When Paul Gustavson meets with BYU head football coach Bronco Mendenhall, they talk strategy. But it’s not the Xs and Os kind of strategy; it’s more of a “let’s create a competitive advantage through organizational design” kind of strategy.
Gustavson is an authority on organizational architecture and an expert in forming high-performance work systems who has been consulting organizations like NASA, Exxon, and AT&T for decades. So when he saw the once-prestigious BYU football program struggling on and off the field after the LaVell Edwards era ended, he called Athletic Director Tom Holmoe to offer his help. The day after he became head coach in 2005, Mendenhall took Holmoe’s reference and called Gustavson.
Gustavson didn’t charge anything for the hundreds of hours of consulting that followed; he saw it as giving back to a program that had blessed his life. In 1972 he was the first returned missionary to become a walk-on for the football team under LaVell Edwards.
“I’ll be forever grateful for that,” says Gustavson, who played center and special teams for two seasons. “I watched how LaVell took a team and made a difference with his leadership style.”
He says the work ethic LaVell showed in making the football team helped him overcome a mediocre GPA and get accepted into the master of organizational behavior program at BYU. He graduated with the degree in 1975, which catapulted him into the career he had always wanted.
Growing up, Gustavson saw how his parents’ work affected them when they weren’t in the office, both for good and bad.
“I wanted to create great places for people to work—make their jobs more enjoyable,” he says. “If you can bring the best out of people when they are at an organization, they are able to contribute more.”
Gustavson, now a member of the Marriott School’s OBHR advisory board, went to work inside companies for nine years, including Zilog, where he worked on developing a new semiconductor plant. They did something completely different, shifting responsibilities and reducing steps—it was a revelation for productivity and employee morale.
“Just by organizing people differently, we had a 253 percent performance improvement. In an industry with fifty-five percent turnover, we averaged only six percent,” he says.
With a success story to share and the support of his wife, Kris Anne, Gustavson founded Organization Planning & Design, Inc., in 1984. “It was an opportunity to work with a number of organizations interested in work innovation.”
He has been crisscrossing the globe ever since, consulting with major companies, start-ups, and government organizations from Scotland to Japan, developing leaders and helping clients understand what it takes to be successful.
“The best companies choose an area where they are going to separate themselves from the pack,” he says.
That applies to the gridiron, too. Gustavson says organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they do; when you don’t like the results—change. It’s one of the principles he has been teaching Coach Mendenhall, and Cougar football fans have seen the results: back-to-back conference championships.
