This book entered my reading list while listening to the Tim Ferriss show 367. Bill Campbell, the coach this book writes about, immediately caught my interest. Here is Eric from the podcast:
So Jonathan, Alan, and I have written a book called Trillion Dollar Coach and Bill Campbell is, at least in our opinion, the most successful coach in world history. He was the primary coach for Google in its rise. He was also the primary coach for Apple in its rise along with a host of other companies. And that some of the companies that he has coached have now exceeded more than $2 trillion of value. So it gives you a sense of the value that he helped create. His background was that he was a football coach at Columbia. And we pointed out many times to Bill that he wasn’t particularly successful, although he tried very hard, maybe it’s because he was at Columbia, we don’t really know. But he was an extraordinary coach of humans.
And so in my first year at Google, John Doerr, who had placed me here at Google, said, “You need a coach.” And I said, “I don’t need a coach. I’m really good.” And he said after some back and forth he said, “Well, do tennis players have coaches?” And I said, “Yes.” And then he got me. I had to say, “Okay.” So we met and then the rest is history.
Eric Schmidt
Bill changed my perspective through this book. Reading the stories about him, the results he got, really made me think and reconsider things. It wasn’t just the book, also the personal work-related experiences I’ve had. Somehow combining my personal experience with the wisdom from this book made things click in me. This is a great book to read in its entirety, but I will do my best and try to summarize the best of it here.
Compassion in Business
Bill started out as a football coach. He said that one of his weaknesses was that he just couldn’t get himself to replace one kid for another. He cared too much for his people to let them go when there was some younger guy who was better than his older guy.
Bill may have been correct in believing that success as a football coach depends on “dispassion,” but in business there is growing evidence that compassion is a key factor to success.*7 And as it turned out, this notion of bringing compassion to the team worked much better for Bill in the business world than on the football field.
Communication
Bill made sure his teams were communicating and that tensions were resolved. He didn’t care about individual decisions, he cared about the team’s morale and cohesion. He was clever enough to know that the team was much more crucial for success than individual decisions.
For fifteen years, Bill met with Eric just about every week. And not only Eric: Bill became a coach to Jonathan, Larry Page, and several other Google leaders. He attended Eric’s staff meeting every week and was a frequent presence on the company’s Mountain View, California, campus (which, conveniently, was a stone’s throw from the Intuit campus, where Bill was still chairman).
For those fifteen years, Bill’s counsel was deeply influential. It’s not that he told us what to do—far from it. If Bill had opinions about product and strategy, he usually kept them to himself. But he made sure the team was communicating, that tensions and disagreements were brought to the surface and discussed, so that when the big decisions were made, everyone was on board, whether they agreed or not. We can say, without a doubt, that Bill Campbell was one of the people most integral to Google’s success. Without him, the company would not be where it is today.
Leadership
I had this opinion which turns out to be wrong, that a company or team can work much more efficiently with just engineers. This might be true in cases where the engineers have enough people skills. But it turns out that bigger companies benefit from managers.
Larry and Sergey loved the idea of Google being a “disorg”. An engineering organization without managers. Then came Bill and tried to convince them to get in some managers. Why? Because he knew it would improve the teams.
Larry was nonplussed. After all, he had just gotten rid of all the managers, and he was quite happy with that. Why does a company of several hundred employees, shipping a product that would eventually generate billions in revenue, need managers? Weren’t we doing better without them? This went on for a while, the argument going back and forth, both men firm in their convictions. Finally Bill took a page from Larry’s book and suggested that they just go talk to the engineers. He, Larry, and Sergey wandered down the hall until they found a couple of software engineers working. Bill asked one of them if he wanted a manager.
Yes, came the response.
Why?
“I want someone I can learn from, and someone to break ties.”
They chatted with several software engineers that night, and most of the responses were similar. These engineers liked being managed, as long as their manager was someone from whom they could learn something, and someone who helped make decisions. Bill was right! Although it took a while to convince the founders of this: Google engineering continued in “disorg” mode for more than a year. We finally called it quits and brought back people managers near the end of 2002.
