Executive Playbook Aims for Victory. (Book Review).

Ken Blanchard, the organization and enterprise leadership guru and author of several bestsellers on the subject, and Don Shula, the legendary head of the Miami Dolphins and the winningest coach in the National Football League (NFL), collaborated on this book, a brief manual on principles that leaders must follow to take their companies, or their sports teams, to victory.

Blanchard outlines five general principles: 1) maintain conviction, that is, determine a mission and values for the organization and follow them; 2) practice with the aim of achieving perfection; 3) know when to make changes; 4) deal with employees (or players) with a coherent attitude, one that awards or praises individual performance, and 5) practice what you preach. Each principle constitutes a section of the book and, in each section, the authors offer inspiring thoughts, each printed on its own page. The thoughts are followed by an anecdote with a moral, almost all of them from Shula, and reflections on their application to leadership methods, generally written by Blanchard.

There are several amusing anecdotes, like what happened to Shula with a writer in the Miami Dolphins locker room after a win against the New York Jets. For Shula, the locker room has always been a private space where he could talk with his team following a contest, address their victories and mistakes, and discuss strategies and methods they must employ or perfect. After the Jets game, when Shula entered the locker room to speak with his players, he spotted someone he didn't recognize. "Who the hell is that?" he asked. Somebody responded: "He's a writer." Shula ordered him immediately removed from the locker room--not realizing it was U.S. author James Michener, working at the time on his book Sports in America. Even if the coach had known it was Michener, he would have acted in the same way, Blanchard says, pointing Out that throughout their collaboration Shula never allowed him--not even once--to enter the locker room. It was the coach's sancta sanctorum.

In this manual for executives, the authors emphasize the importance of certain winning personal qualities, among them honesty and integrity (few things are more injurious to the morale of an organization than distrust towards its leaders) and awareness as to when external circumstances demand change. Also, they emphasize the value of praise for a job well done, striving to achieve excellent performance: employees need recognition of their work, because the security borne of feeling useful improves performance even more.

These points are of value for any organization. But the authors do not elaborate on the principles, so many readers will be disappointed with the manual's relative superficiality. Sometimes, the link between a stadium anecdote and business leadership advice is not clear. Nor do Shula and Blanchard emphasize the similarities between a coach and the president of a company, similarities which are obvious and easy to illustrate. Nor is there any mention of the link between sportsmanship and business ethics. In the Anglo-Saxon culture, for example, sports terminology permeates the economic lexicon: companies are called "players;" fair play is admired on the field and in business; an opportunity to catch up to competitors is "leveling the playing field." This vocabulary and the concepts that it describes, through a kind of osmosis, also occur in Spanish and other languages. The free market, without a doubt, resembles a great arena, now reaching a planetary scale thanks to globalization: competition between rivals, application of triumphant strategies, winners and losers, ovations and fanfare, struggles and applause.

The Little Book of Coaching is a pleasant and welcome guide for executives. Its brevity allows it to be read in one sitting. But fans of deeper thinking and more meticulous explanations should look to other works, including some by Blanchard himself.

Andres Hernandez Alende