competing with one other company at any given time. The strategies that you can carry over from football should apply in a world where you have direct and indirect competitors. They should apply in a world where multiple alternate solutions exist that speak to the ‘job’ your company tackles.
Therefore, I challenged myself to read ‘Gridiron Genius’ to extrapolate lessons from the best NFL head coaches for the corporate world using the lens of strategy as a ‘plan to win’. Following are the 12 strategy lessons I was able to uncover.
#1 – Focus on the process
You’ll find the term ‘results oriented’ frequently show up in resumes and job descriptions. A mindset favoring actual results is most welcome by teams and companies. The rush to get results might sometimes blind us from understanding the steps that led us to the ‘right’ results.
Michael Lombardi talks about the ‘connection between details and improvement’ in his book. NFL coaches often try to get the best players during every draft. It’s definitely not a science and sometimes coaches are lucky enough to find a star player way down in the draft – think Tom Brady in the 6th round. Stumbling into a favorable result is never the best way forward. Since drafting is not a science; Lombardi highlights that the great coaches focus on minimizing the ‘risks’ of wrong picks.
Let’s use the example of strategic plans here. I’ll be surprised if someone shows me a strategic plan that worked flawlessly from start to finish. Since the process is the answer; better strategic planning would involve a close attention to the steps involved in building the plan, review of the assumptions, measures taken to validate/invalidate the assumptions, a rigorous audit of previous year plans and areas where they fell short, and much more.
#2 – “Learn the whole game”
The corporate world loves experts. Walk into any meeting room and you can easily pick out the people who are frequently labeled as the finance expert or the marketing expert or the sales genius! We need our experts and thank God for them. They love the work they do and are always trying to improve every single day – at least the humble experts.
Here’s the caveat. We need all team members – experts or not – to understand their role in view of the overall mission. Several companies have rotational programs for young graduates with the noble goal of acquainting them with the different facets of their business. It’s a good first step, but many of these graduates lose sight of this overall picture once they specialize in functions like finance, marketing, etc.
Challenge any team you are part of to think in terms of the entire system/business. Get them to think beyond their immediate job responsibilities. Help them follow the ripple effect of their choices within your business. Every function at the end of the day is simply an internal silo or demarcation. The customer doesn’t care about it. And neither should you. The focus of any company should continue to be on delivering value to stakeholders in a profitable manner.
#3 – Be philosophy agnostic
This lesson shouldn’t be new to anyone who’s been on top of business news either during the last year or over the last few decades. Every sector is prone to disruption. The rules of dominating a market keeps being rewritten very often that sometimes it syncs with earnings calls!
Any excuse to stick to the old way of doing business despite falling profitability is insanity. Then again, an aversion to taking risks is common in established companies. It becomes harder to change direction or chart a new course.
Football has the luxury of dealing with seasons. And the smart coaches wipe the slate clean with every season and accommodate new ideas to troubleshoot all the problem areas. Even if it means that the team needs to undergo a monumental change in terms of people running the show or handling the key pieces.
#4 – Visualize the path for execution
Strategy is pointless if there’s no way to link it all the way to execution. Strategy without execution is a classic exercise in futility. Always push strategy with a bias to execution and link it to profitability in one way or another.
Any strategic plan has multiple pieces and requires co-ordination between multiple teams to make it a success. It might help to simplify the key parts of your strategy to the stakeholders who are necessary to execute it. Let them not be overwhelmed by the wealth of data but empower them with specific priorities that they can act on to deliver value.
#5 – Understand the real story behind the metrics
We obsess over metrics. We let metrics control so many choices without stopping to question the outcomes they’re supposed to drive. One criticism of the venture capital community has been the over-valuation of certain startups due to the misguided focus on a small set of metrics that distracted from weak business models and lack of profitability.
One more idea worth remembering in this context – there needs to a clear story behind metrics or else they just appear as discrete data points with little use to decision makers. Also, challenge yourself to identify forward looking metrics.
#6 – Avoid the ‘false binary’ trap
I guess this lesson is something that creative strategists would like to share with others. Business situations are never clear cut, yet it should amaze anyone when you hear proposals where the solution is proposed as an ‘either/or’ choice.
