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MYTH: LISTEN TO THE MONDAY-MORNING QUARTERBACKS

Once when he was asked why Notre Dame had just lost a certain football game, the great Knute Rockne turned to his questioner and answered, "I won't know until my barber tells me on Monday."

The Monday morning quarterback is truly the bane of the professional football player.  I can't tell you how often fans have come up to me following a Vikings loss and told me how I should have played a game. And they included a few folks who looked as though they might have trouble running a short pattern to the fridge for their next can of beer. No matter - You pay your money, you get to complain. I just tried to stay out of public restaurants after any game where I'd thrown more than three interceptions and we had lost.
In football, you learn to ignore the second-guessers and get on with preparing for the next game the best way you know how. Any coach or quarterback who starts running his team according to the advice of his Monday-morning barber or the whims of the fans in the stands is on his way to a quick demise. Former NBA basketball coach Johnny Kerr put it this way: "If a coach starts listening to the fans, he winds up sitting next to them."

The same is obviously true for you and your business.  There will always be a Monday-morning barber telling you when and how to change your strategy, your product, your location, your advertising or whatever. I recently counseled some friends of mine who ran an extremely successful restaurant chain. I told them, "Everybody in the world thinks he has the secret of running a food and beverage business, for no better reason than that everybody eats and drinks. Every customer is going to give you some advice. Keep your ears open for the good ideas, but remember: You are the experts. When you violate your own best instincts because of outside pressures, you lose.  Advice is cheap when the advisor does not have to suffer the consequences of his advice."

It was the same on the football field. I always looked for input from my offensive teammates for plays that would work in a particular situation. But in the end, I had to decide which play to call. I factored in the advice of my players, but then took responsibility and went with what my gut told me to do. I couldn't worry about the Monday-morning drones. They're experts at tracing the Johnstown flood to a leaky faucet in Altoona. After all, nobody is more knowledgeable about your situation than you. Don't let the second-guessers try to play your game for you. If they could, they'd be out there on the gridiron - not you.

Of course this does not always win you a lot of friends.  My old teammate Ron Yary (now a Monday-morning quarterback himself) once criticized me for "not being a team player." He said that when I came to the Vikings, I concentrated more on the record books than on the welfare of the team. I called Ron up and asked him, "What is your definition of team?" He said he just had a general feeling that I was playing more for myself than for the Vikings.

Then I asked him how many play-off checks he had picked up before I arrived back in Minnesota. "None," he said. How many after I left? "One." How many while I was quarterbacking the team? "Three."

I told Yary my fundamental belief: that it is the goal of any organization or team to win. The only purpose of a business is to turn a profit; the purpose of a football team is to beat other football teams. I may have made some decisions as quarterback that made some people mad and made other people experts at second-guessing me. But we won a lot of football games and took home bonus money, even though we never won the Super Bowl. Ron's response was: "I never thought of it that way." When you realize your chief goal is to win, that's when you become secure enough to stand up to your critics.

That's why I'd play on any team Harry Gray was on.  Harry believes that if you "submit" to pressure from peers, you move down to their level. Speak up for your beliefs and you invite them up to your level. If you move with the crowd, you'll get no farther than the crowd.  Indeed! I'm glad I never had to play against any of those Monday-morning quarterbacks. After all, they're tougher than anyone already on the team.

FACT: You, not your barber, are the best Monday-morning quarterback.

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