Trillion Dollar Coach | Bill Campbell

Based on interviews with over eighty people who knew and loved Bill Campbell, Trillion Dollar Coach explains the Coach’s principles and illustrates them with stories from the many great people and companies with which he worked. The result is a blueprint for forward-thinking business leaders and managers that will help them create higher performing and faster moving cultures, teams, and companies.

Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple, and Intuit, fostering deep relationships with Silicon Valley visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. In addition, this business genius mentored dozens of other important leaders on both coasts, from entrepreneurs to venture capitalists to educators to football players, leaving behind a legacy of growing companies, successful people, respect, friendship, and love after his death in 2016.

Below you may find the quotes I have highlighted while I was reading this great book. I hope Bill will manage to touch you with his coaching style:

• Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple, and Intuit, fostering deep relationships with Silicon Valley visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. In addition, this business genius mentored dozens of other important leaders on both coasts, from entrepreneurs to venture capitalists to educators to football players, leaving behind a legacy of growing companies, successful people, respect, friendship, and love after his death in 2016.
• Bill loved shining the spotlight on others but preferred to stay in the shadows himself.
• To be a great manager, you have to be a great coach. After all, the higher you climb, the more your success depends on making other people successful. By definition, that’s what coaches do.
• 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. 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.
• Teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company. Research shows that when people feel like they are part of a supportive community at work, they are more engaged with their jobs and more productive. Conversely, a lack of community is a leading factor in job burnout.
• The trick is to corral any “team of rivals” into a community and get them aligned in marching toward a common goal.
• To balance the tension and mold a team into a community, you need a coach, someone who works not only with individuals but also with the team as a whole to smooth out the constant tension, continuously nurture the community, and make sure it is aligned around a common vision and set of goals. Sometimes this coach may just work with the team leader, the executive in charge. But to be most effective—and this was Bill’s model—the coach works with the entire team.
• There was only one Bill Campbell, perhaps the most extraordinary individual we have had the pleasure and honor to meet and befriend. But much of the what and the how of his coaching, we believe, can be replicated by others. If you are a manager, executive, or any other kind of leader of teams, in any kind of business or organization, you can be more effective and help your team perform better (and be happier) by becoming the coach of that team.
• Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader.
• 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.”
• Bill liked to say: “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.”
• He once sent a note to a valuable manager who was struggling, counseling him that “you have demanded respect, rather than having it accrue to you. You need to project humility, a selflessness, that projects that you care about the company and about people.”
• People are the foundation of any company’s success. The primary job of each manager is to help people be more effective in their job and to grow and develop. We have great people who want to do well, are capable of doing great things, and come to work fired up to do them. Great people flourish in an environment that liberates and amplifies that energy. Managers create this environment through support, respect, and trust.
• Support means giving people the tools, information, training, and coaching they need to succeed. It means continuous effort to develop people’s skills. Great managers help people excel and grow.
• Respect means understanding people’s unique career goals and being sensitive to their life choices. It means helping people achieve these career goals in a way that’s consistent with the needs of the company.
• Trust means freeing people to do their jobs and to make decisions. It means knowing people want to do well and believing that they will.
• Great coaches lie awake at night thinking. “What keeps you up at night?” is a traditional question asked of executives. For Bill the answer was always the same: the well-being and success of his people.
• Coaches are like great artists getting the stroke exactly right on a painting. They are painting relationships. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how they are going to make someone else better. But that’s what coaches do. It’s what Bill Campbell did, he just did it on a different field.
• Bill and Eric understood that there’s a direct correlation between fun work environments and higher performance, with conversation about family and fun (what academics might call “socioemotional communication”) being an easy way to achieve the former.
• To build rapport and better relationships among team members, start team meetings with trip reports, or other types of more personal, non-business topics.
• Oftentimes, small talk in a work environment is cursory: a quick “how are the kids?” or chatter about the morning commute before moving on to the business stuff. Conversations with Bill were more meaningful and layered; you sometimes got the feeling that the conversation about life was more the point of the meeting than the business topics. In fact, while his interest in people’s lives was quite sincere, it had a powerful benefit: a 2010 study concludes that having these sort of “substantive” conversations, as opposed to truly small talk, makes people happier.
