Bill Belichick 101 for the Small Business Executive

Many of you who are football fans or are from New England probably know who Bill Belichick is. For the rest of you, he is the head coach of the New England Patriots. Since he joined the organization in 2000, the Patriots have won three Superbowls.

As a student of business strategy, I find Belichick to be a fascinating character. His accomplishment of winning three Superbowls in 4 years is truly remarkable because the market (NFL – 32 teams) he competes in is "efficient" by design and rebalances itself to increase efficiency in clever ways. Every year, the teams that were top performers the prior year (i.e. The Patriots) are penalized by getting lower relative draft picks than the teams that performed less well. In addition, the NFL has a salary cap, so even if your team sells out every game, has massive endorsement deals, and humongous TV deals as a result of winning three Superbowls, there is a cap on spending that puts you at the same level as every other team.


I had a chance to listen to the Bill Belichick biography by David Halberstam over the weekend on cd and also happened to watch his interview on 60 minutes that I Tivo'd awhile back. Here are some of the highlights I pulled out of the two media relative to his management style and his competitive strategy formulation.

1. Belichick does not believe in "tenured" jobs for his players. They are constantly evaluating and ranking all their players. Senior people are not "entitled" to their job -- it’s a complete meritocracy.

2. Belichick believes that being better "organized" than the competition is the way to win.

3. Belichick created a "modern, sophisticated" team that played by different rules and valued different skills/metrics than any other team. He exploited market inefficiencies much like a hedge fund would do.

4. After losing a particularly important playoff game to an injury ridden Patriots team, Payton Manning (MVP that year) commented that "it doesn't seem to matter who they trot out there, it's their 'system' that wins them games." It seems that winning football games is more closely correlated with smart management than talented players.

5. After having success, Belichick fought to keep the ego out. He feels like ego is a poison that kills teams.

6. Belichick is all about the team first and individual second.

7. Belichick's father was an assistant football coach at the Naval Academy. His main role there was to scout opponents. Belicheck literally grew up looking at opponent film with his father. He became an expert at finding weaknesses in his opponent's offenses and defenses. In particular, he became very good at identifying quarterback's weaknesses. For example, he would track metrics on accuracy throwing left, right, center, short, and long while standing still, while moving out of the pocket left and moving out of the the pocket right. Based on those metrics, he would design his defensive schemas. Belichick won 3 Superbowls because he was better at understanding his enemy than anyone else. Not sure if he ever read the "Art of War," but he's Sun Tzu's modern day poster child.

8. From the book and the interview, it struck me that Belichick uses a sophisticated information technology platform to help unearth counter-intuitive insights about his business to create competitive differentiation.

This is a picture of Belichick looking like Yoda in his grey hoodie.


-- Brian Halligan

 

Posted by Brian Halligan on Mon, Oct 23, 2006 @ 10:49 AM