This book was Gridiron Genius and it was everything I’d anticipated. Lombardi uses his career as source material to dissect the methods of three former colleagues – Bill Walsh, Al Davis, and Bill Belichick. He distills the lessons and insights gleaned from these helmet football legends to form a comprehensive examination of how leadership determined success for these men and their teams.
For me, the book has proven an invaluable source of the strategies and tactics that have repeatedly formed the foundation of success in the NFL. As usual, I’ve tried to apply these concepts more broadly to the domains where I can find success. The result is a series of upcoming posts that will look at an aspect of Gridiron Genius in greater detail. Three of these dissect a specific aspect of leadership – team building, training, and consistency. The final post will focus on the book’s helmet football observations.
I’m looking forward to having these posts up on TOA over the next few weeks. In the meantime, though, I’ll leave you with a few scattered notes that didn’t fit into those aforementioned posts.
One up: Lombardi has a knack for cooking up interesting ways to express simple ideas. Many years ago, a sleep-deprived Lombardi came on Bill Simmons’s show and declared that the reeling Arizona Cardinals were never ‘the land of the free or the home of the brave, in terms of winning’. I’m not sure anyone, Lombardi included, understood what that meant, but I think it’s important for me to admit here that the quote remains to this day the most memorable thing I’ve ever heard on a podcast.
Gridiron Genius suffered from no shortage of such quips. Whether it was simply in restating common truisms – when everyone thinks alike, no one is really thinking – or in quoting obscure remarks from ancient philosophers – the secret to all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious (Marcus Aurelius... maybe) – Lombardi’s ability to find memorable phrasing helped me link his many ideas to a handful of the book’s recurring themes.
One down: I thought the note that establishing communication outside of work is one way to improve communication inside of work was very insightful. From my experience, most companies do not know how to help their teams learn how to communicate outside of work. I think more companies should leverage this insight by emphasizing social interaction at the outset of any new work relationship.
Of course, individuals could simply take the initiative and work on this themselves. A possible limiting factor here is the concept of professionalism – colleagues often work up to the point of establishing a polite tolerance of each other in the name of being ‘professional’ but rarely go further. It’s probably the safest approach because knowing someone outside of work is a far messier process than knowing someone’s professional self. However, when a little extra effort to know someone on a personal level could mean significant improvement in workplace performance, I think we all owe it to our career aspirations to give this a fair shot.
Just saying: The core of Lombardi’s leadership philosophy is that success results from a perpetual cycle fueled by learning, application, and growth. His note that team builders must constantly find ways to link curiosity with improvement suggests a starting point for any leader; his comment that growth over time means discovering new ways to do the same things provides a clear benchmark for assessing progress within that cycle.
