I started reading a very interesting book called “Trillion Dollar Coach”, a book about Bill Campbell and his coaching style written by Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice Presidents of Products at Google, and Alan Eagle, former Google Director.
Let’s get straight to it, who was Bill Campbell?
Bill was one of the most iconic and admired coaches in Silicon Valley.
He was mentor, coach and friend of people like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sanberg and Marissa Mayer, just to name a few.
Why did I choose this book?
Quite randomly, I was always fascinated by Bill Campbell’s character, and I was aware of this book published in 2019, but it was only after listening to a Tim Ferris podcast episode with Eric Schmidt that I decided to put it in my reading list.
Bill Campbell’s career was incredible because he was a football player and then a football coach who switched to corporate life.
A very passionate coach, with great empathy and a strong focus on coaching teams not individuals.
Bill History
Bill played for Columbia University in Manhattan where he quickly got respect from coaches and teammates for his on-field intelligence.
He always had a team focus, instead of a “me” focus which was decisive for his football career and later on for his business career.
When he was 39 he left football and joined the business career working in companies like Kraft, Kodak and then landing in Apple where he quickly became VP of Sales and Marketing.
In 1994 he became CEO of Intuit leading the company until 2000.
After this adventure, thanks to John Doer of Kleiner Perkins, one of the best performing venture capital firms, he started a successful career path as executive coach.
Indeed, Bill was a key ingredient for the success of Google, Apple and Amazon, because he was able to coach high performance teams looking at them as communities, which is not an easy task.
In fact here you face at the same time shared interest and conflicts due to individual differences.
But Campbell’s philosophy was always stronger than personal ego: success will arrive if we act like communities and not like individuals.
This culture, easy to tell and hard to implement, will not only impact on the overall team performance, but also will reduce stress and job burnout.
In general I am always fascinated by high performance coaches, from sport to business, because the psychological challenge of managing smart, aggressive, ambitious people with large egos it’s far from simple.
This is also the reason why one of my favourite books is “Leading” the story of Sir Alex Ferguson, former Manchester United manager.
But while in sports roles are well defined by a clear physical and technical performance, in business for example there are conflicts for the same career promotion with higher political dynamics.
Corporations are a tough social environment where selfish people can beat the altruistic ones damaging the company.
Indeed on the other hand people who subordinate individual performance to that of the group will generally outperform teams that don’t.
This topic is well known in academia and some researchers also tried to codify how to manage these selfish situations and how teams should work all together looking at the big picture.
“Generalising the Core Design Principles of the Efficacy of Group” is a paper published in 2013 about this topic that is worth a look.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268112002697
Moulding a team, smoothing tensions and conflicts inside the organisation is not an easy job, that’s why a coach can be a success activator.
Like enzymes working as biological catalysts, coaches can help corral teams of rivals into communities.
Not all the managers like business coaches
It’s worth noting that not all the managers like business coaches. The more insecure the manager is, the less they like the idea of a coach analysing their behaviour or even simply attending a staff meeting.
In my working experience it happened at least two times that after suggesting the evaluation of a business coach I got a big “NO” in reply, because it was not needed.
Quite funny, that while the same people need a gym coach or a nutritionist, they think they don’t need a business coach.
But it’s also natural, “No” was the first reply Eric Schmidt gave to John Doer when he suggested hiring Bill as business coach.
Just to be clear, a business coach is not someone who tells you what to do, but who asks you the right questions to see goals, behaviours and threats from a different perspective.
Business coaches are not only outside consultants, but the same company managers need to learn how to be good coaches.
It’s critical with high performing individuals to go beyond the classic “control/evaluate/reward and punish” .
What’s Next?
I think this introduction to business coaches, its role and outputs, was critical to have a glimpse on why Bill Campbell was so respected and recognized to the point where the former Google CEO wrote a book about it.
The book is divided in 4 sections describing what Bill was communicating and how he was coaching, but as already stressed in the book, he was a “unicum”.
The 4 sections are the following:
- How Bill got the details right in the management skills ranging from one-o-one and staff meeting to handling challenging employees
- How he built trust with the people he worked with
- How he built and created teams
- How he made it ok to bring love into the workplace.
On these 4 points I will write in the future specific posts to summarise my learnings.
It seems an interesting reading, even though I am still at the beginning and I’ve fallen behind on my roadmap, but I already have a positive opinion about it.
See you for the next chapters!
