Grantland Rice, who was one of our great sports writers, said it didn’t matter if you won or lost, it was how you played the game. I disagree completely. The main thing is to win. That’s what the game is for. Just to go out and play and then say, “Well, I didn’t win but I played the game, I participated”—anybody can do that. You have to be number one, whether it’s football or selling insurance or anything.
Most coaches aren’t too business-minded. I’m the general manager of the Redskins, so I have to be a little more aware of business than just a coach. I’m more interested in how we can get more income in, to use that to help us win. So we can spend more money. Anything you can learn on accounting or business is helpful. We’re an organization.
Each player is part of a whole team. A football team is a lot like a machine. It’s made up of parts. I like to think of it as a Cadillac. A Cadillac’s a pretty good car. All the refined parts working together make the team. If one part doesn’t work, one player pulling against you and not doing his job, the whole machine fails.
Nobody is indispensable. If he can’t play, we let him know that he’s not going to be with us. “Do you want to play somewhere else?” We try to improve and replace some of the parts every year.
The only time you relax is when you win. If you lose, you don’t relax until you win. That’s the way I am. It’s a state of tension almost continuously.
Allen’s Ten Commandments
59
1. Football comes first. “During the off-season, I tell my players that their family and church should come one, two, with football third. But during the six months of the season, the competition in the NFL is so tough that we have to put football ahead of everything else.”
2. The greatest feeling in life is to take an ordinary job and accomplish something with it. . . .
3. If you can accept defeat and open your pay envelope without feeling guilty, you’re stealing. “You’re stealing from your employer and from yourself. Winning is the only way to go. . . . Losers just look foolish in a new car or partying it up. As far as I’m concerned, life without victories is like being in prison.”
4. Everyone, the head coach especially, must give 110 percent. . . . “The average good American pictures himself as a hard worker. But most persons are really operating at less than half-power. They never get above fifty percent. . . . Therefore, to get one hundred, you must aim for 110. A man who is concerned with an eight-hour day never works that long, and seldom works half that long. The same man, however, when challenged by a seventeen-hour day, will be just warmed up and driving when he hits the eighth hour. . . .
5. Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night. “Nobody should work all the time. Everybody should have some leisure. . . . You can combine two good things at once, sleep and leisure.”
6. No detail is too small. No task is too small or too big. “Winning can be defined as the science of being totally prepared. I define preparation in three words: leave nothing undone. . . . Nowadays there is . . . no difference between one team and another in the NFL. Usually the winner is going to be the team that’s better prepared. . . .”
7. You must accomplish things in life, otherwise you are like the paper on the wall. “The achiever is the only individual who is truly alive. There can be no inner satisfaction in simply driving a fine car or eating in a fine restaurant or watching a good movie or television program. Those who think they’re enjoying themselves doing any of that are half-dead and don’t know it. . . .”
8. A person with problems is dead. “Everybody has problems. The successful person solves his. He acknowledges them, works on them, and solves them. He is not disturbed when another day brings another kind of problem. . . . The winner . . . . solves his own problems. The man swayed by someone else is a two-time loser. First, he hasn’t believed in his own convictions and second, he is still lost.”
9. We win and lose as a team . . . .
10. My prayer is that each man will be allowed to play to the best of his ability.
IN CHARGE
WARD QUAAL
We’re at Tribune Square, Chicago. We’re in the well-appointed office of the president of WGN-Continental Broadcasting Corporation—“the most powerful broadcast medium in the Midwest.” He has been battling a slight sinus condition, but his presence is, nonetheless, felt.
“I’m responsible for all its broadcasting properties. We have radio and television here. We have a travel company here. We have a sales company here. We have the Continental Productions Company here. We have radio and television in Minnesota and translator systems in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, as well as Minnesota. We have cable television in Michigan and California. We have television in Denver. We have sales companies in New York and Tokyo. I operate sixteen different organizations in the United States and Japan.”
My day starts between four thirty and five in the morning, at home in Winnetka. I dictate in my library until about seven thirty. Then I have breakfast. The driver gets there about eight ’ and oftentimes I continue dictating in the car on the way to the office. I go to the Broadcast Center in the morning and then to Tribune Square around noon. Of course, I do a lot of reading in the car.
I talk into a dictaphone. I will probably have as many as 150 letters dictated by seven-thirty in the morning. I have five full-time secretaries, who do nothing but work for Ward Quaal. I have seven swing girls, who work for me part-time. This does not include my secretaries in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and San Francisco. They get dicta-belts from me every day. They also take telephone messages. My personal secretary doesn’t do any of that. She handles appointments and my trips. She tries to work out my schedule to fit these other secretaries.
I get home around six-thirty, seven at night. After dinner with the family I spend a minimum of two and a half hours each night going over the mail and dictating. I should have a secretary at home just to handle the mail that comes there. I’m not talking about bills and personal notes, I’m talking about business mail only. Although I don’t go to the office on Saturday or Sunday, I do have mail brought out to my home for the weekend. I dictate on Saturday and Sunday. When I do this on holidays, like Christmas, New Year’s, and Thanksgiving, I have to sneak a little bit, so the family doesn’t know what I’m doing.
Ours is a twenty-four-hour-a-day business. We’re not turning out three thousand gross of shoes, beans, or neckties. We’re turning out a new product every day, with new problems. It’s not unusual for me to get a phone call on a weekend: “What are your thoughts on it, Mr. Quaal? Would you speak out on it?” I’m not going to hide my posture on it. I’m going to answer that. This may mean going into the studio to make a recording. Or I may do a tape recording at home. Or maybe I’ll just make a statement. I am in a seven-day-a-week job and I love it!
