Game Plans For Success, edited by Ray Didinger

What football coaches do well is motivate their players to win football games. The best chapter in this book, and the only one worth skimming, is good because of the crustiness of its author, Mike Ditka. Here is someone who is famous not just because he won Super Bowls but because he had a heart attack at 49. Remember the Saturday Night Live skit? A Bears fan walks toward the light after having a coronary, and the light is Ditka? That was genuinely funny, as is his contribution here, entitled Hands-On Management (an ironic title, given his propensity for physical expression).

According to Mr. Ditka, "I ... never had a philosophy other than `whip the other guy'... People sometimes make the game more complicated than it is. They make the business of coaching seem complex, too, when in fact I think it is pretty simple ... It isn't profound ... I have one philosophy - to kick the other guy's ..." Well, that certainly translates pretty well to some businesses for which Chicago is famous, like the mafia.

Ditka's strength is that he knows what he writes is not philosophy. Unfortunately, the other contributing coaches have pretensions toward being business strategy consultants. The thoughts of these men can be fairly summarized as "teamwork, teamwork" and nothing else. Sample titles of some chapters are: Creating a Winning Environment, Moving Up From Middle Management, Transition Management, and also The Power of Innovation (sample passage from the latter: "The term `innovation' implies something new, but it isn't always so. There isn't much that is truly new, especially in football.")

The innovation guru here is Bill Walsh, head coach of the San Francisco 49ers from 1979 to 1988. He is touted as "one of the premier offensive minds in football history." Well, in my opinion, his mind isn't nearly as offensive as that belonging to Marty Schottenheimer, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, who says "I hear businesspeople talk about the risk involved in new ventures, the fear that overtakes a corporation when the profit margin drops and there is talk of a cutback. I spent enough time in business to know the pressure concerning the bottom line is every bit as real as the pressure felt by a coach or player in the NFL." This kind of trivialization of the decisions that leaders of large, important businesses face is at the heart of what offends me about this book. To compare the running of vast firms that support whole towns or even regions of the country with the Kansas City Chiefs is, simply wrong and devalues the intellectual inquiry to which the best of business writing is dedicated.

I don't mean to get too serious, however. Some people will purchase this book because they enjoy light, nonchallenging reading and, after all, a market that supports a business book drawn from episodes of Star Trek (yes, really, it is called Make It So and has a big picture of Captain Picard on the cover) can presumably make room for this piece of dross. The motive of the contributors and the publisher, we can reasonably assume, was to make some money. The last page advertises the availability of the coaches for speeches, which probably don't come cheap, and the entire package is copyrighted by NFL Properties, Inc.

Still, I found it a huge waste of time and probably you will too - even if you are a big fan of football. It just isn't a very good book, but it is funny. For maximum humor (and minimum impact on your student budget), skip the inside pages and read the blurbs on the back cover. The founder of Reebok, Paul Fireman, opines, "while sports analogies may seem overused, this is one of the most straightforward and relevant rules books for success that I have read," and M. Douglas Ivester of Coca Cola writes, "What's surprising is that so many of the fundamental principles applied by these coaching greats on the football field ring true in the field of business as well." Now that's funny.