What Business Can Learn from the New England Patriots

By Dr. Michael Hammer February 2002

The New England Patriots pulled off one of the greatest upsets in Super Bowl history by defeating the heavily favored St. Louis Rams 20-17. The Patriots accomplished this after going undefeated in the nal eight weeks of the regular season, edging out the Oakland Raiders in the conference semi-nals, and then beating the favored Pittsburgh Steelers to win the AFC Championship. Yet even the most die-hard Patriots fans acknowledge that their team is far from the most talented in the league; moreover, the team was without the services of its star quarterback, wide receiver, and linebacker for virtually the entire season. How did they manage to do it? Various explanations are emerging. One is that the Patriots were just lucky, destinys team, that their overcondent adversaries defeated themselves through turnovers and dumb mistakes. Another is a feel-good tale of a gritty, blue-collar team of hard-working underdogs who subverted their egos to beat superior opponents. A third is that of a genius coach who outmaneuvered his less sophisticated counterparts. While there are elements of truth to all of these, none is sufcient. Any team can be lucky once in a while, but not week after week and not in the NFL playoffs. Grit and determination will not stop speedy receivers or blitzing linebackers, and coaches are on the sidelines while the game is being played. The Patriots story is in fact richer than any of these; moreover, it offers important lessons for any organization trying to achieve high performance. Innovative processes are key to success. Execution is absolutely necessary, but it is not sufcient, particularly when your opponents have more talent than you do. Instead, you have to play a different game from what they are. The Patriots do not use the same football plays as everyone else. They employ a lot of gimmick plays on offense, and a wide range of unconventional congurations on defense. Opponents have trouble recognizing what they are facing and nd their own plays disrupted, as Patriot players keep showing up where nobody expects them to be. When this happens, touchdowns and interceptions are not accidents but inevitabilities. The counterpart in business to football plays is processes, the ways in which a company performs its work. If you develop products, ll orders, create demand, and serve customers in much the same way as your competitors, it is hard to see how you will defeat them. Instead, you need to be as creative in your processes as you are in your products and your marketing. Find new ways of commercializing new technologies, of managing customer relationships, of planning production. Progressive Insurance zoomed from nowhere to being the 4th largest auto insurer in the country by constant operational innovation, inventing new ways of underwriting, handling claims, and quoting rates. Great football plays are not designed in the huddle; they are the result of meticulous work by offensive and defensive coordinators. Similarly, new ways of working dont happen by accident and they are not invented on the y by people in the trenches. You need to put real effort and resources into creating great processes and making sure that your people know and follow them. Match your people to your processes. Question: who is the better quarterback, the veteran starter Drew Bledsoe or his backup Tom Brady (who stepped in when Bledsoe was injured)? Answer: the question is meaningless. Bledsoe undoubtedly has a stronger arm than Brady, but it is unlikely that the Patriots would have done as well this year had he been at the helm. The Patriots system was not well-matched to Bledsoes style of quarterbacking, which is centered on staying in the pocket to hit receivers on deep routes. Other teams may have better individual players, but the talents that the Patriots did have t just right with the kinds of plays they were expected to carry

out: short slants on offense, smothering coverage on defense. The same applies to the business environment. Individual talent is an abstraction; what counts is how well people can perform in context. The worlds technically best engineer will perform less well than a somewhat less talented peer, if the process in which he or she is working requires interacting with customers, evaluating costs, and other tasks for which the peer is better suited. IBM demonstrated this in their heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. Other computer companies may have had more brilliant individuals, but IBM had superior processes and people with the right talents and styles to execute these processes. The result was decades of market dominance. Culture counts a lot. When the Patriots took the eld at the Super Bowl, they insisted on being introduced as a team rather than as individuals. This nod to teamwork was not unctuous political correctness, the football equivalent of a corporate value statement enshrined on plastic laminated wallet cards that urges everyone to put customers rst. On other teams, a lineman or a special teams player may resent the attention (and paychecks) lavished on quarterbacks and receivers - and as a result not push himself to make or take a punishing block. Or a receiver may think it beneath him to take the eld when the other side is trying to kick a eld goal. But the Patriots actually believe in the values of teamwork, selessness, and every individual contributing however possible - and they scored a key touchdown against the Steelers when their leading receiver was there to scoop up a blocked eld goal attempt. The Patriots coaches only hire players who t this culture and they let go veterans who do not. In any organization, even the most capable people working in the best-designed processes will not deliver results unless they really want to, unless they are imbued with passion and it is leaderships role to create that passion. You do this not through wallet cards, but by rewarding people who exhibit what you are looking for (and punishing those who do not), by embodying these values yourself, and by endless, repetitive, relentless communication with everyone in the organization. In 1997, Mike Ditka resigned as head coach of the New Orleans Saints, saying, My job is to instill passion in these guys. Somewhere along the way, I have failed. It hurts me. All managers should take his words to heart. Innovative processes, capable people, a culture of passion: the ingredients of success are not a mystery. They arent easy to put in place, but the Patriots have shown what happens when managers put their energies into doing so.

Copyright Hammer and Company 2002. All rights reserved.