“I grew up in a very poor family. Not only did no one come to us for advice, we went to other people for advice. We wondered what we were going to do for the next dollar. We did manage during the Depression. But I know others who didn’t extricate themselves from these difficulties. I won’t forget them. A letter from one of those individuals asking for help is just as important to me as a suggestion from the chairman of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank. They get the same weight. They get a personal letter from me. He didn’t write to my assistant, he didn’t write to my secretary. He wants to hear from Ward Quaal.”
When I come to the Broadcast Center, I’ll probably have about five or six different stacks of mail. One stack is urgent and should be acted upon before I make any phone calls. Once I handle that, which usually takes about fifteen, twenty minutes, I start the important phone calls. In-between these phone calls and others of lesser importance, I get into the other mail. On a typical day we’ll get thirteen hundred pieces of first-class mail addressed to me personally. Every letter is answered within forty-eight hours —and not a form letter. There are no form letters. If they write to the president of the company, they don’t want to hear from the third vice president. They hear from the president. Mail and the telephone, that’s the name of the game in this business.
I imagine your phone calls are not long in nature?
No, they’re not long in nature. I have this ability—I learned this when I was an announcer years ago, and we were feeding six networks out of here. I could listen to all these channels with earphones and I knew when to say the right cue at the right time. I can still do that.
“In high school I wanted to be a good football player, a good basketball player, a good baseball player. I managed to be captain of every team on which I ever played. At the end of my freshman year my coach said, ‘There’s a shortage of people to do oratory and declamatory work.’ He said, ‘We’ve just simply got to have somebody with your voice. If you would do this, I would excuse you from football practice a couple of nights a week.’ I won the oratorical and declamatory championship for the state of Michigan. On the night of the finals in Ishpeming, which were broadcast, the chief engineer of a radio station, a Polish gentleman, called my mother and told her I’d be a network announcer someday.
“I started working during my freshman year in high school as an announcer at WBEO in Marquette. I worked from 10:00
A.M.
to 10:00
P.M.
and got $17.50 a week. At the same time, I drove a commercial milk truck from four in the morning to eight, and I got $22-50 a week for that. The two jobs gave me money to go to the University of Michigan. I have great pride in my university. I was chairman of the Alumni Fund and its Development Council.
“I won the job as a Detroit radio announcer at thirty-five dollars a week, while still a student. I hitchhiked or took a bus every day from Ann Arbor to Detroit. On the campus I was promotion manager of the yearbook. I was sports and feature writer for the
Michigan Daily
. I was on the freshman football team, baseball team, and basketball team. And I was president of the fraternity. All at one time. Shows you can do it if you work hard enough.
“When I applied for admission at the university, I was asked what my goal was after graduation. I said, ‘The announcing staff of WGN.’ I finished my last exam June 8, 1941, and I started at WGN the next day.”
I had no desire to be an announcer forever. I wanted to become general manager. I think this is something anybody can do. The number one thing in any business is to go get a background, so you can show your people you can do anything they can do. My people today know I can announce any show they could, I can write a script, I can produce a show, I can handle a camera. If I still had the voice, I would enjoy being back on the air again.
I’ve had to develop a team effort with all people. I prefer being called Ward rather than Mr. Quaal. Ninety percent of the people do call me by my first name. The young women of the organization do not, although I certainly would not disapprove of them calling me Ward. The last thing I want to be is a stuffed shirt. I’m trying to run this organization on a family basis. I prefer it to be on the informal side.
I’ve always felt throughout my lifetime that if you have any ability at all, go for first place. That’s all I’m interested in. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to be an autocrat. Lord knows I’m not a dictator. I try to give all my colleagues total autonomy. But they know there’s one guy in charge.
Of course, you have to be number two before you become number one —unless you’re born into something. I was born into a poor family. I had to create my own paths. Sure, I’ve been second vice president, first vice president, and executive vice president. But I had only one goal in life and that was to be president.
A fellow like Ward Quaal, he’s one of the old hands now. That doesn’t mean I’m going to vegetate. I intend to devote more time to our subsidiaries and to develop young people who come forth with new ideas. I don’t look forward to retirement. I feel I have many useful years ahead of me. When the time comes to step aside, I won’t regret it at all. I have a lot of writing to do. I’ll have so much to do.
You’re more of a philosopher-king than a boss . . .
I think that is true. When I came here sixteen years ago, August first, I never had any desire to be a czar. I don’t like to say I ruled with an iron hand, but I had to take charge and clean up the place. I am the captain calling the signals and every once in a while I call the right play and we’re pretty lucky.
I don’t feel any pressure, though my family says I sometimes show it. I’m not under tension. I go to bed at night and I sleep well. The company is doing well. My people are functioning as a team. The success story is not Ward Quaal. It’s a great team of people.
POSTSCRIPT:
“On a typical day we get about seven hundred phone calls. We average eighty a day long distance.” I estimated that during the time of this conversation, there were about forty phone calls for Ward Quaal
.
DAVE BENDER
It is a newly built, quite modern factory on the outskirts of a large industrial city. Scores of people are at work in the offices. Sounds of typewriters and adding machines; yet an air of informality pervades. He has come into his private office, tie askew; he’s in need of a shave. We have a couple of shots of whisky.
“I manufacture coin machine and vending machine parts—components.
We also make units for amusement devices. We don’t know what they’re gonna do with it. We have ideas what they might. I have about two hundred employees. I never counted. They’re people. We have tool and die makers, mold makers, sheet metal, screw machine, woodwork, painting, coil winding. You name it, we got it.”