Sweat The (Right) Small Stuff

The time George Allen went completely crackers

Author

Cody Royle
September 08, 2025

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what George Allen got right.

This week, I want to tell you about something he got wrong.

In The Score Takes Care of Itself, fellow NFL coach Bill Walsh calls Allen a ‘demon on details’ and tells a tale of how that obsession would eventually trip Allen up.

“George supposedly took time off from his coaching responsibilities to design a more efficient system of serving food, a way of reducing the amount of time players spent in the lunch line,” Walsh recounts.

Allen took it upon himself to personally redesign the kitchen to create a line for players who wanted crackers with their soup, with a separate line for players who didn’t want crackers.

“This is an example of sweating the wrong small stuff,” Walsh puts bluntly.

As the story goes, the owner fired Allen before the regular season had even begun.

Keep The Main Thing The Main Thing

While George Allen coached in the ancient past, he became consumed with a coaching challenge that still exists in modern times: what do you spend your time on?

Using my craft model as a guide, I estimate that a head coach can spend their time on as many as 100 broad categories on any given day. Those broad categories also break down into dozens of sub-categories, leaving hundreds of potential ‘small things’ that can capture your attention.

As organizations have grown in size, this has only exacerbated the problem, because now there are staff who are incentivized with large salaries to believe their thing is the most important.

I see this when I start working with a head coach and ask to audit their calendar. When you go through hour-by-hour and ask ‘Why is this on there?’ the most common response is ‘It crept on there a few weeks ago and has stayed’.

As more and more low-leverage items ‘creep on’ to your calendar, you become more and more distant from the fundamental duties of your job. Detached from reality, you start to become convinced that designing a crackerless soup line is the ‘marginal gain’ that your team needs.

Bill Walsh describes this phenomenon perfectly:

Looking for relief from the high anxieties, deep frustrations, and toxic emotions that go with the job can lead you to do everything but your job — worrying about issues of lesser and lesser relevance with greater and greater consequences.

The tangential aspects of your job become attractive because they’re monumentally easier to control than what you’re there to do; specifically, to create high performance; this is the toughest part to live with, concentrate on, and control. You use the peripheral stuff as an escape mechanism, rather than tackling what may appear, and indeed may be, unsolvable problems until finally you’re done, finished, sitting there with nothing to show for your leadership efforts but a cup of sharp pencils.

Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself

It takes remarkable discipline to keep the main thing the main thing, and as a coach the main thing is — and will always be — the performance.

“Sharpening pencils in lieu of sharpening your organization’s performance is one way to lose your job,” Walsh adds, before providing a list of other ways in which you can become distant from the act of doing your job:

  1. Exhibit patience, paralyzing patience.

  2. Engage in delegating — massive delegating — or conversely, too little delegating.

  3. Act in a tedious, overly cautious manner.

  4. Become best buddies with certain employees.

  5. Spend excessive amounts of time socializing with superiors or subordinates.

  6. Fail to continue hard-nosed performance evaluations of longtime (tenured) staff members, the ones most likely to go into cruise control.

  7. Fail to actively participate in efforts to appraise and acquire new hires.

  8. Trust others to carry out your fundamental duties.

  9. Find ways to get out from under the responsibilities of your position, to move accountability from yourself to others.

  10. Promote an organizational environment that is comfortable and laid-back in the misbelief that the workplace should be fun, lighthearted, and free from appropriate levels of tension and urgency.

My Advertising Strategy

Hi — it’s Cody.

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