Pete Carroll, Beast Mode and the Risky Game of Inches

It’s pouring down rain outside of my window here at our headquarters in the Seattle area, which seems only fitting following the gloriously optimistic blue skies and sunshine that graced us here last week. Walking around the hallways, one thing is clear: we can relate to the weather today following last night’s Super Bowl loss in Arizona.

Much has been said about Pete Carroll’s play call that resulted in the interception that everyone is bemoaning at the Starbucks locations we have on every block here in Seattle. As a CEO, I can relate to Carroll today. We have all had to make those hard calls that don’t work out the way we envisioned and that certainly counts as a bad, bad day.

And yet there are some great lessons in leadership that come from Carroll. Fundamentally, you can’t be a great leader of a winning organization without making the hard calls, without taking smart, calculated, and sometimes seemingly dangerous risks. Pete Carroll wasn’t wrong to take that risk. He wanted to try the unexpected. In case you weren’t paying attention, Beast Mode has been everywhere, even on the side of our own headquarters.

Marshawn Lynch’s ability to push a half-dozen huge guys out of his way through sheer force of will was the top story leading in the big game. The expected move was Lynch running the ball into the end zone and, while he’s an exceptional Beast, the Patriots were prepared to make that yard or two the hardest he’s ever run. Carroll knew that he could call a surprise play on second down and that, if it didn’t work, the odds were still very much in his favor that he’d have a third and even a fourth try to run the expected play.

Like football, e-commerce is a game of inches. We used to be an organization that perfected making the big play a couple of times in an otherwise lackluster game. We debated each risk for months until we squeezed nearly all the risk out of it and made a thoughtful, slow move. That move usually worked out well, but we lost too much ground while we were debating it. We took so long that we only updated our core Expedia.com site a couple of times a year, like it was boxed software. That kind of attitude nearly killed our flagship business about five years ago, and we had to completely rethink the way we approach risk-taking so that today, we ship thousands of tests a year on our core platforms across our technology and marketing organizations.

We’ve learned that if we change one pixel, one field, one color, we can move the business by a half a percent. And it turns out a half a percent of several billion dollars is real money. So today, we treat every play, every test like we are trying to gain an inch at a time. We sit in our monthly product review, which is an open forum for our entire company, and we review the risks the teams have taken. We joke that the only way to lose in this forum is to win too much.

We’ve adopted a culture of celebrating failure because the fact is that we fail the majority of the time — turns out that we have a pretty good site and most of our tests are either neutral, or losers. But we know we are pushing the limits hard enough and that winning even less than half the time and pushing constantly means we’re still gaining hundreds of inches. Almost every time, we have another chance to get up and try again and that is what makes leading in a game of inches equal parts challenging and fun. Now, once in a while, we do hit a big winner, the run up the middle turns into a very big gain. We don’t count on them, but we get our fair share and those days are fun days.

Undeniably Pete Carroll is having a tough morning, but he knows you don’t lead your team for one day, for one game, and he’s built a team that understands that and is behind him. They believe that their leader can make a mistake and they can bounce back and win again. They know that they are stronger because of every risk he’s pushed them to take. They know that they can ask him to take a risk and he’ll have their backs and take responsibility. We saw that with Jon Ryan’s fake in the NFC Championship Game that took them to the Super Bowl in the first place.

Taking big risks combined with having a team you believe in and that believes just as much in you as a leader make for long-term wins even in a game of inches.

Disagree? Leave a comment but remember: I’m just here so I don’t get fined.