Insight Editions · No. 282
Trillion Dollar Coach
The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle
Three of his coachees set out how Bill Campbell, a former football coach, quietly coached Steve Jobs, Larry Page and a generation of Silicon Valley leaders, and why his real product was teams that act as communities.
A study guide to Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle distil fifteen years of coaching by Bill Campbell, the ex-football coach who advised Steve Jobs, Larry Page and dozens of other leaders, into a manager's playbook. Their claim is that high-performing companies run on teams that behave as communities, and that building them is a coaching job. The best coach for any team is its own manager, so coaching is not a specialist service but the core of management.
The argument in brief
- The question (Foreword). Adam Grant asks how a giver thrived among Valley takers, and reads Google's Project Aristotle findings (psychological safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, impact) as a Campbell playbook.
- The man (Ch. 1). From Homestead, Pennsylvania and a 12-41 record as Columbia's coach to Apple, Claris, GO and Intuit, Campbell then coached Google's leaders from 2001 to 2016, refusing payment (stock he finally took went to charity). His missing ingredient in How Google Works: teams as communities, which need a coach, and the coach must be the manager.
- Management first (Ch. 2). Leadership is conferred by your people and rests on ten basics: people first, trip reports, structured 1:1s (five words on a whiteboard), debate with the leader breaking ties, first principles, protected aberrant geniuses, generous pay, product-first culture, dignified exits and CEO-run boards.
- Trust (Ch. 3). Trust is built first (keep your word, loyalty, integrity and ability, discretion). Coach only the coachable (honest, humble, persevering, learning), listen without distraction, give candour with caring fast and in private, tell stories instead of orders, be an evangelist for courage, and let people bring their whole identity.
- Team first (Ch. 4). Ask who is on the team before what the problem is; hire for smarts, work, integrity and grit; pair peers; bring women to the table; name the elephant; cut short the venting; win right; lead harder in bad times; quietly fill the gaps between people.
- Love (Ch. 5). Companionate love for whole people licensed his hugs, curses and candour: ask about lives and families, cheer loudly, build communities, do five-minute favours, protect founders, and practise until caring comes naturally.
- The yardstick (Ch. 6). Positive human values produce positive business results; his measure was how many people he helped become great leaders.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| Foreword | Foreword by Adam Grant | To manage well you must coach; Project Aristotle reads like Campbell's methods. |
| 1 | The Caddie and the CEO | A failed football coach became the Valley's coach; teams as communities need manager-coaches. |
| 2 | Your Title Makes You a Manager... | Ten operating principles, from 1:1s and tie-breaking to boards, that make people grant you leadership. |
| 3 | Build an Envelope of Trust | Trust first: coach the coachable, listen, candour with caring, stories, courage, whole selves. |
| 4 | Team First | Work the team before the problem: hire, pair, include, confront, and fill the gaps. |
| 5 | The Power of Love | Companionate love licensed his bluntness and built lasting communities and loyalty. |
| 6 | The Yardstick | Success is measured by the leaders you create; having a team is paramount. |
Foreword by Adam Grant
Wharton organisational psychologist Adam Grant frames the book as the answer to a question he could never close: how Bill Campbell thrived as a giver in an industry that supposedly rewards takers. His answer, drawn from the book, is that to be a great manager you have to be a great coach, because the higher you climb, the more your success depends on making others successful.
The man Grant could not profile
Grant first met Campbell on paper, in a Fortune story that called him Silicon Valley's best-kept secret: not a product but a person, a football coach turned sales guy who took a weekly Sunday walk with Steve Jobs and whom the Google founders credited with their survival. The name rang a bell because Grant had taught a Harvard case on a mid-1980s Apple dilemma.
A young Apple manager, Donna Dubinsky, challenged a distribution plan from Steve Jobs himself. Campbell, her boss's boss, gave her football-coach tough love: he tore the proposal apart, pushed her for a stronger one, then stood up for her. The scene holds the book's whole method: demanding and protective at once.
Grant was then writing his book on how helping others drives success (published as Give and Take) and wanted Campbell as a case. The obstacle was that Campbell loved the spotlight on others and kept himself in the shadows, so Grant pieced together a portrait from public scraps and from his protégés.
- Heart over size. Campbell was his high school team's MVP at 5 ft 10 and 165 lb; as a stand-in hurdler who could not jump high enough, he ran straight through the hurdles, bruising his way to the regional championships.
- Captain, then coach. He played at Columbia, was elected captain, and later became head coach there, enduring six straight losing seasons.
- Too caring to win. His weakness was caring about players: he would not bench walk-ons who gave everything or ask stars to put football above school, because he wanted them to succeed in life, not just on the field.
- Strength in business. Old teammates opened the door to business, betting that a weakness in a zero-sum sport would be an asset in companies; he went on to excel at Apple and as CEO of Intuit.
- A web of givers. Valley people known for unusual generosity kept naming Campbell as the source of their worldview. Protégés called him a father and compared him to Oprah, and each call ended with a dozen new names of people he had helped.
