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WHAT IT TAKES to BE #1 Vince Lombardi on Leadership

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WHAT IT TAKES to BE #1 Vince Lombardi on Leadership WHAT IT TAKES TO BE #1 Vince Lombardi on Leadership by Vince Lombardi, Jr. MCGRAW-HILL New York St. Louis San Francisco Washington, D.C. Auckland Bogotá Caracas Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City Milan Montreal New Delhi San Juan Singapore Sydney Tokyo Toronto Dad, this is for you Copyright 2001 Vince Lombardi, Jr. Click Here for Terms of Use. Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VII PROLOGUE: VINCE LOMBARDI AND THE QUEST FOR LEADERSHIP 1 PART I: THE FOUNDATION OF LEADERSHIP: WHAT IT TAKES TO BE #1 13 CHAPTER 1: LOMBARDI ON LOMBARDI 15 CHAPTER 2: THE VINCE LOMBARDI LEADERSHIP MODEL 31 CHAPTER 3: SELF-KNOWLEDGE: THE FIRST STEP TO LEADERSHIP 51 CHAPTER 4: CHARACTER AND INTEGRITY71 v Copyright 2001 Vince Lombardi, Jr. Click Here for Terms of Use. vi WHAT IT TAKES TO BE #1 CHAPTER 5: DEVELOPING WINNING HABITS 95 PART II: INSPIRING OTHERS TO GREATNESS: HOW TO LEAD LIKE VINCE LOMBARDI 123 CHAPTER 6: TEACHING, COACHING, AND LEADING 125 CHAPTER 7: BUILDING THE WINNING ORGANIZATION 163 CHAPTER 8: MOTIVATING THE TEAM TO EXTRAORDINARY PERFORMANCE 195 CHAPTER 9: VINCE LOMBARDI ON WINNING 221 EPILOGUE: “ALL THE MAN THERE IS” 251 ENDNOTES 263 INDEX 273 Acknowledgements Any important project such as this is a team effort, and a good leader acknowledges everyone who made it possible. So here is a heart-felt thank you to those who made this book a reality. Jill, my wife of thirty-five years, thank you for your patience and understanding. My sons, Vincent, John and Joseph, and especially my daughter, Gina, my computer expert and ever vigilant grammarian. Terry Bledsoe, Ed Cerny and Roger Bel Air, trusted filters for the early version of this work. Jeff Cruikshank, a talent- ed writer, who brought needed organization and clarity to the book. Finally, Jeffrey Krames, McGraw-Hill editor-in-chief and publisher, who exhibited some of Vince Lombardi’s "mental toughness" in bringing this effort to successful completion. vii Copyright 2001 Vince Lombardi, Jr. Click Here for Terms of Use. Prologue Vince Lombardi and the Quest for Leadership There are no hereditary strata in leading. They’re not born; they’re made. There has to be an inclination, a commitment, a willingness to command. Copyright 2001 Vince Lombardi, Jr. Click Here for Terms of Use. I magine that sometime in the near future you live through one of those opening scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You’re driving your SUV down a deserted country road on a moonlit night. Suddenly, the calm of the summer night is shattered by the arrival of a spaceship, just ahead of you on the road. You are apprehensive, but unafraid. A strange-looking creature emerges, and you discover that you’re able to communicate with each other. The creature looks you in the eye and says, Take me to your leader. What will you do? Take him to the White House? To your state- house? Maybe you’d be more inclined to go roust out the CEO of your company. Maybe the first person you’d think of is your town’s mayor or the superintendent of schools. The creature has asked you to put a face on leadership. For me, and maybe for you, that would be a difficult task today. Why? Because today, a legitimate leader is hard to find. We live in a time when authority is questioned, gratification is instant, morals are relative, ethics are situational, and the truth is apparently what we decide it is. We lead lives of comfort and ease, and as a result, we’ve lost our hunger to lead and achieve. Today, fewer people are will- ing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to become a leader. Leadership is not just one quality, but rather a blend of many qualities; and while no one individual possesses all of the needed talents that 2 VINCE LOMBARDI AND THE QUEST FOR LEADERSHIP 3 go into leadership, each man can develop a combination to make him a leader. The quote comes from my father, Vince Lombardi. In my opin- ion, Lombardi developed the qualities and talents that make a leader. Most people who know football agree. Vince Lombardi was one of the greatest football coaches in the history of the professional game. In 10 seasons as a head coach in the National Football League—9 with the Green Bay Packers and 1 with the Washington Redskins—Lombardi compiled a truly amazing record: 105 wins, 35 losses, and 6 ties. His Packers played in six World Championship games and won five, including the first two