Michael Lombardi on Leadership/Coaching/Management
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MICHAEL LOMBARDI LEADERSHIP/COACHING WISDOM – ZAK BOISVERT – PICKANDPOP.NET MICHAEL LOMBARDI ON LEADERSHIP/COACHING/MANAGEMENT • LOMBARDI ON BELICHICK - 2 • LOMBARDI ON COACHING STAFFS - 3 • LOMBARDI ON CULTURE - 3 • LOMBARDI ON DECISION-MAKING - 4 • LOMBARDI ON DEFENSE - 5 • LOMBARDI ON EVALUATION - 5 • LOMBARDI ON FALSE DUALITIES - 8 • LOMBARDI ON GAME MANAGEMENT - 8 • LOMBARDI ON HEAD COACHES - 9 • LOMBARDI ON INJURIES - 10 • LOMBARDI ON INVERSE THEORY - 10 • LOMBARDI ON KNOWING YOUR TEAM - 10 • LOMBARDI ON LEADERSHIP - 12 • LOMBARDI ON THE LOCKER ROOM - 12 • LOMBARDI ON MENTAL TOUGHNESS - 13 • LOMBARDI ON MOTIVATION - 13 • LOMBARDI ON OFFENSIVE SYSTEMS - 14 • LOMBARDI ON QUARTERBACKS - 15 • LOMBARDI ON PRACTICE - 15 • LOMBARDI ON SCOUTING - 16 • QUOTES - 16 • MISCELLANEOUS - 17 MICHAEL LOMBARDI LEADERSHIP/COACHING WISDOM – ZAK BOISVERT – PICKANDPOP.NET LOMBARDI ON BELICHICK -He's never going to flinch. The beauty of Belichick is he's so patient. If he were in the home-building industry, he would build one home a year. It's going to be the greatest home ever, but it's only going to be one a year. He's not going to get into the business where he's building neighborhoods. That's not who he is. So if you're going to try to stand the test of time with him and try to see who blinks first. He's never blinking. -Belichick tells his team every single day, "We get our toughness from kickoff coverage. That's who we are. We have to cover kicks. Games come down to being able to set the tempo in covering kicks. -On if a Patriots player had done what Antonio Brown did (filming Mike Tomlin's postgame speech): First of all, he never would have done it. They're trained not to do it. That's part of the program. When you talk about the Patriots, you talk about a program. You talk about 'Football 101.' They're educated o every aspect of the game--including the media...What would Belichick do? It never would have happened because he would have been proactive about it. -Bill hasn't changed. No matter how much success the man has, that's the thing you have to admire about him. That's what I call the "Born to Run" theory. He doesn't mind playing "Born to Run" every single day. He'll play it every day. He'll do the same thing over and over. I don't think he's a workaholic because to him it's not work. It's what he loves to do and he does it very well. Even though for most coaches the longer they do it, the easier it gets. There's no corner Bill cuts. There's nothing he leaves out. Every part of his day is spent working. MICHAEL LOMBARDI LEADERSHIP/COACHING WISDOM – ZAK BOISVERT – PICKANDPOP.NET LOMBARDI ON COACHING STAFFS -Bill Walsh said this to me a long time ago, “When everyone is thinking alike, no one is thinking.” -He’s turned it around because he’s stopped trying to be a TV booth defensive coordinator. A TV Booth Defensive Coordinator is when you try to show the guys how smart you are when you’re in search of a head coaching job, when you’re trying to get the attention on you to say, ‘Hey I made this call. Look how smart I am.’ He’s simplified the defense, he’s defined the roles of the players and he’s made the players the focus of the defense (not him or his scheme). -You have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid. I'm getting on the bus after losing at Cincinnati in 1993 and Saban's sitting there in the first seat and he goes, "What's wrong big dog?" and I tell him, "I hate losing to this team. Every time we lose to the Bengals, I want to burn my clothes." And he goes, "At some point you have to realize that we're not any good and they're better than we are, then we're going to make strides to become better." They have to admit that they're not any good, that they're not talented and you have to have the cold reality of "this is where we are," and make the necessary adjustments because this isn't working. LOMBARDI ON CULTURE -For Josh to be a really good head coach, the organization has to buy in to the culture he wants to create. I heard Howard Schultz talk about when he bought the Seattle SuperSonics. He thought he could change the culture of the SuperSonics and he learned the hard way that he couldn't. And I think Josh McDaniels learned that sometimes organizations don't want to change their culture. And if you want to win The Patriot Way, it has to be a culture change. MICHAEL LOMBARDI LEADERSHIP/COACHING WISDOM – ZAK BOISVERT – PICKANDPOP.NET -That's a "Style of Play" win. Those are so fun because you walk in and say, “That is why we do it like we do. -That's what separates the Patriots from the Bills: the culture. That's what makes them better. That's why they can win. You can sign Ndamokung Suh in Miami, but you're never going to beat the culture. Because culture can eat strategy for lunch, as Peter Drucker once said. So that's why they win. -You’re not going to beat Pete Carroll by hiring just one guy. You’re not gong to take out the Taliban with one bomb. If the Rams don’t build an organization, they’ll never be able to compete at the highest level. You can’t just hire a guy who is going to be in charge of the coaches, you need to build an organizational philosophy. -He was trying to create a culture. If you don't want that culture, then don't hire him. That's the problem with the NFL. Everybody wants to be the Patriots, but they don't want to have the culture. Belichick tells the team all the time, 'There's only one way we're going to do this. We're going to work at it. There's no pill we're going to take that's going all of a sudden overnight have success.' It's the same thing. You need to build a culture. If you want to beat the Patriots, you're not going to do it by signing Suh or extending this player or bringing that. No, it's going to be creating a culture of TEAM that can beat another team. LOMBARDI ON DECISION-MAKING -I equate it to Curly in the "Three Stooges." It’s “Curly in the boat” decision-making. When Curly is in the boat with Moe and Larry, there happens to be a hole in the boat so Curly has the bright idea that he's going to drill another hole to let the water from the first hole out. That's what Doug Pederson is doing. He's compounding the problem with a young quarterback by making more problems. It's one thing to be aggressive and another to be cautiously-aggressive. MICHAEL LOMBARDI LEADERSHIP/COACHING WISDOM – ZAK BOISVERT – PICKANDPOP.NET LOMBARDI ON DEFENSE -You can’t control the game emotionally with your offense. -When you can reduce the offense by what you do on defense then the defense has the advantage. LOMBARDI ON EVALUATION -There are certain people in the NFL that can draft players, there are very few that can build a team. -He’s a “Trailer Player.” You know what a trailer player is? A trailer player is when you look at a trailer for a movie and you say, “That looks like a really good movie.” The only problem is that IS the movie. That’s the only part of the movie that is any good. That guy gives you 5-6 plays a game where you say, “Jeesh,” but that’s not the whole movie. -You need to evaluate two things: You have to evaluate the offense and the skill set of the players within that offense. Is what we’re asking them too much? Does it fit their skillset? Did Player X look bad because he was put in a bad situation? Is our sysem maximizing Player Y’s abilities? -Only way you get better in evaluating personnel is to learn from your mistakes. How'd we mess this up? Did we mess this up? How'd I miss that guy? What'd I do wrong? -I’m gonna let you in on a secret, you ready? If we’re three years in and we’re still trying to find a system for the guy…you ready? There is no system. -In scouting the first rule you have to understand is past performance predicts future achievement. MICHAEL LOMBARDI LEADERSHIP/COACHING WISDOM – ZAK BOISVERT – PICKANDPOP.NET -We had this thing in Cleveland called the few, the proud, the free, and that was after the draft, we would invite as many guys as we could. Now this was back in 91, 92, 93, people weren’t doing this. It was the Branch Rickey approach to scouting. So we invited all these players in, we found Orlando Brown and Wally Williams like that. And we would say, look, "We’ll give you a try out, if you’re good we’ll sign you to a contract, if not we’ll send you home." And that’s essentially what we started back in 14 when I went to the Patriots, we kind of reinvented the few, the proud, the free, brought Malcolm Butler in, and instantly once you saw Butler go through a day of workouts, you said wow, and he signed a contract immediately.