- A shut door. When Grant reached Jonathan Rosenberg in 2012, Rosenberg copied Campbell on the thread, and Campbell declined to be featured.
The foreword plants the book's central reversal: the compassion that cost Campbell games in a zero-sum sport is the same trait that made him invaluable in companies, where colleagues' wins add up instead of cancelling out.
Coaching as everyone's job
Grant's verdict, now that the book supplies the answers, is that management success depends on coaching skill. He has taught Wharton's core teamwork and leadership course for a decade, and says Campbell was living theories in the 1980s that researchers would not develop, let alone validate, until decades later; many of his practices are still unstudied. The lessons are timely in a world where careers hinge on relationships, and timeless, since the approach would work in any era.
Coaching is fashionable (executive coaches, speaking coaches), but a hired coach sees only a fraction of the moments where feedback would help. So everyone has to coach: reports, colleagues and sometimes bosses.
Mentors. Dispense words of wisdom and believe in your potential, usually from a distance.
Coaches. Get in the arena to help you realise it: they hold up a mirror to blind spots, hold you accountable for working through sore spots, and take responsibility for your growth without taking credit for it.
Grant does not rank Campbell lightly. He trained as a springboard diver under Olympic coaches and has worked with Brad Stevens of the Boston Celtics; Campbell, he says, invented his own category, because he could coach people doing work he did not himself understand.
Project Aristotle as a Campbell playbook
In 2012, the year he gave up on profiling Campbell, Grant gave a talk at a global Google event on how he would run the company as an organisational psychologist. Having worked with Google's people analytics team, his pitch was to treat teams, not individuals, as the organisation's basic building block. Google went further and launched a study, Project Aristotle, of what distinguished its best teams.
Project Aristotle found five traits; each maps onto a Campbell practice the later chapters describe.
| Trait | What Google found | Campbell's version |
|---|---|---|
| Psychological safety | People take risks knowing the manager has their back | Envelope of trust (Ch. 3) |
| Clarity | Goals are clear | 1:1 agendas, first principles (Ch. 2) |
| Meaning | Each role matters to its holder | It's the people (Ch. 2) |
| Dependability | Members are reliable | Team first, commit or go (Ch. 2, 4) |
| Impact | The mission makes a difference | Evangelist for courage (Ch. 3) |
Grant's claim is that the five read as if lifted from Campbell's playbook, and the chapters show him working hard to build safety, clarity, meaning, dependability and impact into every team he coached.
A book for the help-others shelf
Grant and Sheryl Sandberg have often noted that bookstores have a self-help section but no help-others section; this book belongs in the missing one, as a guide to being supportive and challenging at once and to putting people first in more than words.
- Small choices. Treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect.
- Bigger commitments. Take a sincere interest in your team's lives, to the point of remembering where their kids go to school.
Campbell wanted neither a profile nor a book. But for a man who gave his knowledge away, Grant concludes, open-sourcing his secrets is a fitting tribute.
The Caddie and the CEO
Bill Campbell, a failed football coach who reached Silicon Valley in his forties, became the coach behind Apple, Google and Intuit, helping create well over a trillion dollars of market value. Schmidt, Rosenberg and Eagle argue that his real product was not strategy advice but teams that behave as communities. Because no company can hire a coach for every team, the best coach for any team is the manager who leads it, and coaching is the one management skill that cannot be delegated.
The memorial
On a warm April 2016 afternoon, well over a thousand people filled the football field of Sacred Heart School in Atherton, California, to honour William Vincent Campbell, Jr., dead of cancer at 75. He had been a central figure in technology since moving west in 1983, and the crowd showed it: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mary Meeker, John Doerr, Ruth Porat, Scott Cook, Brad Smith, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, a concentration of industry power rarely seen in one place.
Two of the authors sat among them. Eric Schmidt had joined Google as CEO in 2001 and Jonathan Rosenberg as head of products in 2002; for fifteen years Campbell had met each of them every week or two, working behind the scenes as Google grew from a quirky startup into one of the world's most valuable companies. They called him Coach and friend, and later discovered that a striking number of the people around them considered him their best friend. The open question that afternoon was which luminary would give the first eulogy. (The answer comes later in the chapter, and it was none of them.)
The champion from Homestead
Campbell started his business career late and reached California only in his early forties, yet packed several lifetimes into 75 years. He grew up pugnacious and smart in the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, where his father taught physical education at the high school and moonlighted at the mill.
- Early sense. As a freshman he wrote an April 1955 school-newspaper op-ed telling classmates that nothing would matter more in later life than good grades, and that loafing could cost them success.
- Unlikely hero. A Homestead High football star, he entered Columbia in fall 1958 at roughly 5 ft 10 and 165 lb (the programme listed him at 180). His all-out play and on-field intelligence won over coaches and teammates.
- Captain and champion. In his senior season, 1961, he captained the team, played nearly every minute as linebacker and guard, won All-Ivy honours and helped win the only Ivy League title in Columbia's history.
- The coach's verdict. Coach Buff Donelli called him a "tremendous influence" on the title but noted that a guard his size would normally never make it, because attitude alone is not enough: a coach needs attitude plus players.
