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Another tribute to Coach Walsh in today's S.F. Chronicle:

A vision beyond football
by Richard Rapaport
Sunday, August 12, 2007

The morning Bill Walsh died, my editor, Owen Edwards, sent an e-mail titled "a bad day." We had both worked with Bill, and the thought of the world without his elegant, laconic presence made it a bad day, indeed. In Bill Walsh, the Bay Area lost a heroic, defining figure and we lost a mentor and friend.

The confluence of Bill Walsh's cerebral reshaping of professional football and the phenomenon known as "Silicon Valley" wasn't coincidental and it is correct to place Bill Walsh alongside Robert Noyce, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Gordon Moore and those who invented the technology/business phenomenon of which the Bay Area is ground zero. That Bill Walsh's "thinking man's" football routed the dumbos from around the NFL gave us a cachet and a confidence integral in crowning the Bay Area as a capital of intellect and accomplishment.

I first met Bill at a 1984 press event, after a Sunday in which the 49ers dismembered the Los Angeles Rams, 33-0. It could have been 133-0, except that humiliation was not in the Walsh's playbook. Bill refused to hand an opponent any potential future psychological edge. It exemplified Walsh's propensity to think improbably far ahead; "We have to remind ourselves," he explained in our 1993 Harvard Business Review interview, "that it's not just a single game we are trying to win. It is a season and a series of seasons ..."

At that 1984 press conference, I asked Walsh to compare that week's Rams blowout with the first game against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1981 season. This had been an early season match-up in which Joe Montana wrecked the powerhouse Cowboys, passing for four touchdowns in the first half. When I asked the question, Walsh got that far-ahead look and replied that while the Ram's game was important, "that first Dallas game made this franchise ... and what's your name?"

Having hit the right note, I was invited to hang around the 49ers headquarters. Walsh was willing to make time. It was often late, with game day approaching, when he would call me into his office to talk not about football, but rather about history, war, business and economics, unexpected subjects considering the setting.

It became clear that Walsh was a qualitative great leap forward from the Vince Lombardi/George Halas, "three-yards-and-a-cloud of dust,'' school of coaching. His teams similarly varied from the NFL norm of a strong-arm organization built to outmuscle the opposition. In Walsh World, the difference was, "we asked more of our players intellectually than our opponents were asking of theirs."

Walsh's brainy approach worked. The 1984 49ers went 15-1 and won Super Bowl XIX. In the following two decades the 49ers won three more Super Bowls, and a remarkable number of Walsh's assistants went on to become head coaches. In 1992, he returned to Stanford to coach and the Harvard Business Review asked me to interview him about the theory and practice of coaching in modern management.
The subject intrigued Bill. It was no coincidence that he would later lease space in the Sand Hill Road Business Park, the iconic home of high-tech finance. Bill fit with executives and entrepreneurs who, like him, recognized that traditional management needed to rethink what was a new business model. In our Harvard Business Review piece and his Forbes ASAP column, Bill recast his Super Bowl-winning philosophy in corporate terms. He spoke of the end of an era in which "an organization would simply discard a player who did not fit a specific, predefined role."
Instead, he suggested his 49er model, which tailored the system to fit the strengths of the players. The 49ers with Joe Montana, was offensively different that it was with Steve Young. Walsh also advocated that organizations be run "like open forums in which everyone participates in the decision-making process." Achieving this organizational buy-in made for a powerful collective will to win. To do it, however, Walsh stressed that the organizational fear factor needed to be eliminated, any idea, foolish or brilliant, would be considered without retribution. In Walsh's organization, ego wasn't an option, even for him.

Ultimately, Bill Walsh's winning equanimity derived from his own professional struggles. While head coaches were typically chosen in their early 40s, Walsh didn't get his shot until Stanford hired him at 47. "I was in a subordinate role as an assistant coach for a longer period of time than most," he noted, "so I was forced to analyze, evaluate and learn to appreciate the roles that other people play more than I might have. In retrospect," he concluded with the modesty that always became him, "I was lucky."
We were the lucky ones.

This article appeared on page C - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle