Install the Standard Before Chasing the Scoreboard

"Consequently, I approached building the 49er organization with an agenda that didn’t include a timetable for a championship or even a winning season. Instead, I arrived with an urgent timetable for installing an agenda of specific behavioral norms—actions and attitudes—that applied to every single person on our payroll. To put it bluntly, I would teach each person in the organization what to do and how to think. The short-term results would contribute both symbolically and functionally to a new and productive self-image and environment and become the foundation upon which we could launch our longer-term goal, namely, the resurrection of a football franchise."

"The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners."

"His mind for technical football was extraordinary, but beyond that was his ability to organize and manage his staff, players, everybody—to get the whole organization on exactly the same page. On that page he set the standard for how he wanted things done, and his standard was simple: perfection. That’s what he taught us individually and as a group—to believe it could be achieved and then achieve it (or come close). He had in his mind this ideal—an image of perfect football—coupled with the nuts-and-bolts details of how to accomplish it, which he then taught."

"Bill raised everybody’s standard, what we defined as acceptable. Perfection was his acceptable norm, and he got us thinking we could achieve it by teaching us what perfection was and how to reach it—not just how to locate a receiver, but every other aspect of doing your job at the top level, whatever that job was in the organization. It was something special, teaching a person, a whole team, an entire organization, to want to be perfect, to want to get to the next level, and the next one. And then do it."