Thinking about coaches came when I heard from Tim Knippenberg of Minneapolis, who remembered a column I’d written about Vince Lombardi a few years back. In honor of the new football season, I decided it was worth another visit from the legend himself.
The ghost of Vince Lombardi stopped by my office yesterday. That’s right. He still had the cigar.
Anyway, here’s what he said:
“I stopped in because I want to clear something up. All the time I hear people quote me, usually it’s that business about ‘winning isn’t the most important thing, it’s the only thing.’ Well, yeah — I said it. And that’s why we need to talk.
“A lot of people look at my career and conclude that all you need to win is to have the right attitude. They think that if you want to win badly enough, you’ll win. And so they go around working at wanting. Bull.
“Say you really, really want to climb Mount Everest. And so you go over there with the perfect attitude, with all the grit and determination in the world but without knowledge, and what’s going to happen? You end up as Mrs. Paul’s Frozen Optimist Sticks.
“When I got the Green Bay job, the Packers had just gone 1-10-1. And I said to the press, ‘I have never been on a losing team, and I don’t intend to start now.’ That wasn’t braggadocio; it was a message to the players. They had to believe in me. You’re not a leader ‘til you have followers.
“And then I didn’t just come in and start hollering; I started innovating. Yes, we had the toughest training of any team. We had the most intense practices. I wanted the games to be easier than practice.
“But here’s what I want to get across: We didn’t just wish hard and try hard; we innovated. We invented the sweep. We invented new blocking schemes. We were the first team to ‘read’ defenses. We brought the passing game to the NFL.
“The upshot was that we were better prepared than the other guys. We had better players because we did a better job of educating them and training them. We had better plays. We didn’t just want to win; we figured out how to win.
“Look at the great coaches, and you’ll see all kinds of personalities. They called John McGraw — the greatest baseball manager ever — ‘Little Napoleon.’ OK. But he invented the drag bunt, the double steal, the relief pitcher and a lot of other stuff. Innovative dictators win.
“But guess what? Innovative saints win, too. Just picture John Wooden sitting on the sidelines, completely unemotional. The guy looked bored half the time, for heaven’s sake. He won because he developed the people around him.
“Parents wanted their kids to play for him. Of course, being a saint will get you into heaven, but it won’t save your job if you lose. He had the best-prepared players in the game.
“That reminds me of John Madden. Now there’s a guy I should recruit for my assistant. I wonder what his cholesterol is? Anyway, I remember playing against the team Madden would coach, the Raiders, in Super Bowl II.
“One of the turning points in that game was when their guy fumbled a punt, and we recovered. What Madden was sharp enough to figure out was that our punter was left-footed, so the ball turned funny. And after that, whenever the Raiders were playing a team with a left-footed kicker, he’d bring in a guy who kicked that way to practice against. You win in practice.”
“Well, I gotta get back. I just wanted to make sure everybody understands how I feel. Don’t worry about being great; worry about being better. Don’t just try hard; innovate hard. If you want to motivate people, don’t give them a great speech. Give them great tools, great preparation, great products. First find the daylight, then run for it.”
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success.”