Trillion Dollar Coach

"Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader."

— Bill Campbell

Schmidt was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, and together with Rosenberg and Eagle, who worked with him at Google for more than a decade, earlier wrote How Google Works. This book is about their coach. Bill Campbell was a football coach at Columbia, head of marketing at Apple and CEO of Intuit, and later devoted himself to accompanying leaders like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Schmidt himself; at Google he worked for years without accepting compensation. He died in April 2016, and more than a thousand people came to his funeral in Atherton, California. Among them were many who considered him their coach: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, John Doerr, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, among others. After the funeral, the authors interviewed more than eighty people who knew him to recover his method. The title comes from the companies he helped build, which together came to be worth more than a trillion dollars, a figure never seen before.

Campbell talked like the football coach he had been. He described himself as a simple football coach, swore without embarrassment and gave feedback without beating around the bush. When Apple had to decide whether to run the "1984" commercial during the Super Bowl, his answer was: "Fuck it! Let's run it!" And when a discussion went around in circles without getting anywhere, he closed it with "Cut the shit. Done." That candor, accompanied by evident affection, is what made people listen to him.

Campbell had no written model. What he left were very concrete habits, which the authors organize into four themes.

The first is the leader as coach:

• Grow your people. A manager's main job is to help their people be more effective and grow; results come from there.
• Prepare your one-on-ones. Campbell organized them in four categories: performance against what the job demands, relationship with peers, leadership of their own team and innovation.
• Open the team meeting with the personal. Before the hard topics, ask about the weekend or a trip; it builds trust and gets people to listen to each other.
• Decide when there's no consensus. When the team is divided, decide based on clear principles, and if there's still no agreement, the leader decides.

The second is trust:

• Listen with full attention, without preparing your answer while the other person is talking.
• Be candid and early. Negative feedback is given in private and in the moment, accompanied by genuine interest in the person.
• Coach only the coachable. Honesty, humility, perseverance and openness to learning are the conditions.
• Believe in your people more than they believe in themselves, and push them to be braver.

The third is team first:

• Work the team, then the problem. Faced with any crisis, his first question wasn't what the solution was, but whether the right people were in the right places and working together.
• Hire for smarts and hearts. People who learn fast, work hard, have integrity and put the team ahead of themselves.
• Unblock relationships. When he detected tension between two executives, he put them to work together on a project before the friction reached the table.
• Protect the dignity of whoever leaves. He told Ben Horowitz exactly that: you can't let them keep the job, but you can let them keep their respect.

The fourth is love, the one that most surprises in a business book:

• Do five-minute favors. An introduction, a call, a piece of advice. They cost little to whoever gives them and are worth a lot to whoever receives them.
• Show up when someone is down. He asked about family, greeted people with hugs and showed up when someone was going through a hard time.
• Be clear about your priorities. For years he coached the boys' and girls' flag football teams at Sacred Heart school, and the book tells that, in the middle of practice, he didn't take Steve Jobs's call: the kids came first.

How to start this process? This week, prepare your one-on-ones with Campbell's four categories and ask each person to rate themselves before coming in; the conversation will be about the difference between their rating and yours. In your next team meeting, open with ten minutes of personal topics before the agenda.

As a founder it will help you stop measuring your leadership by the decisions you make and start measuring it by the team you build. And as a mentor to other founders, the book is a good guide to what it means to accompany someone without expecting anything in return.