Say what you will about his final seasons, former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick’s career cannot be denied. And of all the things he was great at along the way, perhaps the greatest was his timing.
He picked up Tom Brady before anyone knew he was even alive. The list of Belichick’s other prescient moves goes on, but the six Super Bowl rings speak for themselves.
Forget football, though. For students of business, Belichick’s done it again. He’s gone and made himself a case study in reinvention. Make no mistake, his reinvention has been big, messy, and late in the game of his career, but it has also been filled with public displays of grace and hope.
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“This is a day of gratitude and celebration,” he said to a room filled with hundreds of cameras pointed in his face. He looked strained, not that he ever doesn’t. But he was sincere. He was sad for leaving, but happy for having been. He was reasoned, reflective, and resolved.
Here’s the perfect timing part to consider for us mere mortals. Just about the same time as Belichick’s press conference, most of us were wanly waving goodbye to our New Year’s resolutions, as they evaporated into the ether, as they so often do in mid-January.
That reinvention we were planning? That “New Year, New You” stuff? Better leader! More collaborative colleague! Faster to execute, hire, fire, innovate! Um, that’s all very hard. Do not want.
Now, we can be pretty darn sure Belichick did not desire this particular starting-over. He would have certainly preferred a few great post-Brady seasons at Foxboro, and maybe even another Super Bowl ring as a Patriot. But it was not to be.
That is, in fact, how our own reinventions usually occur too. We’ve been fired. Laid off. Passed over for a promotion, or two or three. And so we change; we have no choice.
Without such catalytic mechanisms, though, our resolve can fritter away. We let it—because we can.
At NYU Stern, as at most business schools, my students are largely there to pivot. From retail banking to I-banking, from any kind of banking to consulting, from Dad’s company to a public company, from nonprofit to tech, from not-quite-right to the-big-dream. Such pivoting inherently requires reinvention, and so I myself have become a student of watching my MBA students learn what it takes, which is first self-awareness, and then, mostly courage.
I teach a class called, “Becoming You: Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need,” so suffice it to say, with 20 and 30-somethings, both traits are not fully developed. But for those who make it through the class ready to change, or already starting to do so, I am seeing acts of will that often still my heart with admiration and pride.
It’s often said that change is hard. Yes, of course it is. More than anything, though, change is scary.
Who was I? Who can I be? What don’t I know? Oh really, that much? How long will it take? Are you kidding me?
These are the perilous questions that reinvention forces us to ask. Could that be why we let go of our New Year’s resolutions so easily? That we only gather the fortitude to answer these questions when we must? And only rally the discipline to execute on them, too? I hope the answer is no, for the sake of all of us, facing into a year where change is going to be inevitable.
It is every year, but with the election and AI and geopolitical disorder and oh-just-everything, all of us will have to do a little reinventing in 2024 whether we like it or not.
We can let our “New Year, New You” hopes go, or we can take our cues from Bill Belichick, who did not want to reinvent, but will, now that the time has come. On to Cincinnati.
Suzy Welch is a Professor of Management at NYU Stern School of Business, and a Senior Advisor at The Brunswick Group.
