#2 Michael Lombardi: Leadership on the Field
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Thank you for calling New England Patriots. How may I direct your call? Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. I'm the author of the Furnham Street Blog, a website dedicated to mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. In The Knowledge Project, I host guests from a wide range of disciplines to better expand our minds and challenge our thinking.

The guest on this episode is Michael Lombardi. Michael is the former general manager of the Cleveland Browns and current member of the coaching staff on the New England Patriots. He's widely regarded as one of the shrewdest evaluators of people in the NFL. And as we'll see in our conversation, a lot more goes into that than just measuring talent. Among other things, we explore the four elements of leadership, decision making, game plans, and the role of systems and processes. All right, so let's delve in. Where did your passion for football start?

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Well, you know, I think a lot of times your passion grows from what you see. And as a kid growing up in New Jersey and watching a guy with the same last name as you on a sideline achieve such notoriety and such success and become an idol that, you know, his dreams and his path.

really became my dreams and something that I really wanted to become only because it was the same last name and it looked like he could have been in any one of my family reunions. I thought that. And so, you know, I just really got passionate about learning about him, learning about his life, about what he tried to do. And that set me on the path of football. That's Vince Lombardi, right? Yes.

Yes. So how did you translate that passion into, like, what was your first job in the NFL, I guess, or in football? Well, you know, you start out and so you study the game and you play it. I played a football after. Before I graduated, I wanted to learn about football. So doing my whole collegiate career as a

player and a student at Hofstra, I would, in the winter, I would travel to these coaching clinics all over the Northeast corridor, whether one would be in Atlantic City or, you know, North Jersey or even Connecticut or anywhere. I would go and sit down there and listen to coaches speak, pay the $40 fee and go and spend three days listening to coaches speak about football and learn football. So from doing that in college, I knew that

My path to get to coaching or being involved in football required me to become a graduate assistant, continue my learning process at a school, basically getting the donuts, getting the coffee, doing whatever you had to do. And so from those clinics, I was fortunate enough to meet a man named Harvey Hyde, who had just happened to become the head coach of the University of Las Vegas. He took a liking to me, and he offered me a tremendously high-paying job up in

no money, as many Burger King coupons as I had. And I went out there and started working and learning, actually. I don't think I was working. I think I was learning. There's a fine line between work, producing work, and learning. And I think that I was in the learning stages. There wasn't a lot of

production of work other than getting his car clean and picking up his dry cleaning. What's the learning curve like? Maybe you can take me behind the scenes a little bit in terms of what goes on. And that's a great question. I think that football is a unique sport. It's a sport that is similar to chess, that it requires the studying of

prior gains, prior moves, prior errors to really understand where you are. And if you don't have a sense of all the games that have been played and you don't have that, it's a sport that you just can't come fly into and feel like you have a really great grasp of it. And so you have to really study the game from the single wing and to the T formation until the passing game and the running game. And so that education became important.

really important to me and understanding the game, understanding how it works and the football element of it. And I think that's really what I did at those clinics. I learned the basics, you know, I could understand it, you know, and football is a game where I tell this to people all the time from doing television is you can play, you know, in the offensive line in football, but you only play offense.

In baseball, you play offense and defense. In basketball, you play offense and defense. In hockey, you play offense and defense. And so in football, you only play one side. So you do miss some elements of the entire game. Now, the quarterbacks are fortunate because they seem to know the entire game. And perhaps tight ends can because they block and catch and do all that.

So you really have to force yourself to learn the entire game. And the only way to do that is by studying it in a complete manner. And that's what I try to do. How does that work with specialization? From my point of view, I mean, I don't see inside of NFL organizations, you have position coaches. How much does the role of the entire game play into what you're trying to accomplish as a coach and leader and then your specific team?

job? I mean, how much speciality is there? And then how do you broaden that? Well, I think that's really the great question is the NFL is an on-the-job training site. You get the job, you have to continue your education while you're here, and you can't really spend a lot of time on the continuation because the season's so busy. And I remember reading this years ago in Henry Kissinger's memoirs. He said, you know, when you come to Washington, you borrow an intellectual power, you bring them, you can't renew it once you're here. And I think a lot of that

that statement that Kissinger talked about in terms of Washington related to the NFL. You're in the league, you're learning the league, you really have to find avenues and time spent to study it and continually grow within it because if you don't, it'll pass you by as you're in it.

