The Lombardi Playbook: Double Your Impact
Dan Schultz
Agribusiness Psychotherapist | Keeper of the Language | Closing The Category Gap In Agriculture
“The idea is to have a single point of belief that your message is built around and is emphasized over and over and over again from a variety of different angles.” - Jason Fladlien ?
When Vince Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team was awful. They had gone eleven straight seasons without a winning record, and the season before he was hired as head coach, the Packers won only one game out of twelve.
To open training camp that first year, Lombardi led his players to a meeting room where he stood in front of a portable blackboard as the team sat down. He picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak in his distinct Brooklyn accent. ”Gentleman,” he said, “we have a great deal of ground to cover. We’re going to do things a lot differently than they’ve been done here before?… [We’re] going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence.”?
He paused and stared, his eyes moving from player to player. The room was silent; you could have heard a pin drop. “I’m not remotely interested in being just good.”
Lombardi moved to the blackboard and began to diagram a play called the Power Sweep. He said it was the play the team would perfect. “Gentleman,” he continued. “This is the most important play we have. It’s the play we must make go. It’s the play that we will run again, and again, and again.”
In the Power Sweep, the quarterback hands the ball to a running back, who runs parallel to the line of scrimmage, waiting for blocks to develop. Once a path opens, the back cuts upfield, aiming to gain yards and drive the team closer to the opponent's goal line. It’s a relatively simple play, but perfecting it took enormous effort and focus.
Hall of Fame coach and commentator John Madden once recounted attending a coaching clinic where Vince Lombardi talked about the power sweep for eight hours straight. He was passionate about it; executing that play consumed him, and he passed that vision on to his team. Vince Lombardi did not drop a binder of plays in every player’s lap that first day in 1959; he talked about perfecting one play. And it worked.
In Lombardi’s first year, with nearly the same roster as the previous season, the Packers finished with seven wins and five losses. The following year, they reached the NFL championship game but fell short. Over the next seven years, the Packers claimed five championships, including the first two Super Bowl titles. Their rise from one of the league's worst teams to an all-time dynasty was a gradual, relentless climb—step by step, year by year—rooted in the mastery of a simple running play. One that was first diagramed on a blackboard, then repeatedly perfected on the field.
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Most companies in agriculture today have too many promises to fulfill.
We spread ourselves too thin. Hang ourselves on too many hooks. Try to run every possible play in the agronomic playbook. To avoid excluding anyone or leaving any segment behind, we disrespect the entire market by wasting their time pandering to people who have no interest in change or in hearing what we have to say. Telling a segment of the market, “We made this for you,” is a very different reality than asking everyone you happen to meet at a tradeshow or field day, “What would you like us to build?” Building something that matters begins by making choices that matter.
And one of the most important choices you can make is identifying the single belief your customer must hold to choose you over anyone else. There is one belief, one lens that your customer must have on the world that makes your product irresistible...(Read the full post )
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