Noel Monk was Van Halen’s manager from 1979 to 1985. This means he rode shotgun during the band’s meteoric rise from “backyard keg party” to “world’s loudest circus.” In the twilight of Van Halen’s career, he was the guy who had to clean up the mess when the most notorious party band of the 1980s crashed into the music industry like a cocaine-fueled meteor.
And make no mistake—these were the Van Halen years. David Lee Roth swinging his spandex-covered ego around the stage, Eddie reinventing guitar playing like he was casually doodling on napkins, and the rest of the band proving that if you add enough alcohol, even chaos can go platinum.
Monk himself looked like every band manager from the 80s you’ve ever seen in a VH1 documentary: jeans, t-shirt, unwashed hair, and a moustache that screamed “I’ve definitely been kicked out of a Holiday Inn before.” His job? Everything. He took care of all things from paying off hotel managers for trashed rooms to ensuring the rider was bulletproof.
A rider is the attachment to the main performance contract between the band and the venue or promoter. It lays out the extra requirements the artist needs to perform, things like the stage layout and sound system requirements. It’s probably the most important part of any stage show and performance. It was hundreds of pages long, with many important details that couldn’t be overlooked.
Buried in the rider was an infamous clause that’s become a pop culture icon. You’ve heard the story: Van Halen demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage with every single brown one removed. Sounds like a diva move, right? Wrong. It was actually a genius test. If the promoter bothered to remove the brown M&Ms, odds were they also bothered to read the actual dangerous stuff in the contract—like making sure the stage wouldn’t collapse and kill everyone.
As David Lee Roth said in his autobiography:
“When I would talk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.”
For example a show in Colorado failed the brown M&M test and Van Halen cancelled their show. In the subsequent inspection they found out the promoter ignored the weight requirements of the stage. Result? The stage would have literally fallen through the arena floor. You don’t get “Jump” if the band dies in a pile of amps.
Now, while Monk was out babysitting Van Halen, across the country Bill Walsh was taking over the San Francisco 49ers. When he showed up, the team sucked. Like, two-wins-a-season sucked. Three years later, they were Super Bowl champions. Why? Because Walsh introduced something he called the Standard of Performance.
Similar to the brown M&M clause, the rules sounded ridiculous at first: players had to stand during practice. Coaches wore ties. Lockers had to be spotless. No smoking, no fighting, no swearing. Every passing route graded down to the inch. Practices scheduled down to the minute. Basically, Walsh micromanaged everything.
But, those “trivial” rules created the foundation of a dynasty. Walsh wasn’t focused on “winning the Super Bowl.” He was focused on doing every little thing with ruthless excellence. Because he knew the dirty truth: how you do one thing is how you do everything. A team that can’t keep the locker room clean sure as hell isn’t going to run a clean two-minute drill.
The details matter. The brown M&M matters. The tie matters. Because if you don’t sweat the small stuff, the big stuff falls apart. Literally.
This is why great leaders—from Monk to Walsh—obsess over standards. Not because they’re control freaks, but because standards turn a group of individuals into an institution. Standards make sure the band doesn’t fall through the stage. Standards make sure a football team doesn’t implode on the field.
Too many companies today run on the myth of the “great man”—that one or two people carry the whole place. That works when you’re small. But when you scale? You’re screwed unless you’ve downloaded what makes those great people great into a system. Into checklists. Into standards.
That’s what Walsh did. He didn’t come down from the mountain with commandments. He built it piece by piece, job by job, until everyone knew exactly what excellence looked like in their role. Same way Monk made sure promoters read every line of that rider.
Excellence is boring repetition. It’s deliberate practice. It’s doing the same small things right, over and over, until the compound interest kicks in and suddenly you’ve built a dynasty. Or sold out stadiums. Or both.