Science of Success: The Simple Playbook Of a Turnaround Expert

"Jim Harbaugh regularly says the kind of stuff that would sound completely ridiculous coming from anyone else's mouth.

The University of Michigan's football coach promises to attack each day with "an enthusiasm unknown to mankind." He once instructed his players not to eat chicken because it's a "nervous bird," which was weird, though not as weird as when he later apologized to the poultry he insulted. "I was dead wrong," he said. "Chickens are low-maintenance and high-production."

But lately, he's been thinking about another sort of animal, one that explains why Michigan is now playing for college football's national championship, and his players have embraced this Harbaughism as their mantra: "The worm has turned."

There might not be anybody in any business who is better at getting anything turned around than Harbaugh.

Michigan's coach is the Monet of turnaround artists. He's made a habit of winning everywhere he goes, which is remarkable, because his talents are coveted by teams when it seems like they will never stop losing.

Stanford University went 1-11 the year before he arrived and 12-1 the year he left for the National Football League. The San Francisco 49ers hadn't been to the NFL playoffs in nearly a decade when Harbaugh took over. He soon took them to the Super Bowl. But what he's pulled off at Michigan since his 2014 hiring is the most impressive turnaround project of his career -- and if Harbaugh wins the College Football Playoff title on Monday, it would be his crowning achievement.

To find out how such a peculiar coach became perhaps America's most prominent turnaround specialist, I called Vincent Barker, a professor of strategic management at the University of Kansas' business school who studies corporate turnarounds. That scholarly research was not the only reason I got in touch with him. As it turns out, he's also a Michigan alum.

Barker told me that there are two types of turnarounds: the difficult ones and the ones that are nearly impossible.

"The difference," he said, "is the underlying health of the organization's resources."

Michigan's football team had all the makings of a turnaround that would be difficult but definitely possible. The school with the most wins and one of the most valuable brands in college football was in rough shape, the result of two subpar coaching hires and too many recruits choosing to play for its rivals.

But their condition of mediocrity wasn't terminal because they always had the resources to be competitive again. They just needed the right turnaround doctor to nurse them back to health.

There are few industries with billions of dollars at stake in which the hiring of a single person makes as big of a difference as it does in college football. This is a sport where one charismatic leader can bend reality and rebuild an entire team through sheer force of will.

Coaches are the most influential figures in college football, unlike the NFL, which is why boosters spend a fortune to hire them -- and fire them. The transient nature of the sport gives them the power to mold programs in their own image. The players are young, impressionable and not paid anywhere near what they make in the NFL. They also choose these coaches. And the best ones become edges unto themselves. Success in the pros is dictated by star quarterbacks. Success in college is determined by star coaches like Harbaugh.

Is he an intense maniac? Of course. He's a college-football coach. Is he a motivational genius? Sure. But any coach who can't fire his team up will soon be fired. Is he a brilliant game strategist? Maybe. But his team went 6-0 this season without Harbaugh, who served two suspensions for alleged recruiting violations and corporate espionage. Is he revered? Yes. Is he reviled? Also yes.

But what makes Harbaugh unique among coaches is his ability to instantly make teams much, much better.

How exactly he does this is something of a mystery, and Harbaugh would prefer to talk about his chickens than his turnaround strategies.

But it's clear that one of the competitive advantages he brings to every turnaround situation is his own professional competence. He's a coach who knows how football is supposed to look the same way a conductor knows how music is meant to sound. He sets high standards for his teams and demands that players meet them, even if it means dropping into a three-point stance to demonstrate proper technique himself. There is nothing revolutionary about his schemes or innovative about his preference that Michigan beat the snot out of other teams. Instead, he's obsessed with basics and fundamentals, as if he believes the qualities that made teams good 50 years ago are the ones worth building his team around today.

Harbaugh is the rare football coach who makes winning sound weirdly simple: work hard, get better every day and watch that improvement compound.

He's applied that formula so many times to so many teams that case studies should be taught in business schools about Harbaugh, said Erik Gordon, a business professor at, yes, the University of Michigan.

The first and most important task for any turnaround leader is restoring confidence, he said, which is one part of the job that doesn't feel like work to Harbaugh.

"Lightning bolts of confidence burst out of the guy," Gordon said.

The next steps of a turnaround process are identifying the problems (sales are down; Michigan keeps losing to Ohio State), and recruiting the kinds of people who can solve them. But the hardest part of any turnaround process is the pressure. And if CEOs think investors are fickle or delusional, they should visit a college-football message board.

Of course, there are many obvious differences between distressed companies and desperate sports teams, starting with this one: The typical playbook for a corporate turnaround involves cutting jobs and slashing costs, but reaching for the nearest chain saw doesn't work in football. Colleges spend more money when they're in turnaround mode -- and not many athletic departments have as much to spend as Michigan's.

So it wasn't a surprise when Harbaugh took over a struggling program and began winning immediately, nor was it a surprise that euphoric Michigan fans became completely intolerable. But what happened next was surprising.

The Wolverines regressed in 2019. They had a losing record in 2020. And that meant Harbaugh would have to do something for the first time in his career: turn his own team around.

That was three years ago. Michigan has since beat Ohio State, won the Big Ten Conference and made the College Football Playoff three times.

Before he settled down in Michigan a decade ago, Harbaugh hadn't coached anywhere for more than four years. He's already been in Ann Arbor longer than most fans expected. Now they're wondering if he'll take a turnaround job in the NFL and evade penalties from an NCAA investigation into his alleged sign-stealing operation -- especially if Michigan wins a title.

He could go out on top. And then he could go looking for his next worm." [1]

1. EXCHANGE --- Science of Success: The Simple Playbook Of a Turnaround Expert --- Jim Harbaugh's repeated rescues of struggling organizations aren't studied in business schools -- yet. Cohen, Ben.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 Jan 2024: B.1.