Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
annotated by Eugene Cheang
Trillion Dollar Coach explores the life and wisdom of Bill Campbell, a legendary business coach who played a crucial role in shaping the leadership and culture of some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies, including Apple, Google, and Intuit. I picked up this book to glean insights from Campbell’s coaching philosophy and distill the distinguishing characteristics of an effective leader.
- For any situation, Bill believes in defining 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.
- He believes in operational excellence, putting people first, being decisive, communicating well, knowing how to get the most out of even the most challenging people, focusing on product excellence, and treating people well when they are let go.
- Five factors of successful teams (from Project Aristotle): Safety, Clarity, Meaning, Dependability, and Impact. Bill’s leadership style also shares these key similarities.
- Bill didn't fit the typical football coaching mold. He disagreed with the idea of dispassionate toughness and believed that neither players nor coaches should ignore feelings and push everybody and everything to their limits.
- People knew that if they took risks, their manager would have their back. The teams had clear goals, each role was meaningful, and members were reliable and confident that the team’s mission would make a difference.
- “You replace a kid with another kid; you take an older guy and replace him with a younger guy. That is the nature of the game. Survival of the fittest. The best players play.”
- QUESTION: To what degree is the victor/commander mindset irrelevant in contemporary leadership?
- Teams should act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company. A shared understanding of what benefits the company provides a clear guide for individuals to discern how they can contribute most effectively.
- The most important currency in a relationship—friendship, romantic, familial, or professional—is trust.
- To team leaders, he said, " Leadership is not about you; it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team.” He believed that good leaders grow over time and that leadership accrues to them from their teams.
- To team members, he’d say, “Think about how you can contribute to the good of the company.”
- Bill has a penchant for connecting people to others. You would be talking to him about something and he would say, you should talk to so-and-so, 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 ot; he made a quick calculation that the connection would be beneficial for both people. Which is a pretty good definition of community.
- It’s okay to help people. Do favors. Apply judgment in making sure that they are the right thing to do, and ensure that everyone will be better off as a result. Then do the favor.
- Bill outlines the overarching goals for each role within the team and subsequently delves into the "how" in various sections of the book.
- Bill emphasizes that leaders must inherently possess goodness and be held to a high standard of morality. Here the book mentions some tactical tips:
- As leaders, we need to get better: a higher level of honesty, a better understanding of people and management. Only then can we establish trust and loyalty in people to build a cohesive and motivated team.
- “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.”
- Be 100% substance. Not 90% style, 10% substance.
- You cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.
- Be fully yourself—your best self in the making. This means, while you’re perpetually a work-in-progress, endeavor to bring the best conceivable version of yourself to work.
- At this level, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.
- You can’t lead without talking about winning. But winning isn’t everything. Winning right is.
- When things are going bad, teams are looking for even more loyalty, commitment, and decisiveness from their leaders.
- The moment I truly lost them was when I didn’t rally the team, didn't show them loyalty, and didn’t make decisions that might help them. I just yelled at them.
- 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.
- A coachable person is honest, humble, willing to persevere and work hard, and open to learning.
- He would never tell anybody what to do. Instead he’d ask more and more questions, to get to what the real issue was.
- He looks for people who are smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. He called this ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.
- Keep note of the times they give up things, and when they are excited for someone else’s success.
- In short, he looks for people who show up, work hard, and have an impact every day. Doers.
- He looked at skills and mindset, and he could project what you could become.
- To Bill, his answer to the question of “what keeps you up at night?” is always the well-being and success of his people.
- He said, “Think that everyone who works for you is like your kids. Help them course correct, make them better.”
- Bill set high standards for his coachees; he believed they could be great, greater than what they believed. This created an aspiration for each of us, and disappointment when we thought that we were not living up to that aspiration. Bill set the bar higher for us than we set it for ourselves, and when you approach people with that mindset, they respond.
- Trust means you keep your word. If you told Bill you were going to do something, you did it. And the same applied to him, his word was always good.
- Leading teams becomes a lot more joyful when you know and care about people.
- He didn’t separate the human and working selves; he just treated everyone as a person: professional, personal, family, emotions…all the components wrapped up in one. And if you were one of his people, he cared about you fiercely and genuinely.
- It’s okay to love. That people in your team are people, that the whole team becomes stronger when you break down the walls between the professional and human personas and embrace the whole person with love.
- He holds a special reverence for—and protect—the people with the most vision and passion for the company.
- QUESTION: Define “care.” The word is often taken at face value, and its nuanced meanings are often overlooked.
- A team's goal is to produce results. Bill brought people together and created a strong team culture, but never lost sight of the fact that results mattered, and that they were a direct result of good management. He focuses on the finer details of everyday interactions, emphasizing that they are the social glue holding our relationships together.
- On communication: Bill urged leaders to pay close attention to running meetings well and to see them as opportunities to create moments that inspire and enhance cooperation.
- He’s always concise, clear, and compassionate in his writing. “When Jonathan’s father passed away, Bill wrote, “I am so sorry I didn’t get to know him. He would be very proud of his loving son…”
- “Ben, you cannot let him keep his job, but you absolutely can let him keep his respect.”
- 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.
- Adam Grant calls these “disagreeable givers.” As leaders, we often feel torn between supporting and challenging others. It’s tough love.
- “How’s it going? What are you working on?” are as good a starter as any for developing that personal connection.
- Get up and support the teams, show the love for the work they are doing. Get excited!
- Trip Report: When everyone had come into the room and gotten settled, he’d start by asking what people did for the weekend, or if they had just come back from a trip, he’d ask for an informal trip report. This simple communications practice—getting people to share stories and be personal with each other—was, in fact, a tactic for better decision-making and camaraderie.
- IMPORTANT: The manner and content of your communication are crucial for building trust in any relationship. Mastering what to say, how to say it, and the timing requires a profound understanding of circumstantial nuances.
- IMPORTANT observation that Bill does not like to play kabuki either. Don’t dance around the question if you don’t know the answer. Say you don’t know!
- Board members need to do their homework before meeting.
- To truly include everyone, everyone needs to be at the table.
- When business decisions were being discussed, he wanted everyone to weigh in, regardless of whether the issue touched on their functional area.
- He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus. Consensus leaders 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. The team leader owns the discussion, but everyone’s point of view should be involved.
- As people present and argue ideas, things may become heated. That’s to be expected and is fine.
- On communication: Bill urged leaders to pay close attention to running meetings well and to see them as opportunities to create moments that inspire and enhance cooperation.
- Final paragraph with further reflections:
- Establish foundational truths instead of relying on analogies or previous methods to gain strategic clarity of both the problem and the solution.
- The book provides numerous examples to illustrate Bill’s leadership philosophy and give shape to the characterization future leaders should aspire to embody. Unsuspecting readers are likely to take the virtues mentioned at face value and are not equipped with clarifications to fully comprehend their profundity. For instance, what does it mean to “care” for others or to be “better”? What is a “higher standard of morality?”
- Experience without reflection teaches merely tactical knowledge, offering only partial wisdom that fails to influence convincingly when imparted to others.
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