And the last thing you want to be is a little bit old-fashioned in the league. You don't want to be doing something that was done four years ago because it no longer works today. And so you have to constantly work at it. And your time is your only real element that you challenge. And you have to make sure you use your time wisely. I mean, there's an element of kindergarten in this too that you have to do it. So that's kind of what we try to do is we try to spend as much time studying as we can. And

and really try to grow from it. What would you say is the difference between a good coach and a bad coach? Okay, I think the key here now we're going to fall into the lines of leadership. I think coaching is leadership. So it really comes down to the four elements of leadership. Most great coaches have at least three of the four and they don't succeed if they don't. And so the elements of leadership is management of attention, which means you have a plan.

Most coaches have to have a plan. The management of meaning, meaning you can explain your plan clearly and concisely and communicate it to the players or to the people you're leading. The management of trust, the players trust you to be consistent within yourself and within the people you're leading so that you don't have double standards. I mean, it's one thing to be a really hard, tough coach, but you're going to have to be hard and tough on everybody. You just can't pick and choose. And then the management of self, which is probably the hardest area is to be self-critical of when you make a mistake or when you do something that's not effective.

You have to be able and honest to say, you know what, I made a mistake here. I need to correct that. And so when you have those four areas, then you become a better coach. And I think that's really the fine line, coaching and leadership.

Coaching is teaching. It isn't just a separate issue. It isn't just a separate singular vocation. It's truly about being a good leader. It's about being a good teacher. And if you have those two qualities, you certainly can become a successful head coach. How much do you think that the role of leadership is the individual versus the system they put in place? You know, the system is a byproduct of management of attention.

so it falls right into leadership. So the leadership is the system gets their attention. Bill Walsh introduces the West Coast offense to the San Francisco 49ers in 1979. It's the system, but really that grabbed the attention. And then his ability to explain his system to them captured and then propelled his leadership even further. So I think they go hand in hand. If you don't have a system or you don't have a belief of what you want to become as a team, as a leader,

as a head coach, then it becomes very difficult for you to communicate that to the players. And then all of a sudden you become an independent contractor and you have a bunch of independent contractors working for you. If the head coach doesn't come in with a philosophy and understanding, he has to set a contract all that out. And it can be very difficult for him to sustain leadership over a long period of time. Does that happen a lot? It happens all the time. We're in an industry of specialization, you know, so if you're a defensive coach, you want to hire the best offensive coordinator you can. And when you become a head coach and, you know,

What we've learned is the guys that have had involvement in all areas of the football team as head coaches typically become the better head coaches. Do you just want to go out and hire the best coach or do you want to hire the best person that fits in with what you're trying to accomplish? How do you distinguish between that? I guess on a player's sense, it becomes the talent versus fitting into the schemes and the systems that you're trying to use. Let's take the players first. You can play fair base for the Mets and get traded to the Yankees.

you could have played the day game instead of the Mets, and you could play the night game and play third base for the Yankees, and you wouldn't miss the beat. But in the NFL, you could play offensive line for the Denver Broncos, and you could get traded to the Cleveland Patriots. And those two line techniques and fundamentals and requirements that go within the fabric of the position are probably going to be very...

very different. Therefore, it would be very difficult for you to transition and play. So systems and how systems relate in the NFL are really very important. You have to draft players that can fit within the system, and then you can develop the skills from the system. I think that's one of Coach Walsh's greatest strengths was he was able to set a system in place, drafted players that fit the system, and then he developed those skills within the system. That's why I

oftentimes you'll see players that played well for the 49ers back in their day or played well for the Patriots that may have gone somewhere else and have not played as well because perhaps it isn't the player's fault. Perhaps the system doesn't fit as well to the player's strength. So from a player's standpoint, that's really important. And from a coaching standpoint, as a general manager, you want the organization to have a philosophy that transcends time and understands what we're trying to accomplish. It can't be

on just a very narrow focus. It has to be a 10,000 feet view of what you want the organization to be and how you want it to react and how it's going to behave over time. And those standards and those beliefs and principles have to be time-tested. And then when they are,

they can sustain any bump in the road and you can overcome it without having to dramatically change. There's a difference between change and modify. And I think you see the great organizations that have adapted to the change of the league by rules, have been able to modify their systems and play. And then oftentimes we see teams that haven't been