To Bill, being an executive of a successful company is all about management, about creating operational excellence. As a manager and CEO, Bill was very good at making sure his teams delivered. He brought people together and created a strong team culture, but never lost sight of the fact that results mattered, and that they were a direct result of good management. “You have to think about how you’re going to run a meeting,” he told a group of Googlers in a management seminar. “How you’re going to run an operations review. You’ve got to be able to look at someone in a one-on-one and know how to help them course correct. People who are successful run their companies well. They have good processes, they make sure their people are accountable, they know how to hire great people, how to evaluate them and give them feedback, and they pay them well.”
Bill felt that leadership was something that evolved as a result of management excellence. “How do you bring people around and help them flourish in your environment? It’s not by being a dictator. It’s not by telling them what the hell to do. It’s making sure that they feel valued by being in the room with you. Listen. Pay attention. This is what great managers do.”
How to do meetings
What about meetings? In my experience, in companies, they use to waste a lot of people’s time. The problem is when too many people are in the same room. It is difficult to resolve specific issues when you have to talk about things that are general so that everyone knows what you are talking about.
One on one meetings, on the other hand, tend to be very productive in my experience. I realize how good a meeting was when I come out of it with clarity about what to do next, with tons of work that just needs execution.
Bill made his meetings great by making sure everyone was opening up. And he had a special technique that let him see where anyone’s priorities were.
While Bill did have his top-five list of things to discuss, he didn’t write them on the whiteboard for all to see. Rather, he would hold them back, like a poker player holding his cards close to the vest. After talking about family and other nonwork stuff, Bill would ask Jonathan what his top five items were. Jonathan came to realize that this approach was Bill’s way of seeing how Jonathan was prioritizing his time and effort. If Bill led off with his list, Jonathan simply could have agreed with it. The discussion of the list was in itself a form of coaching (apparently one that Eric never needed).
In teaching his management seminar at Google, Bill advocated that each person should put his or her list on the board—a simultaneous reveal. That way everyone could see where there was overlap and make sure to cover those topics. He felt that the process of merging the two agendas could serve as a lesson in prioritization.
How to act on the Best Ideas
Bill believed that one of a manager’s main jobs is to facilitate decisions, and he had a particular framework for doing so. He didn’t encourage democracy. (Before he arrived at Intuit, they took votes in meetings. Bill stopped that practice.) Rather, he favored an approach not unlike that used in improv comedy. In improv, the entire cast is at risk and needs to work together to continue a conversation, to put off the finality of a scene until the last possible moment. Bill encouraged ensembles and always strived for a politics-free environment. A place where the top manager makes all decisions leads to just the opposite, because people will spend their time trying to convince the manager that their idea is the best. In that scenario, it’s not about the best idea carrying the day, it’s about who does the best job of lobbying the top dog. In other words, politics.
Bill hated that. He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus (“I hate consensus!” he would growl), intuitively understanding what numerous academic studies have shown: that the goal of consensus leads to “groupthink” and inferior decisions.15 The way to get the best idea, he believed, was to get all of the opinions and ideas out in the open, on the table for the group to discuss. Air the problem honestly, and make sure people have the opportunity to provide their authentic opinions, especially if they are dissenting. If the problem or decision at hand is more functional in nature (for example, primarily a marketing or finance decision), then the discussion should be led by the person with that functional expertise. When it is a broader decision cutting across multiple functional areas, then the team leader owns the discussion. Regardless, it should involve everyone’s point of view.
To get those ideas on the table, Bill would often sit down with individuals before the meeting to find out what they were thinking. This enabled Bill to understand the different perspectives, but more important, it gave members of his team the chance to come into the room prepared to talk about their point of view. Discussing it with Bill helped gather their thoughts and ideas before the broader discussion. Maybe they would all be aligned by the time they got there, maybe not, but they had already thought through, and talked through, their own perspective and were ready to present it.
Don’t tell an engineer what to do, tell him what you need
As Bill often commented, “Why is marketing losing its clout? Because it forgot its first name: product.”
Bill liked to tell a story about when he was at Intuit and they started getting into banking products. They hired some product managers with banking experience. One day, Bill was at a meeting with one of those product managers, who presented his engineers with a list of features he wanted them to build. Bill told the poor product manager, if you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You tell them what problem the consumer has. You give them context on who the consumer is. Then let them figure out the features. They will provide you with a far better solution than you’ll ever get by telling them what to build.