• From the (not so) small talk, Bill moved to performance: What are you working on? How is it going? How could he help? Then, we would always get to peer relationships, which Bill thought were more important than relationships with your manager and other higher-ups.
• Have a structure for 1:1S, and take the time to prepare for them, as they are the best way to help people be more effective and to grow.
• When his team was confronted with a challenging decision, Eric liked to use a management technique he called the “rule of two.” He would get the two people most closely involved in the decision to gather more information and work together on the best solution, and usually they would come back a week or two later having decided together on the best course of action.
• When the best idea doesn’t emerge, it’s time for the manager to force the decision or make it herself. “A manager’s job is to break ties and make their people better,” Bill said. “We’re going to do it this way. Cut the shit. Done.” Bill learned this the hard way: in his days as an exec at Apple he had experienced the exact opposite, a place where decisions festered and the business suffered.
• Make the best decision you can, then move on.
• The Manager’s job is to run a decision-making process that ensures all perspectives get heard and considered, and, if necessary, to break ties and make the decision.
• In any situation there are certain immutable truths upon which everyone can agree. These are the “first principles,” a popular phrase and concept around Silicon Valley. Every company and every situation has its set of them. You can argue opinions, but you generally can’t argue principles, since everyone has already agreed upon them. As Bill would point out, it’s the leader’s job, when faced with a tough decision, to describe and remind everyone of those first principles. As a result, the decision often becomes much easier to make.
• Bill understood something about compensation that many people do not: the money isn’t always about the money. For sure, everyone needs to be paid a fair salary that affords them a good lifestyle. For a great many people, the money is about the money.
• Compensation isn’t just about the economic value of the money; it’s about the emotional value. It’s a signaling device for recognition, respect, and status, and it ties people strongly to the goals of the company. Bill knew that everyone is human and needs to be appreciated. This is why the superstar athlete who is worth tens or hundreds of millions pushes for that next huge contract. It’s not for the money; it’s for the love.
• Compensating people well demonstrates love and respect and ties them strongly to the goals of the company.
• If you have the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can. There are minor things that will go wrong and you have to fix them quickly, but speed is essential.
• 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. Shishir Mehrotra notes that Bill “walked among a set of driven technologists, but he saw the world in a completely different way . . . He saw it as a network of people, learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and learning to trust each other as a primary mechanism of achieving goals.”
• How did Bill do it? First, he only coached the coachable. Then, if you passed that test, he listened intently, practiced complete candor, believed that his coachees could achieve remarkable things, and was intensely loyal.
• 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.
• People who want to get the best out of a coaching relationship need to be coachable.
• 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.”
• Don’t tell people what to do, tell them stories about why they are doing it.
• You need to get people to buy in. It’s like a running back in football.
• Don’t tell people what to do; offer stories and help guide them to the best decisions for them
• One thing we learned from interviewing people for this book was how much Bill encouraged people to be themselves at work, well before the “bringing your whole self” meme became so popular.
• People are most effective when they can be completely themselves and bring their full identity to work.
• He knew, as he often said, that “you can’t get anything done without a team.” This is an obvious point in the realm of sports, but it’s often underappreciated in business. “You can only really succeed and accomplish things through the collective, the common purpose,” Lee C. Bollinger says. “There are so many ways in which people don’t understand this, and even when they do understand it, they don’t know how to do it. That’s where Bill’s genius was.”
• When faced with a problem or opportunity, the first step is to ensure the right team is in place and working on it.
• “If you’re running a company, you have to surround yourself with really, really good people,” Bill said. Not one of his most surprising statements: it is a tired business mantra to always hire people smarter than yourself. “Everybody that is managing a function on behalf of the CEO ought to be better at that function than the CEO. Some of the time, they are going to be wearing their HR hat or their IT hat, but most of the time you want them to be wearing their company hat. These are all smart people that have great capabilities, and what you want to get is the best idea that comes from that group.”
• A big turnoff for Bill was if they were no longer learning. Do they have more answers than questions? That’s a bad sign!