That's what they change completely every two years, and they're always wondering when they're going to catch it. When you're drafting a player, for instance, do you spend an equal amount of time on their pure physical talent? How do you even determine if they'd fit into a system? It's what Coach Walsh used to talk about, scouting the inside out, not outside in. So you know what you want as a football team. The draft, it's a huge event.

but it's really a very singular operation because if you focus on what you need and what you really want, and then you search for players that fit those needs and fit those wants, it becomes a lot easier. I often say the FBI doesn't start searching for serial killers by opening up the phone book. They have a profile on everything that they're looking for that might lead them to their suspect.

And it's the same in scouting. Scouting is not about finding players. Scouting is about eliminating players. And so when you have standards and you have requirements and you have beliefs in your system and player and things that you must have within your system, then you search for players that fit the criteria and you eliminate ones that don't. That doesn't mean they can't go on to be great players. It just means that they don't fit what you do or how you want to play.

That's part of the scaling process, and that's why it's very important as a general manager or director of player personnel is to really understand the coaching, what's being taught, the systems that are in place, because when you do that, then it becomes a lot easier to find players that fit within the system. Is that why a lot of the coaches seem to work for people who they've worked for in the past, like when you're hiring a coach, for instance, because you have that sort of relationship with them already? You know, you have a philosophical belief and understanding.

And so you have a relationship that's predicated on how you view the game. Football is different in that there's a lot of different styles of how to play, whether it's the 49ers West Coast offense or whether it's the Giants on your bill Parcells in the power run game with, you know, barely throwing the ball and Phil Simms is the quarterback 15 times a game.

to the Miami Dolphins in their run game to the K gun in Buffalo where they threw it all the time. So there's a lot of different ways to win. So what happens is, which the way you feel most comfortable with, usually those are your friends. Those are the people that you become friendly with because you see the game the same way. And it's why you should have conversations. I think that's why you see a lot of that. So how do you avoid surrounding yourself by kind of group thinking? Nobody's thinking. Yeah, that's right. That's an old saying. It's

We're all thinking alike, but no one's thinking. I think that's the challenge. And I think that that's where you have to stay on the cutting edge and you have to be willing to be curious about what's going on in the league. And you have to be curious to understand that you need to modify and you need to adapt to the rules and find different ways to solve the problem. I mean, divergent thinking certainly plays an effect here. And so if you can be divergent in thought, then I think you can achieve what you need to achieve.

but that divergency in your thought becomes much problematic in the NFL because you've been successful. And so why would you get away from something that's been successful? When I first got to the Raiders and, you know, we won two Super Bowls using the old legal path, you know, the computer age was coming in. So you don't change, you know, you're going to get, they still have a sign in my office that said, if you did by Eric Sheminsky of the United States Army, if you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less. And I think that that happens to be true. And so you have to force yourself to change things.

but change not saying, okay, one year we're going to throw the ball 70 times, the next year we're going to run it, throw it 12. Change within the rules and how you're, but fits within the philosophy of who you are. So I think it would be fair to say that Patriots have adopted in the Bill Belichick era fairly well to change. Why do you think that that is? What gives them sort of the ability to do that, whereas other teams don't seem to adopt as well? Well, I think that's who Bill is. I mean, Bill's very adaptable in terms of as a coach, you know,

You know, I mean, from the time he was at the Giants to in Cleveland, he's always believed in instead of asking the question, instead of trying to play the game the way he wants to play it, the question is always asked, what is it going to take for us to win the game? How do we have to play it? And then you have to have a system in place that can play a lot of different ways. And I think that's why he's so successful. I mean, you've seen that the Patriots have won them initially. We're the only team in the NFL history who threw the ball over 50 times twice and won both games. And that's rare to do in a playoff game.