- Team first, even then. Campbell credited the title to players working together and to senior leadership.
Too much compassion
Short of money, Campbell paid part of his way through Columbia by driving a cab, learning New York so thoroughly that decades later he argued routes with his longtime driver and friend Scotty Kramer (who says you did not question the coach on New York). He took an economics degree in 1962 and a master's in education in 1964, then became an assistant football coach at Boston College, where he quickly won the respect of peers.
When Columbia asked him back as head coach in 1974, loyalty won. Colleague Jim Rudgers says Campbell was then rated one of the country's best assistants and had an offer to coach at Penn State under Joe Paterno; the authors joke that had he taken it, this might have been a book about a college football legend, read via a Yahoo or Bing search.
- The handicaps. Poor facilities at least a 30-minute bus ride from campus in afternoon traffic, an administration of doubtful commitment to football, and a city in decline.
- The record. 12 wins, 41 losses. The most hopeful season, 1978, opened 3-1-1 and then collapsed in a 69-0 rout by a bigger, deeper Rutgers at Giants Stadium.
- The effort. He worked himself into hospital with exhaustion. Recruiting meant visiting about 100 prospects to land 25, leaving after 4:30 workouts and driving to Albany or Scranton and back overnight to be at his desk next morning.
- The exit. Partway through 1979 he decided to resign, finished the season and left.
Campbell's own diagnosis was not a lack of players but too much compassion. Football, he said, needs dispassionate toughness: push everyone harder, ignore feelings, swap a kid for a better kid or an older player for a younger one, because only the best play. He worried about how players felt and tried to explain what the team was doing, and concluded he was not hard-edged enough.
The authors accept that football may reward dispassion but point to growing evidence that compassion drives business success, citing a 2006 paper by Peter Frost, Jane Dutton, Sally Maitlis, Jacoba Lilius, Jason Kanov and Monica Worline that compiles a century of research on the value of compassion in organisations. The trait that sank Campbell on the field became his edge off it.
Let's run it: a business career at speed
At 39, Campbell joined the ad agency J. Walter Thompson, first in Chicago on the Kraft account, then, months later, back in New York serving Kodak. He impressed the client in Rochester so much with his grasp of their business that Kodak hired him away; by 1983 he was in London as Kodak's head of consumer products for Europe.
A Columbia teammate had introduced him during his 1979 job search to John Sculley, then a senior PepsiCo executive. Campbell turned down Sculley's Pepsi offer, but when Sculley became Apple CEO in 1983 he called again. Campbell, who had married Roberta Spagnola, a Columbia dean, in 1976, moved his young family west. His reasoning: years as a "dumb-ass football coach" had blunted his career and left him behind his peer group, whereas the West was more of a meritocracy where he could move fast and reach the management team. Within nine months he was VP of sales and marketing, charged with launching the Macintosh, the machine meant to replace the Apple II as Apple's flagship.
Apple bought a slot in the Super Bowl in Tampa on January 22, 1984. The ad alluded to Orwell's 1984: a young woman outruns guards, enters a hall of grey, shaven-headed men watching a droning Big Brother on a giant screen, and smashes it with a thrown mallet, while a narrator promises that 1984 "won't be like 1984". Steve Jobs loved it; so did Campbell's boss E. Floyd Kvamme and Campbell. About ten days before the game the board hated it (too costly, too controversial) and asked whether the airtime could be resold. A sales executive found a buyer within days. Asked by Kvamme what to do, Campbell answered with a profane version of "let's run it"; they never told the board or other executives a buyer existed. The spot became the game's most popular ad and one of the most famous commercials ever, launching the era of Super Bowl ads as events; a 2017 Los Angeles Times column called it the only great Super Bowl commercial.
The authors' point: less than five years out of coaching, Campbell had the nerve to back a bold creative call against the board, and was right.
1958-62 Columbia: player, captain, Ivy title (1961), economics degree.
1964 Master's in education; assistant coach at Boston College.
1974-79 Head coach at Columbia; 12-41; resigns.
1979 Joins J. Walter Thompson at 39 (Kraft, then Kodak).
1980 Hired by Kodak; by 1983 head of European consumer products.
1983 Recruited to Apple by Sculley; VP sales and marketing within nine months.
1984 Runs the Macintosh launch and the "1984" ad.
1987 CEO of Claris, Apple's software spin-off.
1991 Leaves Claris for GO Corporation (pen computing); GO closes 1994.
1994 Intuit CEO; steps down July 1998, returns September 1999, leaves early 2000; chairman to 2016.
1997 Joins Apple's board when Jobs returns; serves until 2014.
2000 Executive in residence at Kleiner Perkins.
2001 Begins coaching Schmidt and Google's leaders; continues 15 years.
2016 Dies in April at 75.
Claris, GO and Intuit
- Claris. In 1987 Apple spun off a software company and made Campbell CEO. It did well, but by 1990 Apple decided to keep it as a subsidiary instead of letting it go public as planned, so Campbell and several executives left. Staff bought a full-page San Jose Mercury News ad headed "So long, Coach", thanking him for teaching them to stand on their own and saying he had built them to last. Claris remained an Apple subsidiary until 1998.
