Holy Trinity! What Innovators Can Learn from the New England Patriots

Down five points with two minutes and ten seconds left in the fourth quarter last weekend, the New England Patriots did what they do best. Tom Brady orchestrated the 50th comeback win of his career as they beat the Houston Texans 36–33 in game three of the 2017 season.

How does a team remain poised, focused, and confident against low odds and the clock ticking quickly down to zero?

It comes down to the key elements of leadership.

Robert Kraft is the owner of the New England Patriots. He’s also a considerate, caring, and perceptive human being.

Robert gave me a ride on his private jet one day when we were both headed to Boston from New York. On the trip, I asked him about the secret of the Patriots’ longevity at the top.

Robert told me, “It helps to have the coach, quarterback, and owner in alignment.”

In the salary cap era, the New England Patriots have been the most dominant team in the NFL, winning 14 division titles and 5 of the last 17 Super Bowls since Belichick became head coach in 2000. And of course, they came back from a 25-point deficit in Super Bowl 51 to win their 5th and most recent championship.

Robert’s insight instantly resonated with me. Leadership is influenced by innumerable factors, but the key is to understand the highest priority elements. Here’s a diagram of the Patriot’s Football Trinity:

I’ve also witnessed the polar opposite in action. Having spent the last decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had recently watched the San Francisco 49ers take a dive into the NFL basement.

For a few years, the 49ers had looked like they had the ingredients for a potential dynasty, with Jim Harbaugh as coach and Colin Kaepernick as quarterback.

Owners, however, set the tone and maintain the foundation.

When 49ers CEO Jed York decided to back his general manager over his coach, he cracked the foundation and effectively ran Harbaugh out of town. Kaepernick, who had emerged as a potential superstar under Harbaugh’s tutelage, immediately went into a statistical nose dive, and the 49ers have been losing ever since.

Here’s what it looked like, just before it all fell apart:

Contrast that with the Patriots. Bill Belichick can probably melt asphalt with his trademark glare, but he has Robert’s full, unwavering support. And while players might wilt a bit under Belichick, they pick themselves up and run the extra mile for the warmth and care of the Kraft family.

Robert’s insight made me think about the digital equivalent, a digital union of the father, son, and holy spirit.

It’s no accident that the world’s greatest technology companies are led by CEOs that embody the Product Trinity — leaders that often play the role of de facto product manager, CTO, and head of user experience design.

These leaders may have lieutenants reporting to them with those titles, but they actively do these jobs on a regular basis — determining actual, specific product requirements, making technology choices and setting technology direction, and designing details of the user experience.

Weeds Versus Seeds

I imagine CEOs of legacy companies and even some startups muttering to themselves in disagreement, “I can’t afford to be in the weeds. That’s why I hire great leaders into the organization.”

Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos became the richest man in the world in 2017, running one of the top three companies in the world based on market capitalization. The other two companies are also technology companies.

Steve Yegge, a former employee of Amazon, ranted on his blog:

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon’s retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple’s Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally — wisely — left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn’t let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they’re all still there, and Larry is not.

Bezos put it a little more delicately himself. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Bezos shared his views on how to avoid the long, slow slide into obsolescence, what he calls “Day 2.”

One of his four key points includes this warning: “Resist Proxies.”

Bezos writes, “Market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers — something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products.” He later explains, “A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.”

Bezos clearly has heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, and taste. And he’s willing to bet his product, user experience, and company on what he thinks is right.

Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Satya Nadella

Of course, a series of movies and books have made famous Steve Jobs’s obsession with the purity and simplicity of design, even demanding that the inside of his products look neat and elegant.

And Elon Musk has publicly stated that he personally spends 80 percent of his time on new product engineering and design.

Jobs, Musk, and Bezos don’t spend time in the weeds. Great design and great products are the seeds of the future.

When Microsoft’s stock stagnated for a decade, the company replaced CEO Steve Ballmer with Satya Nadella. I met Nadella at a dinner event to discuss how Delphix accelerates the migration of enterprise apps to the cloud, including Microsoft’s cloud, Azure.

Nadella has a very pronounced skull, not only because of his shaved hair but also because of the veins subtly protruding from his temples, actively feeding his highly analytical mind. A longtime employee of Microsoft, Nadella led the transformation of many of Microsoft’s legacy technologies and services from on-premises to the cloud.

As CEO, he implemented a “cloud-first, mobile-first” strategy that overcame decades of internal political strife, resulting in all-time highs for Microsoft’s stock price in 2017. He recently updated the strategy to focus on AI, continuing to shadow the Alphabets and Amazons of the world.

He really became animated and passionate when the topic of augmented reality (AR) came up, describing his vision of what AR could do to improve knowledge-worker productivity, providing everyone with the magical, dynamic interfaces depicted in movies such as Minority Report.

In my blog on cloud strategy, I shared the fundamental equation at work in the world today:

Legacy Industry + Digital Era = Digitally Refactored Industry

You can’t survive the digital era by suffocating your most critical leadership roles under endless layers of bureaucracy.

If the CEOs of the world’s biggest companies can afford to spend time on product requirements, technology decisions, and user experience, can the rest of the world’s CEOs afford not to?

If you’re running a startup or you’re an executive in a big company, you need to embody the Product Trinity or have a team at the top reporting directly to you.

You can’t afford delegate the key elements of leadership for the future of your company.

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About Me

I’ve spent two decades decoding innovation, collecting the hidden frameworks that drive many of the most successful entrepreneurs in technology today. I’ve personally implemented these frameworks, inventing software products at Delphix and Avamar that have driven more than $4 billion in sales. I share these frameworks in Disrupt or Die, my first book (available October 2017).