Trillion Dollar Coach

trillion_dollar_coach.md

• By Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg about Bill Campbell
• Bill coached Google's top executive and Steve Jobs among many others, who give him huge credit. The book is about what he did and how he did it. This is relevant for management and personal ethics. It mixes inspirational content (especially at the beginning and the end) and concrete techniques (especially in chapter 2).
• The intention behind those notes was more listing my highlights as opposed to summing up (where I'd have paid particular attention to being exhaustive and representative). Although practically, it must not be too far away from it.

• Forewords

  • Bill is better in non-zero-sum games, where giving and making others successful doesn't mean losing but winning, because the game is collaborative as this is the case in companies and management.
  • != mentor, more technical, words of wisdom
  • Bring Safety, Clarity, Meaning, Dependability and Impact into team.

• Chapter 1 - Intro

  • Fame / Credit

    • At his funeral: Larry Page. Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg. Tim Cook. Jeff Bezos. Met Jobs weekly, made his eulogy.
    • Coached Schmidt and other Google's executives and Jobs.
    • Thousand others less notorious such as his driver and caddie. Many consider him one their best friends.

    • We can say, without a doubt, that Bill Campbell was one of the people most integral to Google’s success.

  • Career

    • Master degree in education, sport coach
    • At 39, entering the business world, quickly becoming an executive
    • Fought against firing Jobs, for the 1984 ad
    • Then became a coach again, but in the business world

  • Personality

    • Hard worker at school and in work
    • Highly compassionate
    • Many would describe him as their best friend
    • Hugging, candid, cursing culture
    • Took time for people

  • What he did

    • Concretely
      • Meet us individually every week or two
      • Phone calls
      • Was around, met and discussed with employees
    • About the challenges
      • Managed the tension between two forces:
        • Collaboration, teams. Not individuals, not problems. Community, support.
        • This conflicts with Egos, competition, politics...
      • The tension is necessary if you want to have things done, but it's hard to balance.

      • He made sure the team was communicating, that tensions and disagreements were brought to the surface and discussed, so that when the big decisions were made, everyone was on board, whether they agreed or not.

    • About the solutions
      • developing strong mechanisms for making decisions and resolving conflicts.
      • He came to master the art of identifying tensions among teammates and figuring out how to resolve them.
      • Managers need to also be coach
        • Coach the managers to become coaches. And an essential component of high-performing teams is a leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.
        • Everybody needs to be a coach because a) a coach isn't always there b) you can't put a coach behind everybody
        • Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach. You need to, according to a 1994 study, go beyond the “traditional notion of managing that focuses on controlling, supervising, evaluating and rewarding/punishing” to create a climate of communication, respect, feedback, and trust. All through coaching.

  • The book structure

    • After Forewords and Chapter 1, which are intros and overview, 3 pillars, both what to achieve and how to:
      • Details – One on one, ...
      • Trust –
      • Team
      • Love –

• Chapter 2 – Details

  • Role of a manager

    • [Engineer] like being managed, as long as their manager was someone from whom they could learn something, and someone who helped make decisions.

    • “You have to think about
      • how you’re going to run a meeting,” he told a group of Googlers in a management seminar. “How you’re going to run an operations review.
      • You’ve got to be able to look at someone in a one-on-one and know how to help them course correct.
      • People who are successful run their companies well. They have good** processes**,
      • they make sure their people are accountable,
      • they know how to hire great people, how to evaluate them and
      • give them feedback, and they pay them well.
    • Bill was very good at making sure that it’s a results-oriented game.

      • monitoring, targeting, and incentives, performed much better than other plants.

    • Listen, don't give orders
      • The right decision isn't necessarily technical. It's more in a fair and respectful process.

      • 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.”

    • usually to make sure that there was a strong operating plan to accompany the strategy.
      • What were the current crises? How quickly were we going to manage our way out of them? How was hiring going? How were we developing our teams? How were our staff meetings going? Were we getting input from everyone? What was being said, what wasn’t being said? He cared that the company was well run, and that we were improving as managers.
    • 3 points of a good manager to establish the right climate:
      • 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 spend their time thinking how they can make you better.
      • lie awake at night thinking about how to make you better. more successful and better well being
      • They are painting relationships. Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how they are going to make someone else better.
    • Take the time to really know your people, informally
    • Make sure everybody understood the same. Repetition

  • Meetings

    • Ensure people understood the same thing
    • Get to the right debates
    • Make decisions

  • One on one

    • The most important meeting. Well prepared.
    • Have each person bring five words about things to discuss, merge them. That's a good prioritizing exercise.
    • Ask about:
      • Performance
      • Relationship with peers, very important.
      • Teams: Do we know what they're doing
      • Innovation: What can get better? Do you document yourself on what's new?

