Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbellby Alan Eagle, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 6.5/10When you hear about Silicon Valley’s huge success stories — Intel, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, you inevitably hear the names of founders and key executives — Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Marisa Mayer, or Sheryl Sandberg.
Unless you dig deep, you won’t hear the name Bill Campbell.
He helped to build some of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies—including Google, Apple, and Intuit—and to create over a trillion dollars in market value. A former college football player and coach, Bill mentored visionaries such as Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt, and coached dozens of leaders. When he passed away in 2016, “the Coach” left behind a legacy of growing companies and successful people.
Most people are lucky to be involved with one, maybe two successful companies during their career. How was Bill able to influence so many leaders at so many companies? How could he possibly convince Steve Jobs to let him sit on Apple’s board while at the same time coaching Google’s entire executive team?
From their vantage points at Google, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle experienced Bill firsthand. To honor their mentor and inspire and teach future generations, they codified his wisdom in this book. Based on interviews with more than eighty people who knew and loved Bill Campbell, Trillion Dollar Coach explains his principles and illustrates them with stories from the great companies and people with whom he worked and played.
“Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.”
Key points
It starts with who you coach. Only coach the coachable. Those who are honest, humble, willing to persevere and work hard, and are always learning.
Small talk matters. It’s tough to cold open right into the numbers. To ease into a meeting, Bill Campbell had a “trip rule” where any executive who went on a trip was required to open the meeting by reporting on their trip to the whole team. The point isn’t the exchange of small talk as much as the warmup that connects people and primes people to wake up and warm up before sprinting.
The top priority of any manager is the well-being and success of their people.
Lead based on first principles. If people agree to principles in advance, they can’t be argued. Define the ‘First Principles’ for the situation, the immutable truths that are the foundation for the company or product and help guide the decision from those principles.
Product matters. The purpose of a company is to bring a product vision to life. All other functions are in service to the product.
Don’t tell people what to do. Tell stories and guide them to the right decision.
“You want to be supportive and demand, holding high standards and expectations but giving the encouragement necessary to reach them. Basically, it’s tough love. Disagreeable givers are gruff and tough on the surface, but underneath they have others’ best interests at heart. They give the critical feedback no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear.”
Work the team, then the problem. When faced with a problem, get the team right in place first. They’ll solve the problem.
Pick the right players. Value potential more than experience.
High performing but difficult team members should be tolerated and even protected, as long as their behavior isn’t unethical or abusive and their value outweighs the toll their behavior takes on management, colleagues, and teams.
Letting people go is a failure of management, not of the people who are being let go. So, it is important for management to let people leave with their heads held high.
Leaders lead. You can’t afford to doubt, you need to commit. You can make mistakes, but if you aren’t fully committed, then the people around you won’t be either.
Push people to be more courageous.
Effective leaders aren’t afraid to show their emotions. There’s a fallacy that people who show their emotions in the workplace aren’t as competent as their less “touchy-feely” peers. Few people know that better than the folks who worked with Bill. Bill was famous for his personal warmth and informality. He gave his colleagues bear hugs, had a breezy – and often downright profane – way of talking, and he’d drop everything to help people out if they were in trouble.
Every team needs a coach. Even Eric Schmidt, the seemingly omniscient technology executive, leaned on a coach during inflection points in his career at Google. To understand this point in greater detail, watch Atul Gawande’s 2017 TED Talk on coaching. Gawande, a world-class surgeon, learned a lot about improving his surgery technique when he hired a coach. He believes that coaching is essential to becoming great in any field.
“After all, the higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful. By definition, that’s what coaches do.”
What I liked
The stories were great, the examples were meaningful, and it ultimately tied back to the essence of what made Bill successful.
There are a lot of takeaways, especially for managers. How to hire, lead, act, conduct meetings, give feedback, and coach. Also, all the values you should have — hustle, honestly, love, passion, drive, etc.
Concise and highly readable.
What I disliked
I was hoping to read a book with more depth, research and nuance.
Early in the book, the authors say, “We quickly rejected the idea of writing a hagiography.” The term refers to a biography that idealizes its subject. But they ended up writing a hagiography, filled with unremitting praise for Saint Bill. The book would have been more helpful and authentic if it had included times when Bill failed in personal or corporate life.
Conclusion
I recommend this book to all managers, as it provides clear and relatable advice to develop the reader into a leader.
Be warned though. A lot of the book describes Bill Campbell’s unique way of leading and communicating. It’s highly tempting and attempt to replicate his behaviour wholesale in all situations. It might not work for you and it’s dangerous to believe you can do it his way and succeed.
There is no need to clone the tactics. Because essentially what Bill did was to be extremely focused and practice tough love with the objective of making people, teams and companies succeed. If you can do that in your own way, you’ll probably succeed.
Eric Schmidt served as Google CEO and chairman from 2001 until 2011, Google executive chairman from 2011 to 2015, and Alphabet executive chairman from 2015 to 2018.Jonathan Rosenberg was a Senior Vice President at Google and is an advisor to the Alphabet management team. He ran the Google product team from 2002 to 2011. Alan Eagle has been a director at Google since 2007. Formerly Eric and Jonathan’s speechwriter, he currently runs a set of Google’s sales programs.