MYTH: A Manager's Job Is to Think, Not to Play

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MYTH: A MANAGER'S JOB IS TO THINK, NOT TO PLAY

Many managers in America today have fallen into what I call the press-box syndrome. They spend their lives ruminating at desks and living through endless meetings. They are engulfed in reports, and spend more time thinking and observing than doing. They tend to isolate themselves from the real world of business around them. They are not in the arena, playing the game. If a football player did that, he would soon be on the bus back to mama.

Yet, the truth is: You don't know whether a play works if you don't run it. On the blackboard or in the playbook, every play looks perfect. On paper, you score every time.
But sometimes when you take a play out on the practice field, you can try it out all day long and find out it stinks.

In the business world, this means that if you always wait until the right time or the good times to start an enterprise or a new project, you'll wait all your life.

So the corollary to the first rule is: It's okay to make mistakes. In fact, it is a good thing to make mistakes, because this means you are stretching and working your way through a process of elimination - eliminating all the wrong solutions. Each wrong step thus brings you that much closer to the right one and teaches you something at the same time.

Jerry Burns, my offensive coach when I was with the Minnesota Vikings, used to say, "You can get the plays off the back of a Wheaties cereal box, boys. But it's up to you
to make 'em work. "

Coach Burns, besides being the funniest man I've ever known, was strictly action-oriented. Whenever one of us would raise his hand in a team meeting and ask, "What do we do if their defense does such-and-such?" old Burnsie would always answer, "Whatever it takes, boys." That was his philosophy: You do whatever it takes to win. If that means breaking with conventional wisdom and past practices, then so be it.

That's why I became a scrambler - a quarterback who does not stay in the "passing pocket" 7 yards behind the center on every passing play. A scrambler becomes a "mobile" quarterback, able to save plays and frustrate the defense by running around the backfield until he finds one of his receivers open. Sometimes he even runs with the ball himself. Sometimes he also gets tackled behind the line of scrimmage for a big loss, but that is the risk you must be willing to take.

Scrambling is an emergency solution to pressure. It is like the businessman's knowing how to change his product line in mid-market. The ultimate scramble, I suppose is today's Japanese economic miracle. They turned the ultimate disaster - defeat in war - into the springboard for the greatest business success story in the country's history.

Being a "scrambler" was a severe break with the tradition of the great quarterbacks: Y. A. Tittle, Sammy Baugh, Otto Graham, John Unitas and my own first coach, the late Norm Van Brocklin. These men were aghast that I was running out of the pocket. Van Brocklin used to say about me: "He'll win some games that way that he shouldn't, but he'll always lose some that he shouldn't."

That was like the doomsayers who predicted I would never make it at all in the National Football League because I was relatively small (only 6 feet tall and 190 pounds) and weak of arm. Even my own coach in my All-America year at the University of Georgia, Wally Butts, said that. By traditional pro standards, he was right.

But that's just it: I am not bound by tradition, in sports or in business. If you let the past dictate the future, you will never go anywhere. What a dull life it would be if you could see your whole life mapped out in front of you just by looking backward. It reminds me of the player who lost a coaching job because he didn't have the experience. His point was that the Pilgrims didn't have any experience when they landed here. If experience was that important, would we ever have had anybody landing on the moon?

I live by the concept of "feed forward," which means you should rehearse any future plays you're considering in your mind. Your only limitation is the script in your head and the fear in your heart. Because I did not live by feedback alone (the lessons of the past), I could become a scrambler.

Because of the restraints of tradition, nobody had successfully tried scrambling before, so I had to pioneer it. Of course, it is not something I thought up and planned out. It was my natural reaction to some 270-pound tackle thundering down on me at full gallop. Being smaller, slower, and weaker in the throwing department than a pro quarterback is supposed to be, I had to come up with something that worked! For me, scrambling worked. I may have been small, but I agreed with the dictum of California coach Pappy Waldorf: "Good players win games for you, not big players."

Scrambling was simply my way of dealing with a productivity problem on the football field. While Van Brocklin and the others were talking about the "proven" virtue of staying in the passing pocket (and letting those big guys crush you in a heap occasionally), I was always remembering one of the first lessons I learned from Weyman Sellers, my high school coach in Athens, Georgia: "The quarterback's job is to gain yardage and score points." Falling in a heap on the ground just did not seem the best way to reach those goals. I wanted a more productive way to deal with a broken block or a defensive blitz. So I scrambled.

By the time I retired from football eighteen years after Van Brocklin said I shouldn't scramble, I had broken and far surpassed all passing records in the history of the pro game, including most touchdown passes (342), most pass completions (3,686) and most yards gained passing (47,003).

So my philosophy is, When in doubt, do something! I agree with the approach of J. Peter Grace, chairman of W. R. Grace & Co. Peter once compared his corporate success to the way he made himself into a top college ice hockey player by going out alone to work on "practical hockey . . . night after night." He added, "It's the same way in business. Only something you start working on today will pay off in five years."

My whole life has been directed toward action. Whenever somebody presented me with a problem, I have always gone out and started working on it right away. I don't spend too much time theorizing or analyzing. I just start trying to do something about it. I probably do it wrong the first five or six times, but on the seventh try, I get it right. The main thing is, to get to that right solution, you gotta get moving right now!

You win by trying, not by standing around!

The trend in recent years has been to take a more contemplative, analytical approach to problem-solving. Our celebrated business and management schools teach a highly abstracted approach to management of organizations and people. Theirs is a game of numbers and percentiles. It is fashionable to put down the do something approach with a twist on the old joke, "Don't just stand there - do something!" This philosophy believes that much damage has been wrought by those who plunged unthinkingly ahead, acting only on gut instinct instead of moving with a careful plan.

I believe the trouble this country is in today stems from too much analyzing and too little action, too many meetings and not enough hands-on practive. Harry Gray, chairman of the $14 billion United Technologies Corporation, is a real action-oriented, no-nonsense manager. He says, "ninety-eight percent of the talk goes to two percent of the problem. . . At your next meeting remove the chairs, empty the carafes, turn the thermostat down to fifty-five. A stand-up meeting could be a standout."

One of the consequences of analysis without action is a collective timidity in our business community. The Japanese did not attain their extraordinary market shares in cars, electronics and other fields by playing a conservative game. They invested time, money and human resources, took serious risks and pulled themselves up by their wooden sandals from total defeat in war.

In America, meanwhile, we seem to have gotten so comfortable in our old boots - and our old ways - that we don't even know where the bootstraps are anymore.

In sports, it is a matter of being willing to bang your shins and bloody your nose once in a while. All the game plans in the world aren't worth anything if they stay in the playbook. Sooner or later, you have to get into the arena and play the game.

It is just the same in business. Henry Ford did not fill the roads of America with all-black Model T's just by thinking about it. He had to go out one day and make it happen.

The best thing you can do is to get yourself tired of all the talk and excuses about why something can't be done. You've got to want to do something. You've got to take an action approach. Legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant generated such a feeling by posting a sign in the players' locker room: "Cause something to happen." That's my philosophy: Make it happen.

FACT: When all is said and done, more is said than done. Make it happen!

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