But yet we did it, and we did it well. So he's adapted to change. He's very good about understanding what it takes to play by the rules, and I think that that's part of the secret to success as a leader. I mean, it all starts with his leadership ability and his understanding of how to lead.

So you determine, I would imagine, through video and other evidence, you know, that you want to attack a certain weakness on another team. You identify a weakness and that's what you want to exploit. I'm coming from an outsider's point of view, but that's why you end up throwing the ball 50 times. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, look, you know, the way the rules are in the league, they also make throwing the ball more friendly. Back in the early 60s when the offensive linemen couldn't use their hands and they had to stick their elbow out to pass protect them against

That wasn't an easy thing to do. Bart Starr got sacked, I think, nine times in the ice ball. If you imagine talk radio, if Bart Starr would have been sacked nine times in a playoff game. He had a Hall of Fame offensive lineman in front of him, Forrest Gregg, and Jerry Kramer's been in the Hall of Fame, but clearly there was a lot of great fuzzy Thurston Lewis guys that had renowned names in front of them, but yet he was sacked a bunch by the Cowboys. So as

As the rules change and what makes something a lot easier to do, throwing a ball, then you have to adapt your team into that. And so you certainly look at a team's strengths and weaknesses and you can accurately evaluate them. And then you have to have a team that can play right or left-handed, meaning that they can adapt to the style that it's going to require you to play to beat them. And that's really what happens to most good teams. Good teams that win in advance, whether it's in NCAA basketball or it's

in the NBA is they can play different styles and still effectively win the game. But you can only play one style and you have to play that style to win. You gotta be very fortunate and very lucky to maintain that and hit the right opponent all the time or else, you know, it's gonna get bad. - You adopt week to week with the Patriots, right? Different game plans for different teams.

How does that manifest itself in practice? You know, when we say that we're different, we are different, but we don't change the scheme. You know, we might emphasize something different when we're playing the Miami Dolphins as opposed to if you're playing the Jets for one week to the next week. But it's in that emphasis or what that modification might be for that week becomes the emphasis of that week of practice. So it keeps the players fresher too and says, hey, this is what we're going to need to do this week to win the game. And if we can't, we're not going to win.

How hard is it to keep the players engaged generally? I mean, I would imagine there's a ton of ego going on and the me first versus team first. How does that translate into the practice field and the leadership of the coaches? I think being part of success is more important than being personally indispensable. And I think that's really the creed here. I think everybody here plays a part. It's important. And, you know, nobody's more important as it was a team. You know, it's a team element here. It's very important to be reminded of the team that

It's just not one person able to drive the engine. I think we all play a part in helping to build an organization, and you can't get too caught up in how big a part or what you're, as Bill would say very eloquently every single day, just do your job. Your job is to find and you do it.

I would imagine that you guys focus on process and not necessarily outcome, but competitive sports is the ultimate kind of outcome sport. How do you keep that focus on the process? I mean, again, it starts with the head coach. All he focuses on is making sure you do the things that's going to take you to win. It doesn't make a lot of sense to him.

Spent a lot of time on Wednesday worrying about what happened last week. You can only control what you can control, which is moving forward, which is the next week's game and making sure that you do all the things you have to do to prepare yourself to play that week. So the focus in the NFL is pretty sobering because it's always a game the next week. I mean, you don't have time to spend worrying about what happened the week before win or lose.

So when do you go back kind of at the end of the season to look back? You do it ongoing. I think that's the question on most Mondays is why did you win or why did you lose? And if you can accurately answer those two, then you should keep doing the things that answer you why you won and you should try to figure out the things you need to do to stop your friend losing. And I think that that self-reflection every Monday is the most important thing you can do.

