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“I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AND ERIC MANGINI”

So put yourself in this scenario: you love your daughter as much as humanly possible. She meets a fine young man, but you want to study him for a while to be certain he is perfect for her. A year later, you find what might be a flaw. But the flaw is actually a good one, a sign of character and conviction: he works too hard. He can relax and loves being with family. But he is utterly driven—not so much by success as by doing things right no matter how long it takes.

This was my predicament when my daughter Julie fell in love many years ago with Eric Mangini, the current head coach of the New York Jets and one of the youngest head coaches in National Football League history. I have rarely met many people who work as much as Eric. Nor have I ever met someone who prepares so methodically for his work. Using a preparation system, Eric and his staff transformed a struggling team into a contender during the 2006 season.

Being a head coach in the NFL is a grueling and all-consuming job. Professional football is a business in which the world’s most talented players and coaches function under the newfangled sports socialism of a salary cap and profit sharing. The result is a unique parity throughout the league. So one of the decisive factors in winning is preparing better than other teams. Most teams are preparing all the time: grueling practices year-round, endless sessions watching game film, scouting departments full of hungry young people dying to make their living in the sport. So preparing better cannot mean preparing more. In the NFL, it means preparing more methodically—having the superior system of preparation.

Even if you are not a football fan, Eric’s approach will help you understand how using a system like the preparation principles to structure your preparation will help you increase the chances of success in both your professional and personal lives.

This became apparent to me after the American Football Conference Championship game in 2004. Eric was then the secondary coach of the New England Patriots for head coach Bill Belichick. Their secondary that year had suffered innumerable injuries, and Eric was forced to remake offensive players like Troy Brown into defensive players.

Belichick is the quintessential method man, so Eric had a good teacher. And when it came to patching together a presentable secondary, Eric focused on teaching and constantly rehearsing a cohesive defensive scheme rather than emphasizing man-to-man coverage and individual talents. His secondary seemingly thought and moved as one entity. Their awareness of one another’s assignments and position on the field was uncanny. The system, and its preparation, helped the undermanned group become a startlingly effective one.

So after the victory in the AFC Championship, safety Rodney Harrison was so joyous during an interview on national television that he shouted: “I would like to thank the Lord Jesus Christ and Eric Mangini!”

Now, I cannot recall ever hearing a professional player thank an assistant coach. You hear Jesus thanked an awful lot, also Mom, and occasionally the head coach. But an assistant coach? My son-in-law? We replayed the moment, and I immediately realized that Rodney Harrison was essentially acknowledging the value of Eric’s methodical preparation.

The players’ praise continued through Eric’s first year as head coach of the New York Jets.

Prior to the Jets’ first playoff game under Eric in early 2007, Kimo von Oelhoffen, a grizzled veteran of the NFL and former member of the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, called Eric the best prepared coach he had ever seen.

“I’ve learned more football from that man in one year than I’ve learned in a long time,” the thirteen-year veteran told the New York Post. “He doesn’t leave one stone unturned. He will rep it and rep it until we can freakin’ do it. He works harder than anybody I’ve ever seen. You trust people like that. He gets his point across and makes sure that everybody in the room knows his role, his responsibility, and the game plan. We go through every situation, and when those situations arise, we know how to respond. We don’t make many mental mistakes.”

The first time Eric and I talked about his system, we realized that his buzzwords—objectives, precedents, alternatives, scripting—could fall right into the preparation checklist that I teach.

“Our whole business is based on preparation,” Eric said. “The whole week is designed to get the maximum level of preparation and therefore effectiveness. We have a sign on our practice field with a quote from the decathlete Dan O’Brien. It says ‘The will to succeed is nothing without the will to prepare.’ Everyone wants to be successful. At this level, everyone has enormous talent. We stress not just the preparation as a group but the importance of individual preparation. And it’s not just when we are in the building. It’s what you’re doing when you’re not in the building, too.”

Eric makes a key point—preparation takes a strong will. He reminds me of a famous comment made by the baseball coach and manager Cal Ripken Sr.: “Perfect preparation makes perfect.” The willingness to slow down, to apply a method, and to proceed step-by-step has a lot to do with being a great head coach or manager of any team of people.

Eric even prepares the Jets’ training facility.

“Everything is geared toward progress in all areas,” he said. “When we got here, the tables in the dining room were all circular. I had a friend from Australia visiting and he commented how in Australian military prep schools they believe long tables foster a sense of teamwork and unity. So we put in long tables. You don’t know what will make the difference. We try to design everything to create the most effective environment for preparation.”

The extremely competitive and imitative world of professional football won’t allow Eric to reveal some of his more innovative preparation methods. But a look at one amazing game in his first year as head coach illuminates his use of many of the preparation principles.

Obviously, Eric’s primary objective is to win. He makes that very clear. In the second week of November 2006, the Jets were preparing to play Eric’s former team, the New England Patriots. The press had made much of the budding rivalry between Eric, the young protégé, and Belichick, his mentor. The Patriots had become a sports dynasty—remarkable for the development of players, their cohesion as a team, and their precision. They had become the New York Yankees of the 1990s or the Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s.

Eric’s tough and upstart squad had already lost to the Patriots once in 2006. In New York, no less. So in a sport where the home field advantage is very significant, the Jets would be traveling to Boston to try to stay in the hunt for a playoff bid against Eric’s professional football alma mater.

