Sam Walker’s book, The Captain Class, convincingly argues that the common ingredient to all the best sports teams has not been a great coach, but the presence of a player/leader.
I like the argument, and it seems applicable to project management. The best project outcomes come from the best project teams, which require a worker/leader rather than an administrative overseer. In many start-ups, this worker/leader is the entrepreneur who has a great deal of technical talent.
The worker/leader in the DOD should be the program manager. A good PM should have some of the traits described by Walker’s Captain Class. The PM cannot just manage the flow of money and keep the contractor’s feet to the fire. The PM must be a knowledgeable part of the production process who inspires and facilitates the project team.
That description seems to be valid for PMs at DARPA. However, systems that get fielded are managed by the DOD program offices, where the PM is usually an administrator first and foremost. The DOD program, with decade-long development cycles, generally have several PMs filtering through it. These PMs generally go through a brief business management course before getting thrown into a deep and complex technology development environment.
This analogy may sound good, but Walker’s work on leadership excludes college sports, which might have something to teach us. Alabama football has been a dominate force for many years without any obvious player/leaders, particularly considering there had been several turnovers of the entire team during its (continuing) run.
Why might Alabama succeed without a player/leader, and what are the implications for a project management analogy?
Let’s list some unique aspects of college football:
(1) football is a bigger enterprise than most other sports;
(2) college mandates short player tenure (and the NFL scoops up the best prematurely);
(3) realistic game play is more costly to simulate in practice
This actually sounds more like the DOD project environment. Projects include dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individuals who need to be coordinated. DOD projects last longer than any person can be expected to stay on-board. And DOD systems have scale and complexity which means they cannot be tried out again and again, learning from previous mistakes.
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| Statue of Nick Saban outside of the Alabama football stadium. |
How does Alabama succeed? It seems to come down to two factors: culture and recruitment.
First, culture. Forbes reports that:
From the weight room to the players’ lounge to the hyper-focus on nutrition, the environment that these players were surrounded by is steeped in culture. It felt as if every single inch of the facility had been considered and crafted to focus on the common goal of excellence.
Its hard to get a feel for what that culture is at Alabama, but it sounds strict. Former assistant coach Lane Kiffin said it was miserable working there:
“He’s just mad to get mad,” Kiffin said. “He’s feeling like everyone’s too comfortable. I don’t know where he gets it from. It’s just like, ‘I need to rip somebody.’ I never understood it.”
Dabo Swinney built a different kind of winning culture at Clemson, apparently from watching the movie The Internship about Google’s corporate culture. He even built a slide like in the movie. “I’m very focused on the culture we have and nurturing that,” Swinney said.
Culture is a key ingredient that Walker leaves out of The Captain Class. Culture orients the team’s thoughts, leading to general pattern of actions that persist even when the players change over.
Arnold Kling’s preferred definition of culture is “socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies.”
I’m not so sure that the player/leader also breeds a culture that persists. In most of the cases outlined by Walker, the winning culture did not outlast the identified player/leader. In basketball and volleyball, where there are relatively few players and coaches, culture may not be a decisive factor.
College football is something more of an operation. It has up to 85 players, 9 assistant coaches, and 5 strength/conditioning coaches.
Even then, winning basketball teams like Duke under Mike Krzyzewski or Kentucky under John Calipari have persistent cultures, so did Pat Summitt at Tennessee and Geno Auriemma at UConn. In fact, its hard to think about a winning culture not associated with a single head coach (perhaps New Zealand All Blacks?).
Which brings us to our second reason winning teams persist in college, recruitment.
Winning teams always get the very best recruits, which perpetuates winning.
This is obviously true. Another model could be that the head coach personally contributes little. There are random variations that lead to some teams to have a far better season than expected, which generates a positive feedback loop with recruitment, and so forth.
But this is unsatisfying. It seems that just one or two bad-attitude recruits could subvert the culture. Or it just takes one bad event for things to spiral downward.
It seems that the recruitment phase cannot just be a simple strategy of get the best player, who may also be the most toxic. It must be get the best player, subject to a filtering process for cultural compatibility.
This sounds right. Good teams that persist have a strong culture defined by a head coach. Good cultures improve the chance of having a good year, which allows the head coach to become increasing selective about the players he chooses. Because the best teams have the most choice among recruits, more of the best coaches’ time is spent in people selection.
Nick Saban’s player selection process is what stood out to one reporter. Dabo Swinney said “I have an MBA, but my Ph.D. is in people. Everything I do is about relationships.” Krzyzewski said “I’m recruiting more and more intensely than at any time in my career.” It is important for him to recruit people that are already motivated.
I think the people-focused attitude in winning cultures is right. I like the idea of a PM who is a player/leader, but they must be nested in a organizational culture that can persist even when the PM moves on. Recruitment and development of people is probably the most important aspect to building and sustaining a culture.
We see this conclusion reflected in other domains. In business, entrepreneur Ben Horowitz said that “We take care of the people, the products and the profits, in that order.” In military strategy, Col. John Boyd said that it’s “People, ideas and hardware—in that order!”
Defense acquisition needs to pivot from a process that totally focuses on project requirements to a culture that focuses on hiring, retaining, and advancing the right people, whether they work in the government or for it.
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