Super Bowls. His postseason record of nine victories and a single defeat is unrivaled in the history of pro- fessional football. So how, exactly, did my father accomplish what he did? How did he attain #1 status? Equally important, how did he consistently maintain it? I believe that the answer to these questions lies not in one game plan or another, but in an approach to life—a philosophy of lead- ership. And that’s what this book is about. I think I have a unique perspective on Vince Lombardi. He died when I was 28 years old. That means I had the privilege of spend- ing not only my childhood with him, but also much of my young adulthood. As a child, I knew, respected, and loved him, and in those simple times he was simply a father to me. Eventually, I knew that the world saw him as someone special. That only confirmed what the boy already knew. I also got to know him again as an adult. As I grew older, I came to understand that, just like the rest of us, he had his blind spots and shortcomings. We agreed on the big things, and disagreed on a lot of the smaller ones but I never doubted his leadership abili- ties. I know I’ll never meet another leader quite like him. 4 WHAT IT TAKES TO BE #1 A LEADER FOR MANY GENERATIONS In my own life, I have been a lawyer, politician, writer, and National Football League and United States Football League exec- utive. I’ve also done a lot of public speaking, and now I do it for a living as a professional speaker. In all of those contexts, I’ve been amazed at the consistent level of interest that people have shown in my father. When I speak, I very often have people my own age or older come up to me and tell me that my father was a hero to them. They tell me that they have my father’s famous quote, “What It Takes to Be #1,” hanging in their office or den. (For more about this, see the last page of this book.) These are people who cut their football teeth on the Packers when the team was at the pinnacle of football suc- cess in the 1960s. In addition, the Packers, although from the small- est NFL city, weren’t just a local phenomenon. Because of their suc- cess, they were very often one of the two teams in the second game of a nationally televised doubleheader, so people from all over the country got to know Vince Lombardi and his proud Packers. In the 1960s, all across America, people grew up on the Packers. What truly amazes me is the number of younger people, many of them born after my father’s death in 1970, who also speak about him as a hero and role model. This is just a guess, but I sometimes think that the level of public interest in my father is actually increasing. (An excellent biography by David Maraniss, published in 1999, has only intensified the spotlight that shines on my father’s memory.) How many sports figures are still accumulating new fans 30 years after their death? What is the cause of this interest—even fascination? I think people are fascinated by a coach who, although focused and ambitious, wasn’t particularly interested in the limelight. (In fact, he was painfully shy, and the kind of easy banter that today’s coach is supposed to be able to engage in never came easily to my father.) A coach who didn’t land his first head coaching job (other than at the high school level) until the relatively advanced age of VINCE LOMBARDI AND THE QUEST FOR LEADERSHIP 5 46. A coach who rarely went out of his way to make life easy for journalists and, perhaps because of that, sometimes received rough treatment at their hands. Obviously, there’s a hunger out there for the kind of leadership that my father embodied. I’m not a psychologist nor am I a histo- rian, but it seems to me that a leadership vacuum opened up in this country during the 1960s. Our national leaders looked at the lengthening list of seemingly intractable problems (Vietnam, race relations, and increasing levels of crime and violence) and political humiliations (beginning, but not ending, with Watergate), and a tragic thing happened: They lost confidence in themselves! Then the next tragic thing happened: The rest of us lost confi- dence in our leaders. In a few short years, we became a nation of doubters, despite the fact that our nation was then (and still is today) the wealthiest, most powerful, and most opportunity-filled nation on earth. Vince Lombardi was one of the few leaders on the national stage who didn’t seem to have any doubts. He was intense. He was artic- ulate. He believed in his leadership ability. And he had a win–loss record that made believers out of a lot of other people.
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