  • Communication

    • Synchronous calls, no too much delay. Also for feedback.

  • Emails

    • Directly from top mgmt to everyone rather than cascading

  • Decision making

    • The rule of two:

      • Schmidt 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. The team almost always agreed with their recommendation, because it was usually quite obvious that it was the best idea. The rule of two not only generates the best solution in most cases, it also promotes collegiality. It empowers the two people who are working on the issue to figure out ways to solve the problem, a fundamental principle of successful mediation.13 And it forms a habit of working together to resolve conflict that pays off with better camaraderie and decision making for years afterward.*14

    • He didn’t encourage democracy.

      • to put off the finality of a scene until the last possible moment.
      • get all of the opinions and ideas out in the open, on the table for the group to discuss. Air the problem honestly, and make sure people have the opportunity to provide their authentic opinions, especially if they are dissenting.
      • If the problem or decision at hand is more functional in nature (for example, primarily a marketing or finance decision), then the discussion should be led by the person with that functional expertise.
      • When it is a broader decision cutting across multiple functional areas, then the team leader owns the discussion.
      • Regardless, it should involve everyone’s point of view.
      • To get those ideas on the table, Bill would often sit down with individuals before the meeting to find out what they were thinking.
        • This enabled Bill to understand the different perspectives, but more important, it gave members of his team the chance to come into the room prepared to talk about their point of view. Discussing it with Bill helped gather their thoughts and ideas before the broader discussion. Maybe they would all be aligned by the time they got there, maybe not, but they had already thought through, and talked through, their own perspective and were ready to present it.
      • Call them debates rather than disagreement. Make sure people have a team-first rather than me-first mentality.
      • when the manager in charge of the decision already knows what to do (or thinks she does): Getting to the right answer is important, but having the whole team get there is just as important.
      • Don't rob the solution from the team.

    • When the best idea doesn’t emerge,

      • it’s time for the manager to force the decision or make it herself.
      • Failure to make a decision can be as damaging as a wrong decision. There’s indecision in business all the time, because there’s no perfect answer. Do something, even if it’s wrong, Bill counseled. Having a well-run process to get to a decision is just as important as the decision itself, because it gives the team confidence and keeps everyone moving. Bruce Chizen, the former CEO of Adobe who worked with Bill at Claris, calls this “making decisions with integrity,” which means following a good process and always prioritizing what is the right thing for the business rather than any individual. 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.

    • How to? Fall back on principles

      • DEFINE THE “FIRST PRINCIPLES” FOR THE SITUATION, THE IMMUTABLE TRUTHS THAT ARE THE FOUNDATION FOR THE COMPANY OR PRODUCT, AND HELP GUIDE THE DECISION FROM THOSE PRINCIPLES.

  • Good performers, Poor collaborator

    • ABERRANT GENIUSES—HIGH-PERFORMING BUT DIFFICULT TEAM MEMBERS—SHOULD BE TOLERATED AND EVEN PROTECTED, AS LONG AS THEIR BEHAVIOR ISN’T UNETHICAL OR ABUSIVE AND THEIR VALUE OUTWEIGHS THE TOLL THEIR BEHAVIOR TAKES ON MANAGEMENT, COLLEAGUES, AND TEAMS.

  • Money isn't about money

    • COMPENSATING PEOPLE WELL DEMONSTRATES LOVE AND RESPECT AND TIES THEM STRONGLY TO THE GOALS OF THE COMPANY.

  • Innovation & strategy

    • Bill was at a meeting with one of those product managers, who presented his engineers with a list of features he wanted them to build. Bill told the poor product manager, if you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street. You tell them what problem the consumer has.

    • Have tech discuss with product a lot.

    • THE PURPOSE OF A COMPANY IS TO BRING A PRODUCT VISION TO LIFE. ALL THE OTHER COMPONENTS ARE IN SERVICE TO PRODUCT.

  • Board relationship

    • IT’S THE CEO’S JOB TO MANAGE BOARDS, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

    • Send in advance and require preparation.
    • And when we say expect, we mean expect: board members who don’t do their homework shouldn’t stick around.
    • the operations review included a thorough set of highlights and lowlights. Here’s what we did well and what we’re proud of; here’s what we didn’t do so well.
    • A company that is honest with its board can be honest with itself, too; people learn that not only is it okay to frankly share bad news, it’s expected. Determining lowlights is an important task, something to be handled by people running the business, not left to support functions such as finance or communications. At Google, we had product managers handle the task.