Trust and psychological safety
Dean Gilbert, a former executive at Google and @Home, and an accomplished management coach in his own right, notes that “Bill would build an envelope of trust very quickly. It was a natural thing for him, this ability to build rapport, a sense of comfort and protection. It’s the cornerstone of any coaching in business.” Vinod Khosla, a Sun Microsystems cofounder and head of Khosla Ventures, says that he and Bill “built a great relationship around trust, whether we agreed or disagreed.” An important point: trust doesn’t mean you always agree; in fact, it makes it easier to disagree with someone. These are just a couple of the numerous quotes we could cite from people who worked with Bill, all of them basically saying the same thing: You could trust Bill. His success stemmed from that.
Establishing trust is a key component to building what is now called “psychological safety” in teams. Team psychological safety, according to a 1999 Cornell study, is a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking . . . a team climate . . . in which people are comfortable being themselves.”4 This is exactly the feeling we experienced when working with Bill; he quickly established a relationship where we could be ourselves, without fear. Not surprisingly, when Google conducted a study to determine the factors behind high-performing teams, psychological safety came out at the top of the list.
How to be coachable
Bill chose the people he was going to coach based on their humility. When he first met Jonathan Rosenberg he asked him a question.
The consensus, Bill reported, was that Jonathan was smart and worked hard. Jonathan’s chest puffed a bit.
“But I don’t care about any of that,” Bill said. “I only have one question: Are you coachable?”
Jonathan instantly, and regrettably, replied: “It depends on the coach.”
Wrong answer.
“Smart alecks are not coachable,” Bill snapped. He stood up to leave, interview over, as it dawned on Jonathan that he had heard Eric Schmidt was getting coaching from someone and, oh my God, this must be the guy. Jonathan switched from smart-aleck mode to groveling mode, backing away from his quip (which wasn’t exactly a quip), and asked Bill to continue the conversation. After another moment that felt like minutes, Bill sat back down and talked about how he chose the people he was going to work with based on humility. Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team. Bill believed that good leaders grow over time, that leadership accrues to them from their teams. He thought people who were curious and wanted to learn new things were best suited for this. There was no room in this formula for smart alecks and their hubris.
How to ask questions
In a coaching session with Bill, you could expect that he would listen intently. No checking his phone for texts or email, no glancing at his watch or out the window while his mind wandered. He was always right there. Today it is popular to talk about “being present” or “in the moment.” We’re pretty sure those words never passed the coach’s lips, yet he was one of their great practitioners. Al Gore says he learned from Bill how “important it is to pay careful attention to the person you are dealing with . . . give them your full, undivided attention, really listening carefully. Only then do you go into the issue. There’s an order to it.”
“Bill would never tell me what to do,” says Ben Horowitz. “Instead he’d ask more and more questions, to get to what the real issue was.” Ben found an important lesson in Bill’s technique that he applies today when working with his fund’s CEOs. Often, when people ask for advice, all they are really asking for is approval. “CEOs always feel like they need to know the answer,” Ben says. “So when they ask me for advice, I’m always getting a prepared question. I never answer those.” Instead, like Bill, he asks more questions, trying to understand the multiple facets of a situation. This helps him get past the prepared question (and answer) and discover the heart of an issue.
How to deliver feedback
Bill knew how to deliver critical feedback. The key is good intent, not the content you deliver. People often felt better after Bill delivered his candor, even if it was something brutally honest.
Bill was always 100 percent honest (he told the truth) and candid (he wasn’t afraid to offer a harsh opinion). A straight shooter if there ever was one. Google board member and former Amazon executive Ram Shriram: “Bill was always transparent; there was no hidden agenda. There was no gap between his statements and fact. They were always the same.” Intuit cofounder Scott Cook: “He really taught me about honesty and authenticity in giving feedback. You can keep someone’s respect and loyalty while delivering tough news about their performance.”
Bill’s candor worked because we always knew it was coming from a place of caring. Former Googler Kim Scott, author of the excellent book Radical Candor, says that being a great boss means “saying what you really think in a way that still lets people know you care.”
How to pick great people for your team
A great team is the first step acting on a great opportunity.
Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.
A big turnoff for Bill was if they were no longer learning. Do they have more answers than questions? That’s a bad sign!
Bill appreciated high cognitive abilities, but he also understood the value of soft skills, like empathy, that aren’t always valued in businesses, especially tech ones. At Google, he helped us learn to appreciate that this combination—smarts and hearts—creates better managers.