Starting Monday, can you give me a brief overview of kind of what the weekly game prep is like from a coaching point of view? Well, you know, from coaching, it's more Monday mornings are spent on reviewing the game of the week before in three different areas. I mean, football's a game of players, coaching, and scheme. It isn't just players' fault that something happened or a coaching fault that something happened or a scheme fault. There's an element that has to be

evaluated an offer. And so you spend most of the morning evaluating that, whether it's the personnel people, whether it's the coaches, the head coach. So you spend most of the morning. And then once you've done that, I can come up with a consensus on happen positively, negatively, or what needs to improve even if you want.

then you go the next week and start preparing and studying for the test that's going to happen on Sunday. And that test preparation starts on Monday afternoon. It goes all through Tuesday. And then the coaches spend Monday and Tuesday working on that. And then they get ready for practice on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as they prepare their team to

practice things that they believe the way the game is going to go and how it's going to have to be played. And then Saturday is more of a reflection, kind of review, study, and then Sunday we play the game. And it just keeps repeating itself. And you have to make sure you break the game down and understand how you want to play it, what you want to do, and move on from there. What role does technology play in all of this, from a decision-making point of view from the coaches, from an input into how we practice? Yeah, well, it's changed everything. I mean, look, the instantaneous changes

ability to evaluate tape has done that. We've gone from, you know, we were on 16 millimeter tape. I mean, my day, the great Lloyd Gilbert, it was a guy who worked at the 49ers. We would have to wait for him to come back from Walt Torup's photo lab to bring the 16 millimeter tape back to watch practice. So the instantaneous ability to look at practice and tape

allows you to evaluate the game and evaluate and study it. So there's more instant reflection and you can prepare. And so that allows you to get better and improve your technology and improve. So the video alone, I mean, you could sit in your office and pretty much watch every single game in the NFL if you want. Back in the day, you were just really subjected to your exchange of the tape from the opponent. This really makes it so now you have more information at your fingertips, which is great, but it

But it also requires you to understand what is urgent and what is important within that information. You have to be able to decipher that. You put your time and resources in those areas. So you're getting a lot more information than you used to have. Do you think the ability to filter that information becomes more important? Absolutely. I think you have to be able to understand what's urgent and what's important, and you have to study it.

Would you say most of that is kind of intuition from a coaching perspective? A little bit. I think it's depending on who you're playing this week and how you handle that week and what you need to do for the week. From a broader technology perspective, do you see teams trying different things to do with technology or is everybody kind of just doing the same thing and doing more of it now? I think every team has different ways of handling it. I certainly haven't worked for every team, but I'm sure...

Every team's different. The team understands the value of having more information and how you discern the information is critical. So I would assume that everybody has their own way of doing it and how they get it done and what they're doing is what makes them successful and maybe what doesn't. I mean, it really comes down to does it affect on the field and does it help the field? And I think that's really what's the great measuring stick.

How do you think the role of evaluating players has changed? I mean, everybody's familiar in baseball with the Moneyball story and Billy Bean in the Oakland A's and kind of coming at it from a different approach. Can you give us any insight without revealing too much about maybe how that's changed over the course of your career in the NFL? When I first got in the league, you know, we were all subjected to 16 millimeter tape and you had to go to the college to really watch it. Nobody had it in their office. The college scouting was a really hands-on, on-campus job. And

You took the projector into the school, you sat there, you hoped they had 60 millimeter tape available for you. You got to watch it. You rolled it. If you, if the tape was broken, you spliced it back together again and you put it back and you wrote your notes and you watched those three games and you wrote your reports. And now today you can sit in your office and watch Ohio state play Maryland this year. And you can watch them play Illinois and you can watch them play Alabama. You can watch Ohio state play everybody without having to leave your office and

And so you can view more tape, but now when you're not on campus and you're not about able to watch the players practice and around them as much, there's an element that you lose that perhaps you don't see how a player's work habits are, what he does. So as much as you gain more information via the tape,

you perhaps lose more information from the ability to be on campus, get the coaches, talk to them and have coaches available. You adapt to it. You study tape, but it's, again, it's just one piece of the puzzle. So you have to go and try to evaluate the character. I would say today, character evaluation is probably more difficult than the actual film evaluation of a player. How do you go about doing that? It's,

It's challenging, and it measures the good drafts and the bad drafts ultimately, just making sure that you really know the player. The object of scouting is to know more about the player before you get them than after you get them. And so it's very difficult sometimes to do that because you're limited on how many times you can be on campus by the rules of the school. You're limited to who talks, who doesn't.