• Chapter 3 – Trust

  • Trust means
    • people feel safe to be vulnerable.
    • you keep your word
    • loyalty
    • integrity = honesty and trust that the other will deliver what's promised.
    • discretion
  • It should make it easier to disagree with someone
  • Get to know the people personally
  • Establish a climate where it's ok to be yourself fully
  • Who deserves trust?
    • Be coachable. This means:
      • Openness to learn new things, be curious
      • Work hard
      • Honesty
        • Coaches need to learn how self-aware a coachee is; they need to not only understand the coachee’s strengths and weaknesses, but also understand how well the coachee understands his or her own strengths and weaknesses.
      • Humility
        • "servant leadership"
    • The inverse of this is a bullshiter.
  • Listening & Maieutic
    • 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.
    • Bill wouldn't answer even Jobs's calls when he was with someone.
    • “Bill would never tell me what to do,” says Ben Horowitz. “Instead he’d ask more and more questions, to get to what the real issue was.”
    • Listening well helps ensure that all ideas and perspectives get surfaced.
    • “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.1
  • Be honest
    • Bill was always 100 percent honest (he told the truth) and candid (he wasn’t afraid to offer a harsh opinion). A straight shooter if there ever was one.
      • Bill’s candor worked because we always knew it was coming from a place of caring.
      • being a great boss means “saying what you really think in a way that still lets people know you care.”
    • Not to wait
      • An important component of providing candid feedback is not to wait. “A coach coaches in the moment,” Scott Cook says. “It’s more real and more authentic, but so many leaders shy away from that.”
      • Many managers wait until performance reviews to provide feedback, which is often too little, too late. Bill’s feedback was in the moment (or very close to it), task specific, and always followed by a grin and a hug, all of which helped remove the sting.
    • never embarrass someone publicly.
      • “When I’m really annoyed or frustrated with what someone is doing,” she says, “I step back and force myself to think about what they are doing well and what their value is. You can always find something. If we’re in public, I’ll praise them on that. I’ll give constructive feedback as soon as I can, but only when the person is feeling safe. Once they are feeling safe and supported, then I’ll say ‘by the way’ and provide the feedback. I got this from Bill. He would always do this in a supportive way.”

    • BE RELENTLESSLY HONEST AND CANDID, COUPLE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK WITH CARING, GIVE FEEDBACK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, AND IF THE FEEDBACK IS NEGATIVE, DELIVER IT PRIVATELY.

  • Don't tell people what to do

    • DON’T TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO DO; OFFER STORIES AND HELP GUIDE THEM TO THE BEST DECISIONS FOR THEM.

  • Push for Courage

    • BELIEVE IN PEOPLE MORE THAN THEY BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES, AND PUSH THEM TO BE MORE COURAGEOUS.

  • Full identity

    • PEOPLE ARE MOST EFFECTIVE WHEN THEY CAN BE COMPLETELY THEMSELVES AND BRING THEIR FULL IDENTITY TO WORK.

• Chapter 4 – Team

  • Team first

    • Charles Darwin said it best in his book The Descent of Man: “A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.

    • “Bill didn’t work the problem first, he worked the team. We didn’t talk about the problem analytically. We talked about the people on the team and if they could get it done.”

    • Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed?

  • How to pick?
    • 4 things:
      • Smart – being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.”
      • Work hard
      • High integrity
      • Grit – The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.
    • he wouldn’t just ask about what a person did, he would ask how they did it.
    • turnoff for Bill was if they were no longer learning. Do they have more answers than questions? That’s a bad sign!
    • Team & Company first
      • “people who understand that their success depends on working well together, that there’s give-and-take—people who put the company first.”
      • I overindex on those signals when people give something up.* And also when someone is excited because something else is working well in the company. It isn’t related to them, but they are excited. I watch for that.
      • when change happens, the priority has to be what is best for the team.
      • “There are people who are team players and really care about the company. When they speak up, it matters a lot to me because I know they are coming from the right place.”
      • Bill was attracted to people who were “difficult”—more outspoken in their opinions, occasionally abrasive, not afraid to buck trends or the crowd.
      • 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.
    • Compose a team of complementary
      • Not everyone has all, what matters is complementarity.
      • Bill appreciated high cognitive abilities, but he also understood the value of soft skills, like empathy, that aren’t always valued in businesses, especially tech ones.
    • Mindset > Experience
      • He did not overemphasize experience. He looked at skills and mind-set, and he could project what you could become.
  • Involve the people who might disagree early in a project
  • Pair people

    • PEER RELATIONSHIPS ARE CRITICAL AND OFTEN OVERLOOKED, SO SEEK OPPORTUNITIES TO PAIR PEOPLE UP ON PROJECTS OR DECISIONS.

