Trillion Dollar Coach
Insider account of Bill Campbell's coaching of Google's leadership.
Summary
Schmidt, Rosenberg and Eagle document the coaching practice of Bill Campbell, a former college football coach who became a technology executive at Apple and Intuit and then coached the leadership of Google, Apple, Amazon and many startups until his death in 2016. He never took equity for coaching and never spoke publicly about it, so this is the primary record.
The practices they document are specific. Campbell started every meeting with personal conversation before business, on the argument that people work as whole people rather than as functions. He insisted that the manager's first job was the team rather than the individual, and that a leader facing a decision should first ask whether the right team is in place. He argued that the leader's role in a disagreement is to ensure the debate happens fully rather than to arbitrate early, and that decisions should be made rather than deferred once the argument has been heard.
He made a distinction between managing and coaching, and he coached only people who were coachable, which he defined as honest, humble, persistent and willing to listen. He worked on relationships between executives rather than on individual performance alone, on the argument that most executive team failure is relational rather than technical.
The book is written by his admirers and is uncritical. It contains no evidence beyond testimony, and the sample is executives at extraordinarily successful companies, which makes attribution impossible. The practices are stated concretely enough to apply, and the material on running executive teams and on the coach's role in surfacing rather than settling disagreements is the most useful part.
Key takeaways 8
- A manager's first responsibility is the team as a unit rather than the individuals in it, and most problems attributed to individuals are team problems.
- Every meeting should begin with personal conversation, because the relationship is what makes the difficult conversations possible later.
- A leader's job in a disagreement is to make sure the debate happens completely, and then to decide, rather than to arbitrate before the arguments are out.
- Coaching only works with people who are honest, humble and willing to listen, and time spent on those who are not is wasted.
- Executive team failures are usually relational rather than technical, so the work is on the relationships between the people rather than on their individual capability.
- Decisions about people should be made quickly once the evidence is clear, and Campbell pushed leaders to act on underperformance they had been avoiding.
- A leader should give people the title and the responsibility before they have fully earned it when the person is on that trajectory, because it accelerates them.
- Loyalty to people, expressed by helping them even when they leave, produces a network that compounds over decades.
Who should read it
Executives running leadership teams who want concrete practices for surfacing disagreement and for treating the team rather than the individual as the unit.
About Eric Schmidt
Former chief executive and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet; earlier chief executive of Novell and CTO of Sun Microsystems.
How Google Works describes the management model Google ran at scale - hiring for learning rate, small engineering teams holding decision rights, and strategy derived from a technical insight rather than from market research. Trillion Dollar Coach records the specific coaching method Bill Campbell used with executives at Google, Apple and Intuit, including how he ran meetings and handled founder-CEO conflict.
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