Where are you getting information from? And so it's very, very, very difficult to get that. So you just have to really work hard and become more diligent and become a more time consuming job than it was in the past. What percentage of time would you say that you're surprised by the player coming in and it doesn't line up either positively or negatively with what you had assumed kind of pre-draft? I think that's ongoing. I think when you can do that, there's a negative to the player not being what you wanted.

when you get them, but the positive is that helps you to force you to evaluate your own system and see if you can get that back in a check and find out why we missed that. So it does serve a purpose if you use it as a purpose, but I think it's ongoing. I think it shifts constantly. Character evaluation is gonna be an ongoing evaluation and it's gonna continue to shift.

And putting them into a system, I would imagine, has a big influence, especially coming right out of school. Right. And then exposing them to more money, exposing them to freedom, exposing them to responsibility. A lot of colleges are very good at making sure the players are taken care of in terms of their class schedules. And they have people there that support staff to do that. But when you're a professional athlete, the support staff...

isn't as large or isn't as available to them. So you're more on your own in the NFL, I guess, then? Well, it's a job. I mean, it's a job. I mean, always hold your hand. In college, you're a college student. You know, you have to go to class. You have an academic advisory. You've got all sorts of different structures that are in place for you that can help you.

That's a big adjustment for players, I would imagine. So you've had the opportunity to work with Bill Walsh, Bill Belichick, some amazing, amazing coaches, Hall of Fame coaches. What would you say is the common themes between them? They're both head coaches and they both believed in a philosophy offensively, defensively, and in the kicking game. And they coached that way within the philosophy and they led the coaches to adhere to those philosophies. And I think that's what we've

It really separates them from everyone else that you can possibly see. Coach Walsh called plays, but he still had a hand in the defense. George Seifert was the defense coordinator, but it was Bill's intellectual stimulation that challenged yours to become the kind of coach you became. So I think that that's the commonality between them. They're both head coaches. They both understand all three elements of the game and what it takes to win, and they both understand how to build an organization together.

adheres to that. What is the role of the head coach? Is it more to instill a philosophy and allow autonomy in terms of those coaches or is it more to push back or is it more authoritative or the styles vary but what tends to work better? I think there's a fine line. I think coaches want to be able to do their job and want to be able to adhere to have whatever their expectations within the job and there's the fine line, you know, it's the head coach's responsibility to make sure things are being done the way he wants them to be done and so the

their gray area that always is constantly you go back and forth on because you get more comfortable as a head coach. You get more comfortable with the people around you. They kind of know what you want and they know, and you know how they operate. And so that becomes a lot easier to deal with. Tony Dungy, Tom Moore's was offensive coordinator for so many years. And it just becomes a comfort because people know what they want. And it's very challenging.

That's really interesting. But I mean, I'm coming back to kind of what we talked about earlier, but being exposed to new ideas and new thinking and that comfort level probably doesn't necessarily encourage that. But I think what happens is, you know, loss is staggering in the NFL. And so when you spend time studying why you lost and what you need to do to fix that, that forces you to get out of comfort. Yeah.

and perhaps understand what it takes to win. How do you go about doing that? I mean, that must be humbling in so many ways in a league full of egos. You know, I think you have to be really critically honest with yourself. And I think you have to understand that the mistakes you make, if you don't correct them, they're going to bite you again. And I think you have to be really honest with that. And if you can, then you'll correct them and grow and move on. It's what you hope for is they don't get you fired because ultimately you leave.

and it's big and it's, you make mistakes, you're going to get fired and you're not going to grow from them. But I think if you read Pete Carroll's book about the success he had, I think a lot of it was attributed to his self analysis of what he felt like didn't happen correctly for him, whether it was at the Chats or New England. So when he became the head coach at USC, I think he was very self-aware and that self-aware allowed him to build a program at USC and it's allowed him to continue to program there. So if you're not, again, management of self, if you're not good in that area,

it's going to affect your leadership. The environment plays a big role too, I would imagine. Sure. You know, that an organization with the owner's stability and confidence and those are the things that are very important. And that allows you to develop your job, develop your craft, and