- GO Corporation. Campbell became CEO of a startup building the first pen-based handheld computer, a precursor of the PalmPilot and the smartphone. The vision was ahead of its time and the company shut in 1994; his line was "GO didn't go."
- Intuit. Cofounder Scott Cook and his board wanted a CEO to replace Cook. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins (who led its investments in Google, Amazon, Netscape, Sun, Intuit and Compaq) introduced Campbell, and Cook was unimpressed. Months later, still without a CEO, Cook tried again on a walk around Palo Alto. This time they talked leadership and people instead of strategy: other candidates had a one-size-fits-all approach to developing people, while Campbell was a "technicolor rainbow" who treated each person's story as different. Cook wanted someone to grow his people in a way he could not. Campbell became CEO in 1994.
Jobs, Apple and Kleiner Perkins
When Steve Jobs was forced out in 1985, Campbell was one of the few Apple leaders who fought it; colleague Dave Kinser remembers him insisting Jobs was far too talented to lose. Jobs remembered. When he returned as CEO in 1997 (technically interim CEO until January 2000) and most directors stepped down, he named Campbell to the new board, where he served until 2014. The two became close friends, spending many Sunday afternoons walking their Palo Alto neighbourhood; Campbell was Jobs's sounding board, coach, mentor and friend.
Jobs was never the only coachee. Though Campbell left football in 1979, he never stopped coaching: friends, neighbours, colleagues and fellow school parents got a hug, a hearing and usually a story that gave them perspective or helped them decide.
On leaving the Intuit CEO job in 2000 (he stayed chairman until 2016), Campbell accepted Doerr's invitation to Kleiner Perkins. VC firms keep young entrepreneurs in residence to incubate ideas; Doerr's twist was an executive in residence, a seasoned operator to help portfolio startups through growth and its absence. Campbell settled on Sand Hill Road.
The Google coach
In 2001 a startup run by "a couple of brash kids from Stanford" brought in a professional CEO, Eric Schmidt, who had built Sun Microsystems' software operations and been CEO and chairman of Novell. Doerr told him he needed Campbell as his coach. Schmidt already knew of Campbell: Sun CEO Scott McNealy had once tried to hire him, and Schmidt had been struck by his energy (he once arrived at Sun fresh from a one-day round trip to Japan).
Still, Schmidt was offended. He held a BS from Princeton, an MS and PhD in computer science from Berkeley, and had been Sun's CTO; what could a gruff ex-football coach teach him? Within a year his self-review conceded that Campbell had been very helpful to all of them, that the role "was needed from the beginning", and that he should have set it up the day he arrived.
- Fifteen years, weekly. Campbell met Schmidt almost every week and also coached Rosenberg, Larry Page and other Google leaders.
- In the room. He sat in Schmidt's weekly staff meeting and was a regular on the Mountain View campus, conveniently next to Intuit's, where he was still chairman.
- Process, not answers. He rarely told them what to do and mostly kept product and strategy opinions to himself. His job was to make sure the team communicated, that tensions and disagreements surfaced and were discussed, so that big decisions had everyone on board, agreeing or not.
- The authors' claim. Campbell was among the people most integral to Google's success; without him the company would not be where it is.
While coaching Google's team and Jobs, he coached a long list of others.
| Field | People Campbell coached (role as the book gives it) |
|---|---|
| Tech CEOs | Brad Smith (Intuit), John Donahoe (eBay), Dick Costolo (Twitter), Mike McCue (Flipboard), Donna Dubinsky (Numenta), Nirav Tolia (Nextdoor), Shellye Archambeau (MetricStream), Danny Shader (Handle Financial), Dan Rosensweig (Chegg), Sundar Pichai (Google) |
| Executives and investors | Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Bill Gurley (Benchmark), Jesse Rogers (Altamont Capital) |
| Public and academic life | Al Gore (former US vice president), Lee C. Bollinger (Columbia president), John Hennessy (former Stanford president) |
| Sport | Ronnie Lott (NFL Hall of Famer), Charlie Batch (Steelers quarterback, fellow Homestead native), Sacred Heart's boys' and girls' flag football teams |
Ballsy and Bruno
None of those famous names gave the first eulogy. That fell to Lee Black, a Columbia teammate, who spoke about "Ballsy". Campbell had been the smallest man on the team but the most pugnacious in tackling and blocking drills, knocked down again and again and always getting back up. On a bus to practice Black told him he had more balls than a brass monkey, and the nickname stuck: even as captain he was never "Captain", always Ballsy. Columbia's Campbell Sports Center (strength space, athlete meeting rooms, coaches' offices) is known in football circles as "Balls Hall". Outside his teammates, nobody present had heard the name, but it fitted the CEO, Jobs confidant, Ivy champion and father of two and stepfather of three (he and Roberta divorced in 2009; he married Eileen Bocci in 2015).
