Trillion Dollar Coach - Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle
One-Sentence Summary:
As the coach to the CEO/Founder of many world-changing companies, the book can be summarized by the introduction to Bill Campbell’s manifesto: 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.
Rating On Time Of Review:
It’s one of the few books that define what I want to do with my life. A one of a kind book 10/10.
Book notes below. My thoughts are in italics. Opinions are mine during the time of review.
Date Reviewed: July 13, 2020
Chapter 1 - The Caddie and the CEO
Bill ended his career as the coach for the Columbia football team and joined the ad agency J.Walter Thompson at age 39. Fascinating to see such a shift in what others might consider late in his career. Reminder that Bill had not seen much success as a coach at Columbia.
Bill then made his way to be CEO of Claris, a spin-off of Apple that didn’t work out. Then, he became CEO of a startup that was the precursor to the Palm Pilot, then he became CEO of Intuit after John Doer recommended him to Scott Cook (CEO of Intuit at the time).
**Bill’s coached: Eric Schmidt, Google co-founders, Steve Jobs, Brad Smith (CEO of Intuit), John Donahoe of eBay, Al Gore, Dick Costolo of Twitter, Ben Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gurley, Sundar Pichai, Diane Green of VMware, Dan Rosensweig of Chegg, John Hennessy of Stanford, Sheryl Sandberg and many others.
Google’s early focus (first factor for success) was on attracting ‘smart creatives’ and building an environment for these employees to succeed. They defined smart creatives as such: “… someone who combines technical depth with business savvy and creative flair.”
A second factor focused on building communities that would allow employees to put aside differences to collectively obsess with what’s good for the company. They found that it led to higher engagement/productivity and lower burnout.
Google found the value of a coach came to nurture the community by smoothing the tensions that rose from placing many smart creatives into a unit. Hence, a coach worked with individuals and teams. Campbell not only worked with Schmidt individually but also partook in staff meetings and teammates.
**“..any company that wants to succeed in a time where technology has suffused every industry and most aspects of consumer life, where speed and innovation are paramount, must have team coaching as part of its culture. Coaching is the best way to mold effective people into powerful teams.” / coaching is also scaleable as the folks you coach will learn the tactics to coach others.
“....the best coach for any team is the manager who leads that team. Being a good coach is essential to being a good manager and leader…. To create a climate of communication, respect, feedback and trust.”
Chapter 2 - Your Title Makes You a Manager. Your People Make You a Leader
“A 2012 study showed that in the video game industry, strong middle management accounted for 22 percent of the variance in revenue, while game creative design accounted for only 7 percent. 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 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.”” / The devil is in the details. I feel like a manager needs to do the unscaleable and actually focus on each individual. To be attentive.
“…as Bill liked to say: “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.”” / the smarter the employee, the less they want to be told what to do. A manager needs to earn trust by giving trust and showing that you care about each of your teammates.
**Bill’s “It’s The People” Manifesto:
“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.”
**“…a 1999 article notes that firms that improve their management practices by one standard deviation above the mean can raise their market value by $18,000 per employee.” / ROI!!!
“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. 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.” / beauty.
Given how 99%… or some large number of companies fail and die… with most dying after obsessing on growth… wouldn’t a focus on people instead allow one to survive a little longer? Isn’t surviving more important in the first 5 years? A thought.
“Bill had us pay close attention to running meetings well; “get the 1:1 right” and “get the staff meeting right” are tops on the list of his important management principles.” / Bill introduced Trip Reports at Google, Twitter and other companies. The idea is to start Monday staff meetings going over trips everyone took on the weekend and go over them. It’s to build rapport and relationships on a personal basis to set the tone for the meeting. It’s never a time suck to build relationships. Given how some 50% of people find meetings useless… having one means making it count.
**Bill would lead coaching sessions by asking the coachees to decide their 5 priority items. These 5 words would be how the coachees decided what they would talk about. Bill believed the 1:1s were the best way to help people be more effective and to grow and develop.
**Bill’s method started as follows: 1) small talk that really wasn’t small. It was a topic about life and that became more important than the business topic. 2) moving to performance to focus on what you were working on, how it was going and how Bill could help 3) then peer relationships (which were considered more important than those with higher-ups)… going into what you think teammates think of you 4) then if you were setting the right goals/direction for the team. Page 51 of book has framework with more questions.
**“[Bill] believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus…intuitively understanding what numerous academics 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.” / this also means that the leader should speak last. That’s what Bill taught Marissa Mayer to do. Doesn’t matter if you know the answer. Let the whole team talk through issues so everyone comes to an understanding. Process over the answer. A manager breaks ties and makes decisions if necessary but the key job is to run the process so all perspectives are heard.
**“Compensating people well demonstrates love and respect and ties them strongly to the goals of the company.” / It’s the gesture and what it’s implying. It’s a signalling device for emotional value.
**“Bill was a business guy, but he believed that nothing was more important than an empowered engineer. His constant point: product teams are the heart of the company.” / Bill made sure the engineers felt they had stature by taking time when he was CEO of Intuit to sit down with all engineering directors every week to learn. He believed: “The purpose of a company is to bring a product vision to life. All the other components are in service to product.”
