WSJ: Would Jim Harbaugh's Turnaround Skills Work For CEOs — And Law School Deans?

Wall Street Journal, Is This Football Coach the Best Turnaround CEO in America?:

There might not be anybody in any business who is better at getting anything turned around than [Jim] 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. The Wolverines weren’t winning conference titles, let alone national championships. Forget about Ohio State. They couldn’t even beat Michigan State.

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. ...

[W]hat 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. ...

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.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Michigan And Ohio State Law Profs Debate Whether Antitrust Law Will Protect Jim Harbaugh From NCAA Discipline (Nov. 20, 2023)
• Jim Harbaugh Takes His 'Dad Pants' to Michigan (Dec. 28, 2014)