- Scotty Kramer. His longtime New York driver and friend, who flew out.
- Danny Collins. Head waiter at Smith & Wollensky, a favourite New York restaurant.
- Jim Rudgers. Retired coach and Columbia colleague (Campbell was best man at his wedding) who hates flying and so drove across the country from Rhode Island.
- The football clan. Men he played with and coached, plus the Stanford players who lived at his house in summers.
- The Old Pro. Staff of the Palo Alto sports bar he co-owned and frequented.
- The trip crews. Friends from his annual Super Bowl, Cabo and Pittsburgh baseball trips.
- Bruno Fortozo. His regular caddie at the El Dorado course in Cabo San Lucas, near his vacation home.
The authors' reading of the crowd: it was not a gathering of professionals paying respects and networking, but of people who loved him. Bruno illustrates it. The two families had become friends, sharing banter on the course and dinners in Cabo; Campbell had hosted the Fortozos at his homes in Palo Alto and Montana. Bruno says most guests keep a line between themselves and the staff, but Campbell was nice to every single person. Ushered to the front, he found himself seated behind Tim Cook and Eddy Cue of Apple, next to a man he thought "runs Google."
The hug
Campbell's signature was the bear hug, never a polite pat. When Microsoft announced its proposed purchase of Intuit in October 1994, he crossed the stage and hugged Bill Gates, no noted hugger. (The deal later fell apart; the authors note that causality between hug and collapse was never proven.) Black closed by asking the audience to do Campbell proud and hug the people around them, which is how Larry Page, cofounder of Google and CEO of Alphabet, came to be hugging Bruno the caddie. Bruno's summary, "Mr. Campbell treats everyone the same way", is offered as the best tribute of the day: he did not know who the people near him were; they were all friends of Bill.
The guest list is the chapter's evidence. Campbell gave the same attention to a caddie, a waiter and a CEO, and the book's later principles (trust, team first, love) are the codified version of that habit.
The second eulogy and the request
Pat Gallagher, a San Francisco Giants executive for 33 years until 2009 (he jokes that his leaving led directly to the team's World Series wins in 2010, 2012 and 2014), earned the podium through friendship, not résumé. Neighbours in Palo Alto since the Campbells moved west in the mid-1980s, they coached youth sports together, went for beers and burgers with team families, walked the neighbourhood and threw spontaneous dinner parties. Gallagher's eulogy: most people have many acquaintances, fewer close friends and one or two best friends; Campbell was his, and about two thousand other people felt the same, yet with the same 24-hour day as everyone else he somehow found time for each of them, wherever they sat on the list.
As the crowd dispersed, Philipp Schindler, who runs Google's business side, found Schmidt. Weeks earlier he had attended a Google seminar where Campbell was teaching his management principles to executives so they could pass them on. Schindler's proposal: turn that wisdom into something shared with the world, or it would be lost. That conversation is the origin of the book.
The trillion dollar coach
The title is arithmetic. Campbell worked beside Jobs as Apple went from near bankruptcy to a market capitalisation of several hundred billion dollars, and beside Page, Brin and Schmidt as Google (Alphabet) did the same from startup. That already passes a trillion, before counting the many other companies he advised, which by the authors' measure makes him the greatest executive coach ever. And he was not a coach in the traditional mould, maximising individuals: he coached teams.
After his death Google began teaching his principles in internal seminars for emerging leaders. The authors rejected a hagiography (a biography that idealises its subject; Rosenberg and Eagle had to look the word up when Schmidt used it). They argue his approach, both what he coached and how, is unusually suited to a business world where success means moving fast and continually shipping new products.
The missing piece in How Google Works
Their earlier book, How Google Works, argued that success depends on the smart creative, someone combining technical depth, business savvy and creative flair. Such people always existed, but the internet, smartphones and cloud computing magnify their impact, so companies must attract them and build an environment where they succeed at scale.
Interviewing Campbell's coachees showed them a second, equally critical factor: companies also need teams that act as communities, integrating interests and setting aside differences so everyone is obsessed with what is good for the company. Research shows people who feel part of a supportive community at work are more engaged and productive, and that lack of community is a leading cause of burnout.
Why community is hard
- Who is on the team. High-performance teams are full of smart, aggressive, ambitious, opinionated people with large egos who are also rivals for advancement; executives position their silos against each other in status conflicts for resources and glory.
- Keeping score. Internal competition takes over, with compensation, bonuses, recognition, even office size and location as the scoreboard. In such settings selfish individuals can beat altruistic ones, and several studies (and common sense) link this intragroup conflict to worse team outcomes.
- Why it matters. Teams that subordinate individual performance to the group's generally outperform those that do not, so the job is to turn a team of rivals into a community marching to one goal.
- Design principles exist. A 2013 paper lists principles for this, such as strong mechanisms for making decisions and resolving conflicts, but following them gets harder with fast markets, complex models, technology shifts, smart competitors, sky-high customer expectations, global expansion and demanding teammates.
- Tension in the machine. Former Google CFO Patrick Pichette calls the result "tension in the machine". It is good, since a company without it fades to irrelevance, but it makes community harder to build, and community is what success needs.