Chapter 3 - Build an Envelope of Trust
“A slew of academic research bears out what Bill intuitively knew - not just that trust is important, but that it is the first thing to create if you want a relationship to be successful. It is the foundation.” / Bill’s approach wasn’t the “prove to be you’re smart and then I’ll trust you” which is the prevalent view many have now but rather to focus on getting to know the person. Not to judge fast. I think this is very important. That patience is required to build relationships and a company obsessed with executing quickly believing that is the same for people is sorely mistaken.
**How to make best teams (it’s not skills): “The common notions that the best teams are made up of people with complementary skill sets or similar personalities were disproven; the best teams are the ones with the most psychological safety. And that starts with trust.” / How does this work in a world of big-egos? Bill only coached the coachable. It’s not about convincing people.
“[Bill] chose the people he was going to work with based on humility…. He thought people who were curious and wanted to learn new things were best suited for this.”
“The traits of coach ability Bill sought were honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning.” / the 3 requirements that make someone coachable.
**“….a 2016 paper finds that this form of “respectful inquiry,” where the leader asks open questions and listens attentively to the response, is effective because it heightens the “follower’s” feelings of competence (feeling challenged and experiencing mastery), relatedness (feeling of belonging) and autonomy (feeling in control and having options). Those three factors are sort of the holy trinity of the self-determination theory of human motivation, originally developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan.” / The 3 motivation factors triggered through curious inquisition. Asking questions shows caring and it makes people feel like they are seen. Hence, leaders need to be those curious in their people’s development.
Bill is what Adam Grant would classify as a “disagreeable giver”. Given how disagreeable my personality results show, this was personally very exciting to see. I felt my personality was weird to be a coach since I’m not ‘agreeable’ but the need for agreeable is a false dichotomy in actually helping people. Because to truly help people, you not only need to support them but demand them to commit to excellence. For that, you need to be disagreeable to help people get their heads out of their asses. But, it’s not about telling them what to do. Rather, it’s to live a curious life to build up stories that you can tell as guides for people to come to their own decisions.
Bill’s approach: “He started by building trust, which only deepened over time. 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.”
Chapter 4 - Team First
Bill built teams. A coach knows where to put the right players.
“So as a coach of teams, what would Bill do? His 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.” / Focus on building the right team to tackle the problem… not the problem first.
“When I became CEO of Google,” Sundar Pichai says, “Bill advised me that at that level, more than ever before, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.”
“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 a impact every day. Doers.”
Chapter 5 - Power of Love
“Bill was a coach of teams and a lover of people. What we learned from him is that you can’t be one without the other.”
“Academic research, as usual bears this out, showing that an organization full of the type of “compassionate love” that Bill demonstrated (caring, affectionate) will have higher employee satisfaction and teamwork, lower absenteeism, and better team performance.” / it seems like a missed opportunity for people to always need academic research or some kind of proof before doing the “right” thing. Some acts like investing in people are so fundamentally obvious if you just ask yourself what you would want. How you would perform best. What company/job requirements you’d need to love every moment of your life…. All of this can be understood with anecdotal evidence. The requirement for research indicates a rather narrow-minded individual.
What’s also awesome about Bill is that he says it like it is. Page 159 has a list of 10 Billisms and most are some kind of insult that would offend any gentle snowflake. But the reality is that if you probably wouldn’t say any of that to someone you knew could take it and someone who actually cared for. Being insulted by such things may actually mean that the person saying isn’t the problem but the person receiving it at times. I think his top Billisms says ‘fuck’ in all of them. And I just love that brashness.
Sounds simple but: “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.”
Bill believed in the special power of founders. He knew the importance of the visions founders had for companies and how that was the heart and soul of the company that could not be replicated by those with operational excellence. In 2000, Amazon’s board considered telling Jeff Bezos to step down from CEO and let his COO (Joe Galli) become CEO. They asked Bill to spend some time with Jeff and reported to the board that Jeff needed to stay on as CEO. Brad Stone also noted in his book The Everything Store that: “Campbell concluded Galli was unnaturally focused on issues of compensation and on perks like private planes, and he saw that employees were loyal to Bezos.” We can only imagine what Amazon would be like today without Bezos and in many ways, Bill was important in contributing to the Amazon of today.
Bill’s principle for founders in management: “love the founders, and ensure they stay engaged in a meaningful way regardless of their operating role.”
Chapter 6 - The Yardstick
“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.”
“The path to success in a fast-moving highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form high-performing teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things. And an essential component of high-performing teams is a leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.”
“[Bill] believed that great products and the teams that create them are at the core of a great company. Everything else should be in service to that core.”
Disclaimer - I’m writing this for myself. For my past, present and future self. Much of what I write is my opinion. If it somehow ignites agreement in you then great, I’d love to hear about it. If it sparks disagreement in you, don’t reach out because I don’t care for it. There always are obvious exceptions and the flawed person in me hasn’t considered them all.