So how did Eric prepare his team for such a daunting task?

First, he stayed focused more than ever on his two fundamental strategies: slowing down the game and improving communication. These two strategies are the foundation of the weekly scripting that Eric and his coaches do with the team. The weekly regimen—installing plays, walking through them, then going through them at half speed, then moving through them repeatedly at full speed, and then reviewing them on film—is designed to prepare the players to intuitively execute a script.

Eric emphasizes visualization and repetition to give the players the sensation that the whole field is moving more slowly during the real game.

“Michael Jordan always used to say that one of the reasons he prepared so hard is because when he does get into that moment it slows down for him,” Eric said.

Second, Eric respects the daunting complexity of having eleven people move seamlessly as one entity, particularly in a stadium with eighty thousand screaming fans. His weekly preparation method is geared toward developing “aggressive communication.” He picks his coaching staff in large part based on his analysis of their communication skills; he drafts players whom he thinks will be able to communicate clearly with coaches and teammates. Aggressive communication is a strategy that requires a coaching staff and team that likes to have things clear. Very clear.

“Communication is such a huge issue in football,” Eric said. “Eleven people are making the same decision at the same time. We are always looking to create opportunities to increase the level of communication here. We even keep tape of unexpected or unusual game situations in our library to study. You are just preparing for every possible moment.”

Eric looked to precedents like all this game tape to help him refine his strategy for this particularly challenging game. For example, he studied the Patriots’ games in weather conditions like he knew they would encounter this November Sunday. He took advantage of an extra week off for the Jets to review yards and yards of video of the Patriots. He mined his own recollection of the Patriots’ tendencies and strategies from his days as a coach there. And, with a little cooperation from Mother Nature, he added a very specific wrinkle to his communication strategy.

Jeffri Chadiha, a writer from Sports Illustrated, took notice of this strategic addition:

Visitors to the Jets’ training facility at Hofstra University on Nov. 8 might have been a bit puzzled by what they saw. In a driving rain, players and coaches splashed through their drills as loud music blared from speakers along the sidelines. For a few sessions the Jets even moved from the field turf to the muddy grass. All the while the team’s warm, dry indoor practice field stood in the background, unused.

Eric had developed another strategy because of the precedents he had studied: to replicate playing conditions as closely as possible. In the rain and din of their practice field, the Jets were trying to implement their strategy—to slow down the game and communicate effectively—in conditions that undermined cohesion and communication. Eric knew that the field in New England famously turned to slop during the type of weather that was being forecast for the coming Sunday.

The result of the rain, mud, loud music, and slow motion that constituted Eric’s methodical preparation: a 17–14 Jets upset! The field was absolute mud by the end. The uniforms of both teams were brown. Eric barely cracked a smile. The Jets’ players looked like they were doing a rain dance together in celebration at midfield.

I remember one drenched and muddied player saying in an interview on the field that the Jets won because they had already played the game during the week.

New England Pro Bowl defensive end Richard Seymour told the Boston Herald: “They outplayed us and outcoached us.” To me, that translated into “outprepared us.”

Herald writer Gerry Callahan wrote that Eric’s team “would run through the walls for him, but only in the precise order and sequence that he taught them.”

You sense Eric’s insistence on precise order and sequence when you watch him lead a practice or interact with his staff. You sense it when he walks into a room. His preparation system is insistently methodical. When he first started as the Jets’ head coach, that insistence consistently irritated some veterans. Some players complained about the rigidity and repetition. But games like the upset in the Boston mud changed all that. In fact, the Patriots even changed the surface of their field soon after the Jets’ big game.

The Jets will win and lose games through the years because some teams may be more talented, some players may be injured, or some unlucky bounces may go against them. The vagaries of the NFL—losing a key player due to a contract dispute or having your quarterback get hurt in the first game of the season—can undermine the best-laid plans for success. But I doubt that they will ever lose for lack of preparation.

The Jets, like any team or company, cannot succeed on preparation alone. What economists like to refer to as “extrinsic events”—shocks to the supply chain or currency devalutions—have their football equivalent in quarterback controversies or injuries.

As most football fans know, 2007 was a rough season for the Jets. Lots of so-called “extrinsic events,” and even some internal miscalculations. But what has impressed me about Eric is his continued commitment to his preparation method in spite of the challenges thrown at his team. If anything, the struggles in 2007 reinforced the importance of his system for him more than the surprising success of 2006. No doubt Eric never took seriously his fleeting New York nickname, “Man-genius.” He knows full well that preparers are rarely geniuses, but always perserverers who rely on a system through thick and thin.

When you spend time with Eric, he reminds you of an old-school craftsman. He could be a stonemason building a wall. His preparation is his craft. He takes pride in it as much as in winning. And he teaches his players to rely on and take satisfaction from a systematic approach to their jobs, too.

The lesson of Eric Mangini reminds me of something I say over and over again to my clients, colleagues, and seminar participants: the only thing you really control in life is your preparation. You may be up against more devious, more intelligent, or more excitable people, but you can’t control their conduct, steal their skills, or tranquilize their emotions. You can’t control external events. But if you prepare yourself and your team fully, you know that you will have done all you can do to achieve an optimal result. For me, the preparation principles, to which I now turn, are the best way to control the only thing you can control: your methodical preparation.