Bill Campbell employed all of these techniques, from hiring well (pick the right players) to promoting gender diversity (get to the table) to taking care of small misunderstandings before they become big (fill the gaps between people), to help teams achieve greatness. And the essence of Bill was the essence of just about any sports coach: team first. All players, from stars to scrubs, must be ready to place the needs of the team above the needs of the individual. Given that commitment, teams can accomplish great things. That’s why, when faced with an issue, his first question wasn’t about the issue itself, it was about the team tasked with tackling the issue. Get the team right and you’ll get the issue right.
How to solve problems
People tend to avoid the big and ugly problems. Smart people like those working at Google, often like to focus on the fun problems. Not the ones that don’t have an obvious solution and thus tend to get political. Not so Bill, he knew how important it is to solve the big problems first and resolve tensions.
Things come up, tensions arise, and they don’t naturally go away. People do their best to avoid talking about these situations, because they’re awkward. Which makes it worse.
When that happens, people refer to the “elephant in the room”: the big problem that overshadows everything but that no one acknowledges. As former Avon CEO Andrea Jung says, “With Bill there was never an elephant in the room.” Or, more accurately, there might have been an elephant, but it wasn’t hiding in the corner. Bill wouldn’t allow that. He brought the thing front and center.
“It’s a football mentality,” Shona Brown points out. “Where’s the weakest link on the offensive line, or the defensive secondary?” Throughout her tenure at Google, Shona worked weekly with Bill tackling numerous operational issues, many of which were lurking like elephants in the corner. The company was just growing so fast, well ahead of any semblance of process. Bill’s approach, Shona says, was always to tackle the hardest problem first. “You have to address that first.”
A litmus test for when issues have simmered for too long, a way to spot the elephant, is if the team can’t even have honest conversations about them. This is where the coach comes in, as a “tension spotter.”
The first step to solve an issue is to address it
Bill always made sure that problems were aired completely and transparently. And then, once that was accomplished, he moved on.
“That’s one of the big things he taught me,” Eddy says. “When it gets to the negative, get it out, get to the issues, but don’t let the damn meeting dwell on that. Don’t let bitch sessions last for very long.” Psychologists would call this approach “problem-focused coping,” in contrast to “emotion-focused coping.” The latter may be more appropriate when facing a problem that can’t be solved, but in a business context focusing on and venting emotions needs to happen quickly, so more energy is directed to solutions.
Making decisions
Bill knew that making decisions is often more important than making the “right” one. He pushed people to make decisions.
As Deb Biondolillo says, Bill was “the shadow behind you. You hear him, but you are the one in front. He could be less confined, more genuine if he was in the background.”
This was all done without an agenda. Bill often didn’t voice an opinion about which way a decision would go—he just pushed for the decision to be made. When he sensed those moments, he’d work behind the scenes, drawing out people’s points of view, closing communication gaps, and fixing miscommunications, so that when the time came to discuss things in the meeting and make the decision, everyone was prepared.
Then Bill would sit back, observe, and start the cycle over again.
To care about people you have to care about people
This might seem like common knowledge but Bill executed religiously on it.
Bill cared about people. He treated everyone with respect, he learned their names, he gave them a warm greeting. He cared about their families, and his actions in this regard spoke more loudly than his words. Jesse Rogers talks about how much his daughter cared for Bill, about how Bill always took the time, when he saw her, to give her a big hello hug. Ruth Porat says that when she took the job as Google’s CFO and started commuting back and forth from New York, Bill’s primary concern was how her husband was faring with the arrangement. Was he happy? What could Bill do to help out? “He cared about the whole you,” Ruth says. “We talked about that a lot.”
Building Community
Bill built community instinctively. He knew that a place was much stronger when people were connected.
He cared so much about community that he invested in a place for people to gather. The Old Pro was a sports bar that opened in 1964 at the corner of El Camino Real and Page Mill Road in Palo Alto in a funky steel Quonset hut of unknown provenance. Bill started going there with his Intuit team in the 1990s, and when the bar was forced to move in the mid-2000s, he helped its owners Steve and Lisa Sinchek set up at a new, swankier location in downtown Palo Alto. Bill could be found there most every Friday afternoon, holding his own version of TGIF. Different people gathered there, always with plenty of food and beer, and when someone new showed up, Bill introduced him or her around with a generous spirit: he picked your best feature or accomplishment and highlighted it. The only rule was that you couldn’t come there with an agenda. No one came to the Old Pro to “network” or to talk about deals. Bill liked the bar for its casual atmosphere, where formalities could drop by the wayside and people could just be themselves, whether laughing at old stories or talking business. It was the physical manifestation of the numerous communities he created. It is still one of the most popular spots in Palo Alto.