The very ambiguity of business challenges these days give rise to creative solutions that people refer to as ‘out of the box’ thinking. So, the next time, you come across a binary ‘either/or’ proposal; challenge the involved parties to at least come up with a third option. The very act of thinking about a third option opens a multitude of potential solutions.
This perfectly leads into the next strategy lesson…
#7 – Be open to opinions from unexpected places
The hard truth of career progression is that we develop blinders over time due to our continued success. We also develop our internal frameworks to solve the recurring challenges. But, there finally comes a time where we run out of answers or at least the good answers.
One way to counter this would be to ask a lot of questions. Lead with listening before talking and develop the capacity to hear different thoughts and ideas. Another way to supercharge this effort would be to look for insights in unconventional places.
Belichick would consult a defensive coach, for example, to get a different perspective on an offensive player. Extending this into the business world, it might help to stop looking at a business situation as a specific functional problem and open it to feedback from a multi-functional team. The complexities of the current world are often resolved in an interesting confluence of cross functional solutions.
#8 – Have an active list of needs, problem spots
The day to day operational commitments might derail any company from evaluating their mid or long-term health. Survival for any public company happens one quarter at a time. While the immediate instinct might be to continue to put fires out; there’s an added impetus to solve the underlying problem spots, address the growing needs to stay afloat beyond even a year.
An active, evolving list of needs and problem spots would be one way to address this. Granted, nothing comes of it unless this list is formally managed by the decision makers and each action item has some accountability and timeline attached to it. In any bureaucratic system, sunlight is in fact the ultimate disinfectant.
#9 – Don’t squander any opportunity (however small) to add value
The following idea shouldn’t surprise anyone in the corporate space – Wins, no matter how small, create a ripple effect of success. It’s easy to wait for the big win and ignore so many opportunities that might pop up to serve the customer better or even generate value in the marketplace.
A classic example from NFL in this context would be the role of special teams. They account for nearly 20% of all plays during a single football game. Despite that, many coaches ignore the need to use special teams to change the momentum of the game. They even don’t account for the quality of players that are part of special teams.
The smart NFL coaches understand the edge that special teams can offer especially when the offense and defense are evenly matched. Small opportunities today can often indicate the mammoth shift in customer buying behavior down the line.
#10 – Get better at measuring risk/reward in any situation
A huge component of many strategic choices is the measurement of risk vs. reward. There’s a tendency to overvalue the reward or the risk in view of actions taken by the competitors we identify as part of our peer group. Invariably, we also adopt the same biases of our competitors into our decision-making process.
The great NFL minds are effortlessly good at ensuring that their feelings don’t dictate the way they evaluate a new prospect or for that matter, evaluate the ‘true’ worth of a star player to the entire team. There’s a famous saying that the greatest gift is the power to estimate correctly the value of things. We may never get every evaluation right. Tracking the success and failures in our evaluations helps us stay in the continual improvement process to make better forward-looking decisions.
#11 – Never underestimate the marketplace
It’s easy for any company to get complacent after dominating a given market with some short-term successes. This story repeats itself over and over again. Let me lay out the story in more detail.
A company comes up with an innovative product/solution to serve a customer’s pressing needs and immediately charges a premium. They rest on their laurels while their margins gradually erode over time with competing products and in some cases – game changing solutions. When the margins don’t exist anymore, the company goes into scramble mode to “innovate” the next iteration of the product.
The great NFL coaches never forget the games from the past. They never underestimate an opponent even if they’ve managed to beat them multiple times over the course of their rivalry. Staying on top of the marketplace – strengthening customer relationships, keeping tabs on the competitors, watching the short- and long-term trends (for example) – is the best remedy to prevent the company from failing into a non-value adding rut.
#12 – “You’re never done getting better”
Experience should never substitute preparation. Belichick apparently likes to frequently say that “to live in the past is to die in the present”. This understanding of starting with a clean slate every new year manifests itself in his dedication to continuously learn. Belichick looks at each season completely detached from the past and avoids the glare from the past Super Bowl wins.
The only way greatness perishes is when growing no longer remains a priority. I think this lesson is true at an individual level too.
Bill Walsh famously said, “If we are all thinking alike, no one is thinking.” You can’t always expect to copy your competitor’s moves and hope to outsmart them every single time. A significant proclivity to offbeat thinking pays off in the long term. Hopefully, these gridiron strategy lessons inspire each one of you to do exactly that!