What the coach does
To balance that tension you need a coach who works with individuals and with the team as a whole, smoothing friction, nurturing community and keeping everyone aligned on one vision. Some coaches work only with the leader; Campbell's model was the whole team: at Google he met Schmidt, Rosenberg and others and attended staff meetings, walking the halls and getting to know people.
- Accepting a coach takes confidence. Executives can read a coach in their staff meeting as a sign of weakness, but a 2014 study finds the most insecure managers are the ones threatened by others' suggestions, so publicly accepting a coach signals confidence.
- Group coaching is underused. A 2010 article finds group coaching effective for "goal-focused change" in teams but rarely used.
- Why football. Few sports coaches succeed as business operators, though many write books. Campbell spent a decade in perhaps the ultimate team sport, where poor teamwork means losing and people getting hurt, and learned to spot tensions between teammates and resolve them, a skill he carried into offices and conference rooms.
Why the manager must be the coach
Every sports team needs a coach, and so does any company competing on speed and innovation: team coaching has to be part of the culture. But hiring a coach for every team, or even every executive team, is impractical (where would they come from, and at what cost?) and, more importantly, would not work. What the interviews revealed was that Campbell, while coaching people, taught them to coach their own teams; many still ask "what would Bill do?" in hard moments, and the authors found they do too.
So the best coach for any team is the manager who leads it. Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without it. A 1994 study urged moving beyond managing as controlling, supervising, evaluating and rewarding or punishing toward a climate of communication, respect, feedback and trust, built through coaching. Many management tasks can be delegated; coaching cannot. The recipe is high-performing teams with the resources and freedom to do great things, led by someone who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.
The book covers what Campbell coached and how he coached it, in four sections:
- Management details (Chapter 2): one-on-ones, staff meetings, decisions, difficult people.
- Trust (Chapter 3): how he built it with each person.
- Team first (Chapter 4): how he built and repaired teams.
- Love (Chapter 5): why caring belongs in the workplace.
The principles can sound like aphorisms, but they are simple in concept and hard in practice. A 2010 study from Curtin University of Technology (Perth) lists how managers fail as coaches: not taking enough time, believing people cannot be developed, and seeing coaching as unconnected to bottom-line results. The authors worried whether only Campbell could apply his method and concluded that much of it is replicable by any leader of teams. Ben Horowitz: nobody can channel Bill, but you can learn from him a higher level of honesty and a better understanding of people and management.
"Don't f*** it up"
The authors interviewed dozens of people: boyhood friends, Columbia teammates, players he coached at Boston College and Columbia, fellow coaches, colleagues from Kodak, Apple, Claris, GO and Intuit, executives he coached, the Stanford players who crashed at his house, family, and Sacred Heart kids. Many got choked up, which the authors take as a sign of the devotion he created and of the legacy entrusted to them.
- The profanity. Campbell used the F-word almost as a part of speech of its own. When Rosenberg sent him a study showing workplace swearing boosts morale, he replied, "A good one for me!" (The research cuts both ways: profanity is linked to stress relief, honesty and creativity, but swearers are also judged less trustworthy and less intelligent.)
- Gallagher's verdict. Somehow, when Campbell swore, it didn't sound like swearing. Asking Gallagher to give the eulogy, Campbell's only instruction was not to f it up*.
- The book he refused. Campbell shunned the spotlight and turned down several book proposals. The authors believe he came round near the end to the idea of a book that codified his coaching (not a biography) so it could help other companies, and they adopt his instruction to Gallagher as their own brief.
- Insiders. The authors are Google insiders and the copyright belongs to Alphabet. The book credits Campbell with value created by thousands of others; the "trillion dollar" figure adds up Apple and Google market caps and is not a measured contribution. (Both firms have since passed $1 trillion each on their own: Apple in 2018, Alphabet in 2020.)
- Friendly sources. They reject hagiography, yet the sources are friends and protégés interviewed after his death, so failures (Columbia, GO) are told briefly and kindly, and no critics are quoted.
- The hug and the deal. The joke about the Gates hug skips the real reason the Microsoft-Intuit merger died: the US Justice Department sued to block it on antitrust grounds in April 1995, and Microsoft walked away weeks later.
- Small inconsistencies. Columbia's 1961 Ivy title was shared with Harvard. Campbell's weight is given as 165, 162 (Donelli) and 180 (programme). The text implies Campbell left Claris in 1990, but the farewell ad ran on February 25, 1991.
Your Title Makes You a Manager. Your People Make You a Leader.
Campbell's first lesson is unglamorous: leadership grows out of management excellence, meaning well-run one-on-ones and staff meetings, clear decisions, honest boards, generous pay and respectful exits. The chapter sets out the ten operating principles he drilled into Google, Apple and Intuit executives. Leadership is conferred from below: if you are a great manager, your people will make you a leader, and they decide that, not you.