To Bill, it was all part of a grand approach. Once you have your team or your community, what matters most are the bonds between the people on the team, which are forged by caring for each other and the common good. With all the trips Bill took with people, the trips were not the goal of the communities, the communities were the goal of the trips.
Many of the people we talked to commented on Bill’s penchant for connecting them to others; he was extraordinary at that. You would be talking to him about something and he would say, you should talk to so-and-so, I’ll put you in touch. Minutes later the email would be on its way. He didn’t do this randomly or for the sake of it; he made a quick calculation that the connection would be beneficial for both people. Which is a pretty good definition of community.
Helping People
Bill was huge on favors. He didn’t care about protocol when he could help someone, that’s what he did.
Susan Wojcicki was an early employee at Google and spoke with Bill frequently over the years. A few years back, Susan, who was by then the head of YouTube, wanted to attend an important tech and media conference. Despite YouTube’s status as one of the biggest video destinations for consumers around the world and an important player in the media and entertainment world, Susan could not secure an invitation. She worked through her considerable list of contacts, to no avail. In her 1:1 with Bill, she brought this up. He responded with a burst of colorful language. “This makes me so angry!” he said. “Of course you should be there!” They ended their meeting soon afterward, and a day later an invitation to the conference appeared in her inbox.
Bill did Susan a favor. He made a few calls and got her the invite. This is such a simple thing, but something surprisingly unusual in companies. We have had a couple of situations over the years where we asked colleagues to do us favors. These were not big favors, but they did entail bypassing processes or waiving minor rules. No one would have been hurt, and in fact the things we requested, if judged on merit alone, were absolutely the right things to do. Nevertheless, we were turned down. I’m sorry, I can’t do that, was the generic response. You see, we’ve got this process in place . . .
To which Bill would have said: bullshit. Bill believed in doing favors for people. He was generous, he liked to help people, so when he could call on a friend to help the CEO of YouTube get into an event at which she absolutely belonged, he did it without hesitation.
Generosity
“being an effective giver isn’t about dropping everything every time for every person. It’s about making sure that the benefits of helping others outweigh the costs to you.”
Adam Grant
Bill enjoyed helping people and was incredibly generous. Good luck buying a dinner or a drink when Bill was around. One time, when he had a group of friends together in Cabo for vacation, Bill took all the kids to dinner; everyone got the bar T-shirt. He bought cases of very nice red wine to pour at his annual Christmas party, not because he enjoyed wine, but because he enjoyed watching his friends enjoy wine. You might think, well, heck, it’s easy for a rich guy to buy everyone T-shirts and wine, and you’d be right. But Bill was that way well before he was rich. He had a generous spirit, which anyone can afford. For example, he was a very busy man, but he was generous with his time. Sometimes it took a couple of months to get on his calendar, but if you truly needed him, that phone call would come right away.
Vision
So often companies focus on operation when they lack vision. Without vision, a company has no heart.
Too often we think about running a company as an operating job, and as we have already examined, Bill considered operational excellence to be very important. But when we reduce company leadership to its operational essence, we negate another very important component: vision. Many times operating people come in, and though they may run the company better, they lose the heart and soul of the company, the vision that is going to take it forward. This is where founders excel. Bill loved founders, not just for the chutzpah they possess to try entrepreneurship in the first place, but for the vision they have for the company, and the love they have for it. He understood their limitations, but he usually felt that their value outweighed the shortcomings.
Love
One of our big surprises in working on this book was how often the word love came up when people talked about Bill. This isn’t a typical word when speaking with tech executives, venture capitalists, and the like. But Bill made it okay to bring love to the workplace. He created a culture of what people who study these things call “companionate” love: feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others. He did this by genuinely caring about people and their lives outside of work, by being an enthusiastic cheerleader, by building communities, by doing favors and helping people whenever he could, and by keeping a special place in his heart for founders and entrepreneurs.
Love is part of what makes a great team great. Yes, this was a natural part of Bill’s personality—he was way more ebullient than most of us! But it was also something he likely learned from football.
Speaking of Love, I loved reading this book. You can get it here and help me make more summaries.