Keith Rabois recommends Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself, citing Walsh's obsession with detail: when he took over the 49ers, he wrote a manual on how receptionists should answer the phone. That systematic focus on standards, Rabois argues, built a winning culture. Steve Jobs did the same at Apple, sweating the circuit board design.
Chapters
So one of my favorite books that I highly recommend to all founders and executives is the Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh, who is famously both a football coach and professor at Stanford before he took over the 49ers and really turned the worst franchise in the NFL into the best. And his book is the Philosophy and the Approach he used to convert this losing organization into a consistently winning organization. And the number one approach that he teaches is that you need to focus on every minute detail and the byproduct of doing that will yield winning. So for example, when he first took over the 49ers, the first thing he did, which strikes a lot of people as amusing but is incredibly instructive when you contemplate it, is he taught all of the receptionists how to answer the phone properly. So he literally created a manual of how to answer the phone properly, which for someone who inherited a football team that wasn't winning many games, a lot of people would have critiqued that as the number one priority for the general manager and coach. But it was an example, an illustration of how you have to take everything, decompose everything and insist upon a standard of performance and that will eventually translates into everything that happens on the field. Same thing is true of Apple. You know, famously, you know, Steve Jobs would redesign or insist upon a high quality design of like the circuit board in computers that couldn't be opened by the user. So like that sort of philosophy, I think is the key to building a great company.