Google's "disorg" and the case for managers
In July 2001 Google was nearly three, had just launched AdWords (the ad product that would soon make it rich) and employed several hundred people, many of them engineers under Wayne Rosing, an ex-Apple and Sun executive who had arrived six months earlier. Unhappy that his managers were strong engineers but weak managers, Rosing worked out a radical fix with Larry Page and Sergey Brin and took it to Schmidt: abolish every engineering manager and have all engineers report to Rosing. Rosing and Schmidt named it the disorg.
- Why the founders liked it. Neither had worked in a formal business. They preferred the university model, where students gather on projects under an adviser and nobody is "managed", and saw no reason to ask a manager about a project when you could ask the engineer doing it. (The authors note that the first manager probably appeared minutes after the first company; Peter Drucker nominated as history's greatest manager whoever ran the building of the first Egyptian pyramid, some 4,500 years ago.)
- Campbell's entry. He was new, still learning the culture by dropping in on executives in the evenings, when things were relaxed. He told Page "we have to get some managers in here." Page, who had just removed them, disagreed, and the argument went round in circles.
- The test. Campbell borrowed Page's own method: go and ask the engineers. He, Page and Brin walked the halls that night. Most engineers did want a manager, on two conditions: someone to learn from and someone to break ties.
- The outcome. The founders took time to accept it. Google ran the disorg for more than a year and restored people managers near the end of 2002.
Research finds merit on both sides. A 1991 study finds that during the implementation phase of an innovation (where Google then was with search and AdWords), managers are needed to coordinate resources and settle conflicts; a 2005 study finds creativity flourishes in network-like rather than hierarchical settings such as Broadway productions. The tension between creativity and operational efficiency never goes away.
Results come from management
For Campbell, running a successful company was about management: operational excellence and teams that deliver. In a Google seminar he listed what successful operators do: think about how to run a meeting and an operations review, know how to help someone course-correct in a one-on-one, have good processes, hold people accountable, hire great people, evaluate them, give feedback, and pay them well. Silicon Valley people drift towards other goals; he kept insisting it is a results-oriented game, and that team culture exists to achieve results.
- 2017: a large study of US manufacturing plants found that performance-oriented management (monitoring, targets, incentives) mattered as much as R&D, IT investment and worker skills.
- 22% vs 7%: in the video game industry (2012), strong middle management explained 22% of revenue variance; creative game design explained 7%.
- $18,000 per employee: the market-value gain for firms whose management practices improve by one standard deviation above the mean (1999).
- 8 behaviours: Google's 2008 internal study (Project Oxygen) found teams whose managers regularly practised eight behaviours had lower turnover and higher satisfaction and performance; first on the list, "is a good coach." (David Garvin described it in Harvard Business Review, December 2013.)
Authority is earned, not issued
Campbell saw leadership as the by-product of management excellence: you do not get people to flourish by dictating, but by making sure they feel valued in the room with you, by listening and paying attention. Harvard's Linda Hill, who studies first-time managers, found (2007) that new managers quickly learn that orders do not work, and that the more talented the report, the less likely she is to obey; authority emerges only from credibility with reports, peers and superiors. Another study finds people under authoritarian managers do more than chafe: they are more likely to leave the team.
At Kodak and as Apple's sales and marketing VP, Campbell had been detail-obsessed and a micromanager, and it had worked. So as first-time CEO of Claris he told everyone what to do. Late one afternoon Donna Dubinsky came to his office and warned that if he kept it up, everyone would quit and go back to Apple: nobody wanted to work for a dictator. She added the line he adopted as his mantra, always telling the unflattering story with it: your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader. (Dubinsky went on to run Palm and Handspring, serve as lead trustee of Yale, and become CEO of Numenta.)
Campbell later wrote to a struggling but valuable manager that he had demanded respect instead of letting it accrue, and needed to project humility and selflessness that showed he cared about the company and its people.
Charisma is not leadership
Coming from a man who worked beside Steve Jobs for nearly three decades, this sounds odd, but Campbell warned against mistaking charisma for leadership. In his view Jobs was not a great leader in his first Apple stint, which ended when John Sculley and the board removed him in 1985. After Apple bought NeXT and Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, Campbell watched him become a great manager, detailed in everything: product, but also finance, sales, operations and logistics. His conclusion: Jobs could not be a good leader until he became a good manager.
Hence the content of the weekly coaching sessions: management first, meaning operations and tactics. Campbell rarely weighed in on strategy, and when he did it was to demand a strong operating plan behind it. His standing questions:
- Crises. What are the current crises, and how fast will we manage our way out?
- People. How is hiring going, and how are we developing our teams?
