Photo of Bill Campbell
This book was highly recommended to me by someone else, and it was by sheer coincidence that I had also read another of Eric Schmidt’s books, How Google Works. This could be one of the reasons why I found Trillion Dollar Coach enjoyable. The book is a well-portrayed biography of Bill Campbell, who is considered as many to be a legendary coach who has coached numerous top executives in Silicon Valley.
The foreword, as Adam Grant begins, “I read a story in Fortune about Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret. It wasn’t a piece of hardware or a bit of software. It wasn’t even a product. It was a man.” I couldn’t have agreed more. The knowledge and values Bill taught us were timeless, and he truly knew what it meant to be a true coach.
Eric brings us on a journey to experience Bill’s life, from when he was a small football coach, and note that many consider him a failed one because he didn’t exactly lead his team to numerous victories, to him becoming a CEO of a Fortune 500 company within 5 years of migrating from a football coach. He became the CEO of Intuit and he was coaching many other current (and future) CEOs during that time, such as Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Sheryl Sandberg, and Larry Page to name a few.
Bill’s style of coaching was very different. He was always there to ask questions, and not give you the answers. What he did was ask the best questions so that you could come up with the correct answers yourselves. This style was fundamental to him shaping the mindsets of many. He was also a very ‘people’ person, and he would go to lengths to help anyone if he could, regardless of who that person was - he was even nice to members of the local grocery store members which he frequented.
He was real as well. Real in a sense that he never sugarcoated his words, and was almost always crude with his remarks. However, he did it in such a way that everyone loved him, no matter the things he said because they knew that he was saying it from the bottom of his heart, to help that person improve. He was a big hugger as well. He loved to give people hugs, and that was his trademark.
The book has many solid principles to take away, which I’m sure many will love, but the one that really stuck with me was the ‘Team First approach’. Bill believed that the team was the most important aspect of anything. If there was a huge problem, focus on the team first and the problem will sort itself out. “Work the team, then the problem”, as Eric puts in nicely. Bill loved to give support to the teams, and he would give his whole heart. He was the team’s biggest supporter and would try his best to help them. He always had their backs, and I think this is a key lesson for everyone.
I truly enjoyed my time reading this book, and unlike many other books, this was a rather short book, totalling only around 100 pages of digestible content. A great read to pick up on your commute. It’s simplistically written and highlights many important values which serve as a good reminder that the best things happen when we have Empathy in us.
