Leadership Lessons from Alabama Football Coach Nick Saban - Sep
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Leadership lessons from Alabama football coach Nick Saban - Sep. 7, 2012 9/21/12 1:24 PM Leadership lessons from Nick Saban By Brian O'Keefe, assistant managing editor @FortuneMagazine September 7, 2012: 2:19 PM ET Bryant-Denny Stadium, Tuscaloosa, Ala., Aug. 1, 2012. From left: Michael Williams, Dee Milliner, Coach Saban, Nico Johnson, Barrett Jones, and Chance Warmack (Fortune) -- If you want to figure out what makes Nick Saban tick, start with the little things. It's noon on a recent Thursday, and I've been invited inside the multiple-national-championship- winning University of Alabama football coach's inner sanctum. We just returned from a quick trip across campus, where Saban gave a speech to a theater full of high school students and dispensed a bit of his patented motivational magic. ("What are you selling today? Are you selling positive, or are you selling negative? Are you affecting everybody else in a positive way or a negative way?") The whole experience, there and back, took about 25 minutes. Now we're about to multitask through lunch. He has until 1 p.m. to answer some questions, give or take one minute. As he sits down at a small table in his expansive wood-paneled corner office, the coach grabs what looks like a garage-door opener and presses the button. Across the room, the door to his office softly whooshes shut. Boom! Nick Saban just saved three seconds. Multiply that enough times and you have a couple of extra months, or years, to recruit more high school stars. Then there's lunch itself. He has it down to a science -- another in a series of small efficiency measures. Every day, Saban sits at this very table and works through his lunch hour while eating the same exact meal: a salad of iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes topped with turkey slices and fat-free honey Dijon dressing. No time wasted studying a menu. (Guests, though, aren't required to order the same thing. On this June day I'm having a turkey wrap.) Saban runs his schedule -- and his entire program -- with similar efficiency. Nothing is trivial or unimportant. It may be the off-season, but there is very little downtime in the world of Alabama football. In a couple of days there will be 1,000 high school players on campus for camp, and they all need to be coached, evaluated, and potentially recruited. There are boosters who want to talk. There are speeches to give. Not to mention the fact that the coach has to save energy and time to deal with issues that crop up, like player problems. (Or, he says, giving me a look, "dealing with the press.") So he packs the middle of his days with meetings and saves his mornings and afternoons for "football-related stuff." MORE: Sports stars should be subject to clawbacks http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/07/news/companies/alabama-coach-saban.fortune/index.html Page 1 of 6 Leadership lessons from Alabama football coach Nick Saban - Sep. 7, 2012 9/21/12 1:24 PM The 60-year-old coach has jammed a lot into the five years since he arrived in Tuscaloosa after a short foray in the NFL as the coach of the Miami Dolphins. He has revived a once-great football program in record time and led it to new heights. He has recruited an outsize share of the nation's best high school players and turned them into first-round draft picks (eight of them in just the past two years). He has helped lead the community's and his team's response to a devastating tornado that blew through town last year. He has even, if you believe the university chancellor, played a key role in driving the school's enrollment and increasing the quality of applicants. Most of all, of course, he has collected victories. After going 7-6 in his first year, Saban has now won 48 of his past 54 games. And in January the Crimson Tide won its second BCS National Championship in three years when it defeated SEC rival Louisiana State University 21-0 in the title game in New Orleans. Add that to the title that Saban won back in 2003 when he was the coach at LSU, and he's the only active coach to have won three BCS titles -- and the only ever to have won BCS titles at two different schools. This year Alabama began the season ranked No. 2 and looked dominant in easily defeating No. 8 Michigan by a score of 41-14 in its opening game. There's a distinct possibility that when January rolls around, Saban's team could be playing for a third title in four years. If Saban were running a company instead of a football program, he'd be hailed as an elite manager. Alabama football is big business, and it has gotten only bigger under Saban. In 2006, the year before he arrived in Tuscaloosa, the athletic department brought in $67.7 million in revenue, mostly from football, and spent $60.6 million. Last year revenue was $124.5 million and expenditures were $105.1 million -- leaving a $19.4 million profit, according to figures compiled by USA Today. During Saban's tenure, Alabama has expanded the capacity of Bryant-Denny Stadium from 92,000 to 101,000, including the addition of new luxury (i.e., more expensive) seating. It was a no-brainer for the school to give him a two-year contract extension and healthy raise earlier this year. With a compensation package that averages $5.6 million a year over the next eight years, Saban is among the highest paid coaches in college football. Saban has long been recognized as having a first-rate football mind. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick -- himself the winner of a few championships -- hired Saban as his defensive coordinator when Belichick coached the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s. He pays Saban the ultimate compliment: He copies him. "We talk on a pretty regular basis," says Belichick. "If I ask Nick a question and he says, 'Well, this is how we do it,' then I usually just cut to where he is and take that shortcut and say, 'Okay, we're going to do it this way.' I know that he's already gone through all the stages of thinking it through, and I would rather just get to the stage that he's at rather than waste the time figuring that I'm going to end up at that same point anyway." What really separates Saban from the crowd is his organizational modus operandi. In Tuscaloosa they call it the Process. It's an approach he implemented first in turnarounds at Michigan State and LSU and seems to have perfected at Alabama. He has a plan for everything. He has a detailed program for his players to follow, and he's highly regimented. Above all, Saban keeps his players and coaches focused on execution -- yes, another word for process -- rather than results. MORE: Steal bases, snag sponsors? Sound like your typical chief executive? "I think it's identical," Saban says, digging into his salad. "First of all, you've got to have a vision of 'What kind of program do I want to have?' Then you've got to have a plan to implement it. Then you've got to set the example that you want, develop the principles and values that are important, and get people to buy into it." Sounds simple. But it's taken Saban 40 years to perfect the Process. Saban has won so much in such a short time at Alabama that it's easy to forget how much the proud program had struggled in the years before he arrived in January 2007. The school had been severely penalized twice in a decade by the NCAA for rules violations. It had suffered through losing seasons and humiliating upsets to what would normally be pad-your-record opponents, such as Northern Illinois and Louisiana Tech. One head coach bolted for Texas A&M. Another was fired before he ever coached a game at the school after an ill-fated visit to a strip club in Florida. Worst of all, from the perspective of Alabama fans, the football team that had for decades been at the top of the mighty Southeastern Conference had sunk to the middle of the pack -- finding itself out-recruited and out-coached by schools like Florida, LSU, Tennessee, and archrival Auburn. http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/07/news/companies/alabama-coach-saban.fortune/index.html Page 2 of 6 Leadership lessons from Alabama football coach Nick Saban - Sep. 7, 2012 9/21/12 1:24 PM It's a tale of woe all too familiar to this writer. Growing up in Birmingham in the 1970s, I was weaned on the dominance of Crimson Tide football and the legend of Paul "Bear" Bryant, who won six national titles at Alabama. Later, as a student at the university, I watched Gene Stallings lead the Tide to its 12th national championship, in 1992. Being conditioned to winning made the losing that came later that much more painful. When Saban arrived, 'Bama fans had high hopes that he was the guy to finally turn things around. But most rational observers figured it would take a few years for Alabama to rebuild. Saban didn't get the memo. In his second year he went 12-0 in the regular season and got his team within a few plays of making it to the national championship game.