The late Bear Bryant, the legendary football coach at Alabama was so confident in his coaching abilities he was quoted as saying, “I’ll take mine and beat your’n, or I’ll take your’n and beat mine.” He did not mean to imply that his players were not great, just that he would stack his coaching staff up against any other.

The season after I coached an undefeated championship football team, I was transferred to coaching at a school that we had beat that year 63 to 0 in football, scoring on every play. My new school had not won a game in any sport in several years. We lost our first 10 basketball games. When we won our last game of the season, you could hear the gym ring several counties away. We then won the league baseball championship, narrowly beating my old school in the finals.

That’s the way a great brand manager has to be. A gifted marketer, a really great brand person can take any product in a category and start winning. They can’t always take over leadership, but they can almost always make a winning difference. Get the right people. Be the right leader.

In my mind, that’s the way it is. If given a choice to start a company with six great product ideas or with six great brand managers, I would take the latter.

One of my favorite stories is of a Nintendo meeting years ago when the big guy from Japan was conferring with the 320 managers here in America on future scenario planning. Someone asked him what the company would do if the video games business went away. He replied simply, “The company is not our line of products. The company is the 320 of you sitting here today. We would just efficiently go out of our current businesses, sequester ourselves together somewhere for as long as it took, and decide what together we were going to make happen next.”

To me that demonstrates inspirational leadership. A great brand manager has to be such a leader.