Bill Belichick and the cover of 'The Art of Winning: Lessons from a Life in Football'. Photo: AlexanderJonesi, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons | Cover: Simon & Schuster
My after-church reading yesterday included an article from the April 26-27, 2025, Wall Street Journal by football coaching genius Bill Belichick. His essay coincided with the May 5 release of his book, The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football.
While we’re Green Bay Packers fans around these parts, we’ve come to respect Belichick for his Hall of Fame coaching resume and commitment to both the game and his craft. In fact, just one year after he started his head coaching career with the New England Patriots, he personally mailed us several of his go-to drills and plays to help us launch a coaching publication we once operated called Gridiron Strategies. (We discovered over time that we were better at covering how to embrace the many changes in agriculture than we were at convincing a head football coach to adopt a different offensive or defensive scheme.)
Belichick’s essay reminded me of a manufacturing press event I attended 3 decades ago, which featured a retired University of Michigan offensive line coach. His remarks were emphatically summarized with phrase, “The truly great teams do the mundane with great enthusiasm.” I always loved that quote. Belichick’s words were similar.
Knowing Your ‘One Thing’
Most effective business leaders I know can describe their company's “one thing.” That is, the approach to business that they choose for themselves. So while whatever Brand X, Y and Z do, there’s usually a defining part of a successful business that is differentiated from the competition, and onto which its leadership knows where to “hang its hat.”
“You cannot think of big tests & triumphs as ‘final’ in any respect if you want to keep winning. When we prepare to win, we prepare to win all the time...”
In my ag media world, the “one thing” we shoot for is the content formula — precisely matched to the needs of each niche audience. We aim to be pretty damn good at targeted distribution, and sponsorship and advertising sales too, and with a fiscal responsibility that allows reinvestment, but where we're driven to most stretch ourselves is to “own” a reputation for relevant and actionable content. And in whatever form it is, including print, web, broadcast or in-person gatherings.
What’s your business’ “one thing?”
Doing it Your Way
Belichick is a student of excellence, and also what motivates it. As he began coaching with the New York Giants in 1979, he started, in is own mind, to establish “a series of principles, rules of thumb, habits and philosophies that I understood to be fundamental to our success,” he says. Somewhere along the line the phrase “the Patriot Way” emerged.
“But here’s something you should know,” he says. “‘The Patriot Way’ does not exist. When we won, I kept what worked. When we lost, I threw out what hadn’t.”
A Master Winning Process
“One important principle is realizing that a big win isn’t the end of anything,” Belichick writes. “It’s the beginning of trying to win the next one. You cannot think of big tests and triumphs as ‘final’ in any respect if you want to keep winning. When we prepare to win, we prepare to win all the time.
“To do that, we have to master a winning process,” he says.
Because as Belichick goes on to say, sometimes, when the stakes are high, coaches (managers) and players (staff) can forget what got them that far in the first place – and then mistakenly veer from it. That can result in playing a card outside of what makes you special, thus yielding the very space that you can “own.” In other words, it’s competing on some other field of play where your “one thing” can end up neutralized or cancelled out.
“Big moments are won by winning all the small moments that come before them.” Belichick maintains that his first Patriots Super Bowl in 2002 was won in part “because we didn’t do anything we hadn’t done before.”
Consistent Adaptations
“People focus on the fact that we developed a new defensive game plan,” he says, “but they forget that we also developed a new game plan against every team we played. We were following the same process that brought us there, but that didn’t mean doing the same things: Our consistent process also included consistently adapting.”
“Big moments are won by winning all the small moments that come before them...”
A couple of takeaways:
- You and your team must know what those “small moments” are. For example, if history shows that Farmer Jones needs 5 personal visits at his dining room table before making a major tractor or combine purchase, then each of those moments must be executed with diligence and purpose. If any of those process-identified milestones are mishandled by your sales team, don’t be surprised to lose the sale to the competition.
- While a business’ game plan, or one-thing strategy as we might refer to it, can be different based on the customer or situation, the “approach to the game plan” very well may be your “special sauce” – and NOT the outcome that the planning produces.
Belichick's essay also delved into real-world examples of responsibility and accountability, but that’s another blog for another time. But it’s clear that, in his system, execution and responsibility goes hand in hand.
