Before reading "Trillion Dollar Coach," I had not been aware of the legendary career of Bill Campbell, for many years Silicon Valley's uber coach to leading executives. Despite his success as a leading executive and coach, during his lifetime Campbell opted to stay out of the public eye - often refusing to step into the limelight. After Campbell's death in 2016, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle got together and decided that an appropriate way to honor Campbell's life and legacy would be to distill his wisdom into a book, sort of a posthumous festschrift. The result of their distillation efforts is this book that is worth its weight in gold.
In his lifetime, Campbell coached football at Columbia University, moved to the business world when Kodak hired him, and then carved out a remarkable third career in Silicon Valley. He founded several successful companies, and began to serve on Boards and to invest in companies and to coach their leaders. The likes of Steve Jobs, Al Gore, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, and Sheryl Sandberg. The total valuation of the leaders he coached is well north of one trillion dollars, hence the book's title. Among those companies are Google, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Intuit, Claris, and Adobe. Campbell served on the Board of Apple, and was instrumental in bringing Steve Jobs back to the helm of the company.
As effective as Bill was in coaching and befriending individual leaders, his real secret sauce was his emphasis on coaching teams of leaders. He was convinced that even in a cutthroat place like Silicon Valley, webs of relationships of trust were essential to success. As a former football coach, he was not averse to dispensing some tough love, telling those he coached the hard truths they needed to hear. But because he had established a strong foundation of trust, and they knew that he was on their side, they were able to hear and accept what would have been painful coming from any other source.
The book is filled with nuggets of gold drawn from Bill Campbell's relationships with those who were eager to share vignettes of their encounters with Coach Bill. The consistent thread that ties these recollections together is Bill's consistent message that addressing the strength and health of the team was usually the straightest path to solving complex problems. In his life, he would go to extreme lengths to be the catalyst who would pull together effective teams - within companies and across corporate boundaries. His annual trips to the Super Bowl became events that numerous individuals looked forward to. The game was secondary; the opportun enjoy the relationships within the traveling group was the primary point of these outings. There were also weekly gatherings at a sports bar in Palo Alto in which Bill was invested to build a sense of community among the participants.
Like any effective executive coach, Bill would abstain from offering his own solutions. He would listen carefully, ask probing questions, challenge assumptions, and over time help the leader he was coaching to arrive at wise decisions on her own. Now, thanks to the work done by this trio of authors, his wisdom and spirit can live on in perpetuity, allowing those of us who did not meet him in his lifetime to encounter him through the reflections of those he invested in.
I recommend this book to anyone who finds himself or herself in the role of coach, as well as those who are leading companies and teams. Campbell was emphatic that any leader worth his salt should also be intentionally coaching those he was leading.
Enjoy!
Al
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