October 13, 2022 | Read Online

Bill Walsh's Blueprint

Having a great culture allows sustainability — and understanding how to play the game gives us the ability to improve quickly.

Though it's still the middle of the season, football coaches are losing their jobs at a high rate.

Expectations and financial rewards have been placed on every program, and when they are not met, change quickly occurs. As leaders and program builders, our short window for turnaround makes an already difficult job even harder — forcing us to ask: Do we cut corners or use short-term thinking to show progress?

Many of us recognize anything sustainable takes time. It takes a long-range strategy, and there are no easy solutions. The answer to the aforementioned question is a new leader or coach must have two strategies working concurrently. One for culture, the other for how to play the game.

When Hall-of-Fame Coach Bill Walsh took over the San Francisco 49ers, he constructed the organization around his standard of excellence — 17 points that would establish the culture in the building.

His blueprint for "how to play the game" is rarely properly analyzed and quite often misunderstood. Many claim his West Coast offense was the key to his sustained success and that the design of his plays was the blueprint. But his achievements are far more nuanced.

The Walsh Blueprint for the 49ers:

Must first find talented players on defense — Defense is the key to improvement
Must have pass rushers in the fourth quarter to be at least a .500 team.
Must isolate what players need to do in order to improve. Not everyone is the same.
Must have coaches who can communicate. People often hire on skill and fire on personality.
Repeat what is successful, it's never about new plays, it's always about running the plays with better execution.
Show poise, think clearly under pressure so the players can see you in control.
Stress conditioning. Teams being out of shape are the first to lose their intensity.

Best-selling author James Clear recently wrote in his 3-2-1 newsletter: "In sports, one of the primary sources of advantage is choosing how to play the game."

And what made Walsh so successful is he understood his standard of excellence set the culture, and his blueprint determined how he played the game.

Not all of us are football coaches. But the important lesson we can all take and implement from Walsh is that having a great culture allows sustainability — and understanding how to play the game gives us the ability to improve quickly, which hopefully afford us time to build a sustainable program.

Culture matters.

How to play the game does as well.

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