  • Peer feedback survey
    • Asking feedback from the peers regularly.
  • Spot the elephant in the room early
    • “With Bill there was never an elephant in the room.” Or, more accurately, there might have been an elephant, but it wasn’t hiding in the corner. Bill wouldn’t allow that. He brought the thing front and center.
    • saying that things are getting “political,” = problems have arisen because the data or process hasn’t led to the best decision
    • own diligence in tackling the toughest, ugliest problems head-on.

    • IDENTIFY THE BIGGEST PROBLEM, THE “ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM,” BRING IT FRONT AND CENTER, AND TACKLE IT FIRST.

    • One way Bill was able to accomplish this trick was by staying relentlessly positive. It would be easy to dismiss this attitude as mere cheerleading, except that he was also relentless in identifying and addressing problems, which cheerleaders don’t do.

    • AIR ALL THE NEGATIVE ISSUES, BUT DON’T DWELL ON THEM. MOVE ON AS FAST AS POSSIBLE.

  • Winning right
    • High level of commitment. No being late, ...
  • Loyalty

    • WHEN THINGS ARE GOING BAD, TEAMS ARE LOOKING FOR EVEN MORE LOYALTY, COMMITMENT, AND DECISIVENESS FROM THEIR LEADERS.

    • Don't tolerate a lack of loyalty.
  • Monitor carefully
    • he’d work behind the scenes, drawing out people’s points of view, closing communication gaps, and fixing miscommunications, so that when the time came to discuss things in the meeting and make the decision, everyone was prepared.

    • LISTEN, OBSERVE, AND FILL THE COMMUNICATION AND UNDERSTANDING GAPS BETWEEN PEOPLE.

  • Chapter closing words

    • Bill Campbell employed all of these techniques, from hiring well (pick the right players) to promoting gender diversity (get to the table) to taking care of small misunderstandings before they become big (fill the gaps between people), to help teams achieve greatness. And the essence of Bill was the essence of just about any sports coach: team first.

    • All players, from stars to scrubs, must be ready to place the needs of the team above the needs of the individual. Given that commitment, teams can accomplish great things. That’s why, when faced with an issue, his first question wasn’t about the issue itself, it was about the team tasked with tackling the issue. Get the team right and you’ll get the issue right.

• Chapter 5 – Love

  • “To care about people you have to care about people.”

  • Tough love

    • “The concept of male love is something people aren’t used to talking about. When he is yelling at you, it’s because he loves you and cares and wants you to succeed.”

    • The reason Bill was able to get away with his hugs-and-curses approach was that all of his behavior was rooted in his heart: it came from love.

  • Enthusiasm

    • “When Bill walked into the office at Benchmark, it was like a party arriving,”

    • not a dry, boring, revenue-driven board reaction. He’d be out of his seat, an explosion of emotion.” The effect of this wasn’t so much about the approval of the product. It was about approval of the team.

  • Care

    • 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.

    • He created a culture of what people who study these things call “companionate” love: feelings of affection, compassion, caring, and tenderness for others.

    • How to

      • faking it won’t work. Repeat: don’t fake it!

      • But practice will help

      • Bill was perhaps the most “people person” we’ve ever met. So how does someone who isn’t so naturally inclined to love people do it? Practice.

  • Community

    • The common thread with all these trips? Community. Bill built community instinctively. He knew that a place was much stronger when people were connected.

  • Being a giver

    • “being an effective giver isn’t about dropping everything every time for every person. 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.”

    • Put people in touch

      • I’ll put you in touch. Minutes later the email would be on its way. He didn’t do this randomly or for the sake of it; he made a quick calculation that the connection would be beneficial for both people.

  • Special love for Founders

    • Because they bring vision

      • But when we reduce company leadership to its operational essence, we negate another very important component: vision.

    • After a few weeks, he [Bill] reported back to the board that Jeff Bezos needed to stay as CEO. In his book about Amazon, The Everything Store, Brad Stone writes 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.”

    • Vision is an important role. Heart and soul matter.