Michael Lombardi
The People Advantage: Build, Maintain and Influence Culture
Culture isn’t a mission statement, or a slogan on the walls, it’s a way of life for all those involved. Culture starts from the top and grows from the bottom. To be a great leader you need to establish, drive, and maintain the right culture for your organization. Talent management, communication, planning, and execution are all critical ingredients in the leadership focus needed to build and maintain a powerful culture.
Pulling from his experiences both as a team player and a manager in the sports arena, Michael Lombardi will provide the blueprint for what makes successful organizations click and win. And the common mistakes organizations make that keep them on the losing side time and again.
Michael Lombardi
Former NFL general manager and three-time Super Bowl winner Michael Lombardi reveals what makes organizations tick at the championship level. Lombardi shares what he learned working with coaching legends Bill Walsh of the 49ers, Al Davis of the Raiders, and Bill Belichick of the Patriots, among others, during his three decades in football.
In Gridiron Genius Michael Lombardi provides the blueprint that makes a successful organization click and win–and the mistakes unsuccessful organizations make that keep them on the losing side time and again.
In reality, very few coaches understand the philosophies, attention to detail, and massive commitment that defined NFL juggernauts like the 49ers and the Patriots. The best organizations are not just employing players, they are building something bigger. Gridiron Genius will explain how the best leaders evaluate, acquire, and utilize personnel in ways other minds won’t even contemplate. How do you know when to trade a player? How do you create a positive atmosphere when everyone is out to maximize his own paycheck? And why is the tight end like the knight on a chessboard?
To some, game planning consists only of designing an attack for the next opponent. But Lombardi explains how the smartest leaders script everything: from an afternoon’s special-teams practice to a season’s playoff run to a decade-long organizational blueprint. Readers will delight in the Lombardi tour of an NFL weekend. First stop: Belichick’s Saturday night staff meeting, where he announces how the game will go the next day. Spoiler alert: He always nails it.
From how to build a team, to how to watch a game, to understanding the essential qualities of great leaders, Gridiron Genius gives football fans the knowledge to be the smartest person in the room every Sunday.
Michael Lombardi was most recently an internal consultant for Bill Belichick in the New England Patriots’ front office, after thirty years working for the San Francisco 49ers, the Oakland Raiders, and the Cleveland Browns (where he was general manager for two years). He writes a column for The Athletic and has his own podcast, The GM SCHUFFLE on the Cadence Podcast Network.
