My 11 Notes from “Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell”
Legendary Bill Campbell stands behind some of the greatest Silicon Valley’s companies including Google, Apple, Intuit and many more that he advised and mentored in the past. He indeed started his career as a college coach but most of his life he spent first as an executive in companies like Kodak and Apple and later as a coach and advisor to top executives like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. The book summarizes the lessons of Bill Campbell backed by stories from more than eighty interviews that illustrate his approach and formula for leadership.
Although I must admit that I felt somehow a little bit disappointed as it lacked the depth I had expected. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a wonderful piece of writing full of insights but seems rather like a tribute to Bill Campbell than an in-depth analysis. Read and judge for yourself.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t bring any change to the fact that many lessons from legendary coach are just priceless. Here are eleven themes I highlighted backed with quotes in the sections below:
- On the importance of coaching: “Coaching is no longer a speciality; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.”
- Team first: “Work the team, then the problem”
- Not everyone is a fit for coaching: “First, he only coached the coachable.”
- On Servant Leadership: “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.”
- On Meritocracy: “He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus(…)”
- On Decisionmaking: “Make the best decision you can, then move on.”
- On Dealing with genius assholes: “What can’t be tolerated is when the aberrant genius continually puts him-or herself above the team.”
- On Narcism and craving for publicity: “Publicity is fine if it’s in the service of the company, and indeed, that is part of the CEO’s job.”
- A tip for Product Managers: “Tell them what problem the consumer has [not which features you want]”
- About Firing People: “Still, the company must move forward, so be careful not to apologize too much”
- On Love and Compassion: “When he is yelling at you, it’s because he loves you and cares and wants you to succeed”
1. “Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.”
“Whereas mentors dole out words of wisdom, coaches roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. They don’t just believe in our potential; they get in the arena to help us realize our potential. They hold up a mirror so we can see our blind spots and they hold us accountable for working through our sore spots.”
“Great coaches lie awake at night thinking about how to make you better. They relish creating an environment where you get more out of yourself. Coaches are like great artists getting the stroke exactly right on a painting. They are painting relationships.”
“(…) coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.”
“Honesty and humility because a successful coaching relationship requires a high degree of vulnerability, much more than is typical in a business relationship. Coaches need to learn how self-aware a coachee is; they need to not only understand the coachee’s strengths and weaknesses, but also understand how well the coachee understands his or her own strengths and weaknesses.”
2. “Work the team, then the problem”
“His [Bill] first instinct was always to work the team, not the problem. In other words, he focused on the team’s dynamics, not on trying to solve the team’s particular challenges. That was their job. His job was team building, assessing people’s talents, and finding the doers.”
“The five key factors could have been taken right out of Bill Campbell’s playbook. Excellent teams at Google had psychological safety (people knew that if they took risks, their manager would have their back). The teams had clear goals, each role was meaningful, and members were reliable and confident that the team’s mission would make a difference. You’ll see that Bill was a master at establishing those conditions: he went to extraordinary lengths to build safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, and impact into each team he coached. Sheryl Sandberg and I have often lamented that every bookstore has a self-help section, but there isn’t a help-others section. Trillion Dollar Coach belongs in the help-others section: it’s a guide for bringing out the best in others, for being simultaneously supportive and challenging, and for giving more than lip service to the notion of putting people first.”
“There is another, equally critical, factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company. (…) “The objectives were twofold. First, for team members to get to know each other as people, with families and interesting lives outside of work. And second, to get everyone involved in the meeting from the outset in a fun way, as Googlers and human beings, and not just as experts and owners of their particular roles.”
“(…)start by asking what people did for the weekend, or, if they had just come back from a trip, he’d ask for an informal trip report.”
“Getting to the right answer is important, but having the whole team get there is just as important.”
“In our world, the attitude is often first prove to me how smart you are, then maybe I’ll trust you, or at least your intellect. Bill took a different, more patient approach. He started relationships by getting to know the person, beyond their résumé and skill set.”
“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.”
“(…) examined collective intelligence in teams: why are some teams “smarter” than the sum of their individual IQs? The answer is threefold: on the most effective teams everyone contributes rather than one or two people dominating discussions, people on those teams are better at reading complex emotional states, and . . . the teams have more women. This can be partly explained by the fact that women tend to be better at reading emotional states than men.”
3. “First, he only coached the coachable.”
“Bill’s opposition to bullshitters wasn’t as much about their dishonesty with others as it was about their dishonesty with themselves. To be coachable, you need to be brutally honest, starting with yourself.”
“not tell you what to do. He believed that managers should not walk in with an idea and “stick it in their ear.” Don’t tell people what to do, tell them stories about why they are doing it.”
“He was highly selective in choosing his coachees; he would only coach the coachable, the humble, hungry lifelong learners. He listened intently, without distraction. He usually didn’t tell you what to do; rather, he shared stories and let you draw conclusions. He gave, and demanded, complete candor. And he was an evangelist for courage, by showing inordinate confidence and setting aspirations high.”
“A big turnoff for Bill was if they were no longer learning. Do they have more answers than questions? That’s a bad sign!”
4. “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.”
“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.”
“Humility, because Bill believed that leadership is about service to something that is bigger than you: your company, your team.”
TIP: “(…) there were always five words written on the whiteboard, indicating the topics to discuss that day.”
“If you’ve been blessed, be a blessing.”
5. “He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus(…)”
“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. 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.”
“when she was discussing a decision with her team, she always had to be the last person to speak.”
6. “Make the best decision you can, then move on.”
“Do something, even if it’s wrong, Bill counseled. Having a well-run process to get to a decision is just as important as the decision itself, because it gives the team confidence and keeps everyone moving.”
7. “What can’t be tolerated is when the aberrant genius continually puts him-or herself above the team.”
“Never put up with people who cross ethical lines: lying, lapses of integrity or ethics, harassing or mistreating colleagues.”
8. “Publicity is fine if it’s in the service of the company, and indeed, that is part of the CEO’s job.”
“(…) resent that one person seems to get a lot of credit and other, more humble, people, less. Seeking attention is one trait of narcissism,”
“(…) problematic if the rest of the team comes to suspect that the media star is more interested in the spotlight than the team’s success!”
9. “Tell them what problem the consumer has [not which features you want]”
“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.”
10. About Firing People: “Still, the company must move forward, so be careful not to apologize too much”
“Many of the people whom you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with the appropriate level of respect. Still, the company must move forward, so be careful not to apologize too much.”
11. “When he is yelling at you, it’s because he loves you and cares and wants you to succeed”
“Academic studies point out that there is a “compensation effect” between warmth and competence: people tend to assume that people who are warm are incompetent and those who are cold, competent.”
“Academic research, as usual, bears this out, showing that an organization full of the type of “companionate love” that Bill demonstrated (caring, affectionate) will have higher employee satisfaction and teamwork, lower absenteeism, and better team performance”
“The concept of male love is something people aren’t used to talking about. When he is yelling at you, it’s because he loves you and cares and wants you to succeed.”
“He had a way of communicating that he loved you. And that gave him license to tell you that you are full of shit and you can do it better . . . It was never about him. Coming from him, it didn’t hurt when he told you the truth.”