• Sheryl Sandberg says that the first time she met Bill, during her first week at Google in late 2001, he asked her, what do you do here? At the time, Sheryl had been hired with the title of “business unit general manager,” a position that didn’t exist before she arrived. There were, in fact, no business units, so she had nothing to manage. She answered by saying that she used to be at the Treasury Department. He stopped her: okay, but what do you do here? This time, she replied with ideas of what she thought she might do. Bill wasn’t satisfied: but what do you do here? Sheryl finally copped to the truth: so far, she didn’t do anything. “I learned an incredibly important lesson,” she says. “It’s not what you used to do, it’s not what you think, it’s what you do every day.” This is perhaps the most important characteristic Bill looked for in his players: people who show up, work hard, and have an impact every day. Doers.
• All people have their limitations; what’s important is to understand them individually, to identify what makes them different, and then to see how you can help them mesh with the rest of the team.
• As Stanford professor Carol Dweck points out in her 2006 book, Mindset, someone’s true potential is unknowable, since “it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.”
• Peer relationships are critical and often overlooked, so seek opportunities to pair people up on projects or decisions.
• To truly include everyone, everyone needs to be at the table.
• Identify the biggest problem, the “Elephant In The Room,” bring it front and center, and tackle it first.
• You need to commit. You can make mistakes, but you can’t have one foot in and one foot out, because if you aren’t fully committed then the people around you won’t be, either. If you’re in, be in.
• Failure is a good teacher, and Bill learned from these experiences that loyalty and commitment are easy when you are winning and much harder when you are losing. But that’s, as Dan’s story highlights, when loyalty, commitment, and integrity are even more important. When things are going badly, teams need even more of those characteristics from their leaders.
• Leading teams becomes a lot more joyful, and the teams more effective, when you know and care about the people.
• To care about people you have to care about people! You hear over and over again in corporate-speak that a company’s most important asset is its people, that businesses put their people first, that they care about their employees, that blah blah blah. These aren’t necessarily empty words; most companies and executives truly do care about their people. Perhaps just not the whole person.
• “I was always busy going into these meetings, with lots of things to do, but my time with Bill always gave me a sense of perspective. That whatever I was doing was important, but he showed me that what really matters at the end of the day is how you live your life and the people in your life. It was always a lovely reset.”
• None of this feels that novel, does it? When we get together with colleagues, we often inquire about their families. The difference with Bill, and the hard thing to do in a busy business environment, is that he somehow found a way to get to know the families. Many times, he accomplished this simply by taking the questions a few steps beyond the “how are the kids?” norm.
• To care about people you have to care about people: ask about their lives outside of work, understand their families, and when things get rough, show up.
• Cheer demonstrably for people and their successes.
• Bill built community instinctively. He knew that a place was much stronger when people were connected.
• 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.
• Build communities inside and outside of work. A place is much stronger when people are connected. 
• It’s about making sure that the benefits of helping others outweigh the costs to you.” People who do this well are “self-protective givers.” They are “generous, but they know their limits. Instead of saying yes to every request for help, they look for high-impact, low-cost ways of giving so that they can sustain their generosity—and enjoy it along the way.”
• The key is pushing yourself to do it. When you’re in that elevator, passing someone in the hallway, or seeing a group from your team in the cafeteria, take a moment to stop and chat. 
• Loving colleagues in the workplace may be challenging, so practice it until it becomes more natural.
• To be successful, companies need to have teams that work together as communities, where individuals integrate their interests and put aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good and right for the company. Since this doesn’t naturally happen among groups of people, especially high-performing, ambitious people, you need someone playing the role of a coach, a team coach, to make it happen.
• He understood that relationships are built on trust, so he prioritized building trust and loyalty with the people he worked with. He listened completely, was relentlessly candid, and believed in his people more than they believed in themselves. He thought that the team was paramount, insisted on team-first behavior, and when faced with any issue his first step was to look at the team, not the problem. He sought out the biggest problems, the elephants in the room, and brought them front and center, ensuring they got looked at first. He worked behind the scenes, in hallway meetings, phone calls, and 1:1s, to fill communication gaps. He pushed leaders to lead, especially when things were bleak. He believed in diversity and in being completely yourself in the workplace.
• He loved people. He brought that love to communities he created or joined. He made it okay to bring it into the workplace.
• Don’t waste time worrying about the future. Allow serendipity to play a role. Most of the turning points in life cannot be predicted or controlled.
• If you’ve been blessed, be a blessing.