“The Score Takes Care of Itself” is a warning to perfectionists

As part of my 2017 manifesto I am trying to post more and read more books (not just the million blog posts and academic papers I read).

The first book I finished this year was “The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership” by Bill Walsh. It was recommended by my mentee in The Product Mentor, Aurelija. When mentoring I like to have alternating book recommendations from me and the mentee since it is about learning from each other.

I played football in high school (team-captain-and-all-league-thank-you-very-much), but I’m not much for sports-focused books. I wouldn’t have thought about reading this book, but was happy that Aurelija got me out of my book safety zone.

There were tidbits of ideas or thoughts that were inspiring, but I found that the book slowly became a warning to managers that are too detail oriented, as Walsh is. It also talked about how managing success is hard to do for anyone. If you don’t manage it properly it ends up destroying you and leaves you with regrets.

Walsh’s Standard of Performance

The focus was on how to apply Walsh’s “Standard of Performance” to leadership in business and elsewhere. The “Standard of Performance” is his set of very particular rules on how people should behave. Those behaviors build on each other until you have a world class team.

When reading through many of these passages about how detail-oriented Walsh was it reminded me of the issues with command and control structures: you are only as innovative as the top person. Walsh was incredibly talented in offense and a very hard worker. This worked for a good amount of time until it crushed him. Near the end of the book he laments multiple times that he should have delegated more.

Teach others to talk to themselves

This passage really resonated with me when I think about leadership and strategy:

The leader, at least a good one, teaches the team how to talk to themselves. An effective leader has a profound influence on what that inner voice will say.

Sometimes you just need to prime yourself to get out of whatever mindset you are stuck in, such as with Rubber Duck Debugging.

In organizations that have a great amount of alignment, that inner voice reminds you what is the most important thing for the organization. When strategy is known within an organization this inner voice is the organization.

Isolation in success should be avoided

Walsh felt isolated when things were hard, successful, and pretty much always. It seems that this was his own doing by way of keeping his support system small:

Football coaches, just like executives who push themselves to the brink and beyond, often have no support system and become isolated from family, friends, and normal interactions. I’ve described it as being in a submarine, submerged and cut off from the human race.

And:

Thus, develop a small, trusted network of people whose opinions you respect and are willing to honestly evaluate.

And:

Be very discreet about whom you confide in. Crying on somebody’s shoulder, if it’s the wrong “somebody,” can have negative repercussions.

When I think back to the tough times I have gone through with work or personal issues it was when I was isolated. The way to avoid this is to not assume you have to be an island. You need to find ways to connect with everyone on your team.

Simple solutions

In one of his many lists (he loved lists) he had this:

Don’t label some concept or new plan the thing that will “get us back on track.” Keep in mind that simple remedies seldom solve a complex problem.

This didn’t inspire me towards complex problems require complex solutions. It made me think about how we try to propose ideas as the way to ‘get us back on track’ when we don’t really know.

Approaching new ways to do things as experiments lowers the expectations and allows them to fail. Sometimes it is a simple solution to a complex problem, but sometimes it isn’t. Assuming you know correct solutions from the wrong ones is just false when you will know more tomorrow than you know today (see agile).

It’s about the journey

Your effort in the beginning is part of a continuum of effort; your Standard of Performance is part of a continuum of standards. Today’s effort becomes tomorrow’s result. The quality of those efforts becomes the quality of your work. One day is connected to the following day and the following month to the succeeding years.

I sometimes can’t understand the things that my old self believed. I have empathy for myself that it was a point in life. We are all constantly adding (or subtracting) towards the state we are today. We are not yet how we will be tomorrow.

We should respect that effort now is part of a continuum.

Conclusion

I wasn’t impressed with a lot of this book’s advice, but was appreciative of the message from Walsh (and backed up by his son) on success and perfection. He did some pretty amazing things with the 49ers, but in the end he focused so much inwardly that it broke him.