Football and Life Lessons From Michael Lombardi
Yesterday morning I listened to the newest episode of The GM Shuffle podcast, and the discussion sparked several trains of thought.
With the recent news of tweaks to the NFL head coach hiring process, Lombardi pulled back the curtain to show what makes a successful head coach. This isn’t something he merely talks about in this podcast, it’s the subject of his book Gridiron Genius.
In Lombardi’s eyes, one problem with the current system is a focus on candidates needing to be electable rather than selectable. Instead of the best coach getting the job, more often it’s the coach who can be “sold” to the fan base and organization who gets hired. This discussion led me back to his book and prompted a synthesis of several overarching ideas in my head.
Start With the End in Mind
One of my favorite TV shows is Survivor. Over the past few weeks, with season 40(!) approaching the home stretch, I began revisiting older seasons. Survivor: Cook Islands was a true gem. Yul Kwon, the eventual winner of the season, had the end in mind long before anyone else. He knew that in order to win he needed at least five votes from the jury. There were several pivotal moments throughout the season where he took actions to secure votes days ahead of time. This strategy stood out amongst others where most contestants seemed too focused on the short term.
There’s a similar strategy in Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why. Sinek describes an American car company where employees on the assembly line needed to tap the edges of the car doors with a rubber mallet once they were put on the hinges to ensure a perfect fit. Surprisingly, when several executives visited a Japanese car company assembly line they didn’t see any rubber mallets. The Japanese car company made sure the doors fit perfectly by design.
How about with wrestling? Whether we’re talking about a one night event like the Royal Rumble or a year’s worth of lead-up to New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Wrestle Kingdom, successful pro wrestling bookers start at the end and work backward. At the risk of losing readers I’ll end this thought here, but hopefully you understand that this concept is universal.
Back to interviewing head coaching candidates. If there isn’t a vision of the end result, and that doesn’t just mean a Super Bowl, how will you know where you’re going?
The Endowment Effect
“A draft day crash won’t necessarily destroy a team. But sticking to a plan because of that disaster always will.” -Michael Lombardi
The teams and players change (right now it’s the Bears and Mitch Trubisky), but professional sports teams across all leagues face this bias. For the longest time this is something I have struggled with as well. In broad terms, the endowment effect is the tendency to overvalue something because it’s yours. In other words, if you were forced to put a price on something of yours to sell, you wouldn’t pay the same price if you were on the other end of the transaction. What we're left with is a distorted sense of opportunity cost.
Something that Marcus Aurelius wrote helps present a contrasting viewpoint. In Meditations, Aurelius writes “Remember that to change your opinion and to follow him who corrects your error is as consistent with freedom as it is to persist in your error. For it is your own activity, which is exerted according to your own movement and judgement, and indeed according to your own understanding, too.” To combat the endowment effect, we need to take a step back and objectively analyze the situation. By doing so, we are more likely to dissociate ourselves with something of ours that needs to be valued.
It All Comes Back to Signaling
Lombardi’s thoughts on the difference between successful and unsuccessful head coaches revolve around signaling (something I wrote about recently).
In Gridiron Genius, Lombardi writes about how “When one team has success, another wants to duplicate its path to good fortune.” He calls it the “Texas snake problem.” This refers to two almost identical species of snakes in Texas, but one truly is a killer while the other is harmless. The harmless snake thrives by giving off the appearance of the dangerous snake.
Lombardi continues to say “Teams try to get away with this kind of lazy copycatting all the time. They try to succeed by hiring a coach who has all the same markings and temperaments as Belichick or Walsh without really understanding what makes both men killers; drive, decision making, and realistic optimism.”
We know that successful signals have to be 1) costly to obtain and 2) difficult to mimic. When interviewing head coaching candidates, or anyone else for that matter, the end result should be finding someone with the characteristics required to thrive in the position. If we know what we are looking for, then we can start with the end in mind and work backwards.