and work at it. Switching gears a little bit here, what would you say that you've learned from coaching and being in the NFL that you've applied to being a parent? Well, I think the number one thing would be that coaching isn't criticism. So you have to always convey to your children that you're trying to help them and not criticize them. And that's a fine balance, whether it's coaching players or whether it's talking to your children. Your criticism is really in coaching. You're not being critical of them as

people. So you can break down that barrier where they'll take information and knowing that your goals and your objectives are pure for their own success, you have much more success with your players and with your children. So there's three questions I usually ask at the end of these interviews, and we'll go from there. So what book has most influenced your thinking? You know, different parts of your life are always changed by what you read and

I mean, you know, as you grow and you adapt your life, I think you learn more about yourself and about what you need to improve on about other people. And so I would say The Life and Times of RFK by Evan Thomas is one of the books that I think, you know, when you learn about the struggles, the overcoming, you know, that kind of thing. I think those are great. When Pride Still Mattered by David Maraniss was great.

really a good book about Vince Lombardi. I think those books are really influential. You know, early in my career, I think anything you can get your hands on, Frank the Ford story about Bob Knight in Sports Illustrated, which was a run rabbit run. It was an interesting analysis of the man and who he was and what he was trying to accomplish. I think those are impactful in your life. That just spurred kind of another question. You kind of mentioned that books are contextual with where you're at in your life and how they influence you.

How much of leadership do you think is contextual? I think leadership is all about that. And I think principles don't change. You know, Bobby Kennedy used to tell his children around the evening table that guide your life with principles, not ambition. And it's a great lesson for all of us to learn. I mean, I'm sure we've all made it. I know I have at times where ambition becomes better than, and so, you know,

when you are in a leadership position, you have to constantly remind yourself of the principles that you're leading and don't let the other effects in your life kind of take away from it. - So do you think a lot of leadership can be taught then? - I think it can be developed. And I think there's a level to where not everybody is going to be

the greatest leader, but there's elements of leadership that need to be taught. So there's a difference between a manager and a leader. Managers do things right, leaders do the right thing. And so that fine line is always the balance. That's essentially what leaders are. They do the right thing. Managers do things right.

And so you can't teach people what the right thing is to do, but they can do it well. But they'll do what you tell them to do. I think that that's separate. That's a really good distinction there. What book is on your nightstand right now? Just In the Middle of the White Brothers by David McCullough. Are you enjoying it? Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating that their imagination and their curiosity to put something in the air with no real equipment and just a vision is

is really remarkable. I mean, the imagination it requires in the bicycle shop owners, they prepare things, their drive, their ambition, and their thought. I mean, you know, they come at the part of the book where the French wanted to buy the plane and become partners with them. And the Wright brothers were smart enough to realize that they weren't going to sell their ideas out. They were going to make sure that they held on to them and that they weren't looking for partners. They were looking for people that wanted to buy the plane, not a partner. It's a story of

of how their willingness to fail allow them to succeed. That's a great lesson. And last question, you know what I'm trying to accomplish with Farnam Street and the Knowledge Project. Who else do you think I should interview? Well, if you could get to Bill Clinton, I think Bill Clinton features the next single day about a myriad of subjects that every time he's on the television, you stop and you listen and you think, wow.

you've learned something and for whatever he was explaining to you whether it's north korea and then nuclear arms program or whether it's katie and his involvement in the clinton initiative i think once you get past the politics when you listen to the core of the world he's teaching you know i think those are valuable lessons that i think you could never forget i think the life of a writer i think you know the john irving the the robert carrolls the people that

that go into a room every single day and spend time on a thousand words and how they craft those words. I think there are powerful lessons for all of us that live a life about a process, not about a result. And I think if you can become a writer as diligent as Robert Caro, who's only written four books, five books, four of them about Lyndon Johnson, one of them about Robert Moses and how the diligence and the work ethic to continue his process in his 80s is remarkable. So I think anytime you can get a writer on that, I think you can.

crave to learn about that and how they feel about their job. And, you know, anytime you can find people out about how they work is always beneficial to me. And that's one of the reasons I read your site continuously. The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.