The Bill Walsh story, the Bill Walsh case is pretty interesting. One of the most interesting examples that I came across in doing my research on super bosses. In fact the case, you may have noticed, is written predominantly by a former student of mine, his name is Kevin Demoff, who is the Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Rams. It's a guy that really knows football and really understands the business of football. He's the one that actually brought this story to my attention when he knew I was doing this type of research. I think that's interesting. I hope you also got a lot out of it, even if you don't like football, you're not a football fan, I think you can still see how many things come out of the case that's very relevant. Really generalizable stuff you can do in other businesses and other other fields. We did talk a little bit earlier in the video on the cohort effect about Bill Walsh, and so hopefully you're able to bring that into your learning as well in the case analysis. But there are several other really interesting insights that come from this case. Let me walk through some of those. First off, his eye for talent, you know that story about Dwight Clark, there's this guy that no one thought about. He didn't look like a football player. He was a second stringer. He barely was playing as a college player, but Walsh saw him, and he was able to identify a certain type of talent, and he ended up being able to stash him. Nobody knew about him, and drafted him later in the draft in a lower round. It turns out that what he liked about him is that he was just the right person, the right type of player who could fit into Walsh's system. Again, we see this talent spotter. Everywhere you go, you look for talent. Even though on that particular trip he was scouting a quarterback and other people, he saw this Dwight Clark and he said, okay, this is someone with some capability. Bill Walsh really was inclined to value intelligence, creativity, and thinking outside of the box. These are things that were hallmarks of the types of things super boss leaders look for in other people. The point about untapped talent pools , that's a biggie also. You can see plenty of examples here, from hiring high school coaches to people with PR backgrounds, to especially minority football players who could be coaches. The work that Bill Walsh did in creating those internships for ex NFL players that were Black and that had the potential to be coaches but hadn't been given an opportunity. On that bucket around talent, we have lots of really good practical examples from the case study of what Bill Walsh did that I think are things we can hang our hat on and see it in action. Preparation. Bill Walsh was known for his first 25 plays, which is really a genius idea. The idea is that everyone knew what those plays are going to be ahead of time, and what does it do? It creates tremendous confidence. Really for anything that you're doing, he called it a safety net. You always know what that is, and you don't have to worry about what's going to happen next. You just know. I have found, and maybe you have as well, that preparation is the secret sauce. I do a lot of presentations, I do a lot of speeches, and certainly when I was younger and just starting, it was a little nerve-racking at the beginning. But the way I dealt with it was by over-preparing, and it worked. In fact, when I started teaching in the MBA program at Tuck and the business school at Dartmouth, which is a school that really spends a lot of time with students and values teaching, my preparation was completely crazy for each class. For each hour and a half class, I spent almost a week preparing, which was way over the top and nuts, I get that. But it gave me incredible confidence. I knew the material, I new the case studies, I knew the students in the class, I knew everything I had to know better than anyone that was going to be there, and that gave me the confidence to be able to do that. Preparation also extends to the people around you. When you feel prepared and you help them feel prepared, it's going to help them perform better. Even in the middle of a game, when you're doing everything you can to keep going, it's probably not the best time to start thinking about what you should be doing. Preparation and rehearsal really gets you to a better place, and you see it. This is to me a big takeaway from this Bill Walsh story. The bottom 25 percent. This is opposite to the old GE, General Electric model under Jack Welch, where they would drop the lowest performers. It would be automatic, you'd have to rank everyone, and the bottom, I think it was something closer to 10 percent, they would be let go. Pretty harsh, right? Maybe this is due to the nature of sport, and this sport, you can't afford to have only high draft picks, just A player, just stars, and all-stars. But what team can you think of that doesn't have role players? This is true in business as well. We'd like to think that everyone in our team really is a superstar, and hopefully we help that happen. But there are people that have specific roles, they have a job to do, and it's very important. Finding a way in which everyone can add value, and feel really good about adding that value is important. It's true for parents as well. One of the things that good parents always say is, our kids are different, but we want to help each kid find that special thing for them, whatever it happens to be. It doesn't matter what it is as long as it's something that they care about, and that they can be good at. The feeling I'm trying to be excellent at something is a really powerful motivator. Again, it's still self-confidence. Communication, sharing of information a lot in the case study about that, very consistent with motivation by super bosses. But it's also about how high-performance teams really should be operating. Who can afford to operate without all of your talent contributing? The cohort effect. We talked about that before, we brought it up. Really building on that sense of teamwork, camaraderie among players, and how he helped develop the assistant coaches on his staff. Let's get a check mark for that one as well. Innovation, incredibly innovative leader, so many of the super boss leaders are innovative. As I shared earlier, especially in Module 2, creativity and trying to unleash people's capability, very important. The legendary West Coast offense, which is what Bill Walsh really created, pioneered, to how he helped prepare for each game, to how he looked at intelligence in a sport that, well, professional football is not exactly known for a sport that values intelligence over brute force. But he did that, and he saw it, and he created it as a source of competitive advantage. He truly was innovative, and it takes, as I said, an innovator to unleash the creativity and innovation of the people around you. Of course, you know how he supported his assistant coaches, even picking up the phone to talk to the owner of a competing club to tell them, Mike Holmgren, or Bill Belichick, or Marvin Lewis, they were ready to be head coaches. That's unbelievable. Quite consistent with the last video on the talent retention trap, and how leaders, super boss leaders in particular, are open to the idea, understand the idea that some people will go. In this case, Bill Walsh also actually helped them go. Imagine doing that. By the way, if they walk away literally with the playbook, the football playbook, then you've got to keep innovating and fine tuning. It's a requirement, and of course that's what Bill Walsh's teams did. It might be extreme, but it was by no means unique because I heard plenty of stories in my research and my travels talking about super bosses doing really much the same thing. Again, it's one of these things. It sounds a little bit odd, but great leaders are doing it, great super boss leaders are doing it, and the payoff is big. Because again, that's that talent magnet idea I talked about earlier, that's what it's all about. All of a sudden the best talent is seeking you out, and that's a pretty good thing. This case study puts together so many of the practices I've been sharing throughout this entire course, all in a single example. I hope you enjoyed the chance to see it in action, and the results that followed. Once you see that, it's not hard to start thinking even harder about how you can be this type of leader, a super boss leader, is it?