- Meetings. How are staff meetings going? Is everyone giving input? What is being said, and what is not?
| Principle | Bill's rule |
|---|---|
| It's the people | The manager's top priority is the well-being and success of her people. |
| Start with trip reports | Open team meetings with personal, non-business topics to build rapport. |
| Five words on a whiteboard | Give 1:1s a structure and prepare for them; they are the best way to help people grow. |
| Throne behind the round table | Run a process where all perspectives are heard; if needed, break ties and decide. |
| Lead on first principles | Name the immutable truths of the business and decide from them. |
| Manage the aberrant genius | Protect difficult stars unless they are unethical or abusive or cost more than they give. |
| Money's not about money | Pay well: it signals love and respect and ties people to company goals. |
| Crazy people have stature | The company exists to bring a product vision to life; everything else serves product. |
| Heads held high | If you let people go, be generous and celebrate their accomplishments. |
| Bill on boards | The CEO manages the board, not the other way around. |
It's the people
In August 2008 Gawker ran "The 10 Most Terrible Tyrants of Tech", opening with a parody of Apple's 1997 "Think Different" ad that toasted the screamers and chair-throwers. The list: Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Marc Benioff and, second to last and the only Googler, Jonathan Rosenberg, who was thrilled to be in such company. At his next 1:1 a printout lay on the table. Rosenberg grinned; Campbell did not. After a stream of expletives he asked what Rosenberg's mother (Rina Rosenberg) would think if he sent it to her. They agreed she would not be pleased.
That was when Campbell first gave Rosenberg the "It's the People" manifesto he had written at Intuit and recited almost word for word to coachees for years.
People are the foundation of a company's success, and each manager's primary job is to help people be more effective and to grow. The company's people want to do well, can do great things and arrive fired up; they flourish where that energy is liberated and amplified. Managers create that environment with three things:
- Support. Give people the tools, information, training and coaching they need, and keep developing their skills.
- Respect. Understand each person's career goals and be sensitive to their life choices; help them reach those goals in ways consistent with company needs.
- Trust. Free people to do their jobs and make decisions, knowing they want to do well and believing they will.
Executives repeat that people are an asset but, when hunting for performance, often overlook management culture. Examples of the principle in practice:
- Columbia athletics. Athletic director Peter Pilling worked with Campbell to rewrite his department's mission as "it's the student athletes". Every decision is tested against them (does it help them reach their highest achievement; do they know the staff cares?), support covers their whole lives, not only sport, and he holds quarterly meetings with all head coaches to discuss athletes with full candour.
- Eight thousand souls. When Brad Smith became Intuit CEO, Campbell told him he would now go to bed every night thinking about his 8,000 employees: what they think and feel, and how to make them their best.
- Painting relationships. Ronnie Lott, who played for both Campbell and Bill Walsh (49ers head coach 1979-1988, three Super Bowls), says great coaches lie awake thinking how to make you better, relish building an environment where you get more out of yourself, and are like artists getting a brushstroke right: they paint relationships.
To the classic executive question "what keeps you up at night?", Campbell's answer was always the same: the well-being and success of his people.
Start with trip reports
For more than a decade, Schmidt's staff meeting ran Mondays at 1 p.m. It looked like any staff meeting (agenda, round-table check-ins, people sneaking looks at email) except for its opening: a question about the weekend or, after travel, an informal trip report. With Page and Brin in the room that meant kiteboarding and extreme-fitness tales, but also Rosenberg's daughter's soccer, or engineering lead Alan Eustace's golf score. (Eustace later set the record for the highest-altitude free-fall jump, from a balloon at 135,899 feet in October 2014, reaching 822 mph and landing 14 minutes later.) Back from a trip, Schmidt would put a Google map with pins on the screen and go city by city.
The ritual looked impromptu but was a communications design Campbell had refined with Schmidt, with two aims:
- Know each other as people, with families and lives outside work.
- Engage everyone from the start, as people and Googlers, not as owners of a function.
They knew fun work environments correlate with higher performance, and that family-and-fun talk ("socioemotional communication" to academics) is the easy route there. It paid off later in the meeting, where Schmidt wanted everyone to weigh in on every decision, inside their area or not: the personal opening was a tactic for better decisions and camaraderie.
- Dick Costolo. Learned it from Campbell, thought it weird, then found it changes the meeting's dynamic (more empathy, better mood). Sitting in on a mentee CEO's meeting that launched straight into hot topics, he found it jarring: he could not tell whether the team connected.
- Marissa Mayer's "family prayer". As Yahoo CEO she opened with thank-yous: each person thanks another team for something from last week; you cannot thank yourself or repeat someone else. It doubles as a weekly recap.
Repetition and the right forum
Campbell treated communication as critical and coached the authors to make sure others understood what they understood; even clear messages take several repetitions to sink in ("repetition doesn't spoil the prayer"). A 2002 Southern Methodist University study finds that knowing what to share, and with whom, is central to a manager's job, and that this knowledge commonality improves team performance enough to justify the time.
"Get the 1:1 right" and "get the staff meeting right" were at the top of his management principles, as the most important tools an executive has. Staff meetings, more than 1:1s, should carry the most important issues and opportunities: use them to get everyone on the same page, reach the right debate and decide. Most big issues cut across functions, and discussing them together builds cross-functional understanding and strength, even for issues a 1:1 could settle, because the team practises solving problems together.
- GO and Microsoft. Founder Jerry Kaplan recalls in his book Startup wanting to discuss GO's growing Microsoft threat privately with Campbell, since it was confidential and controversial. Campbell refused: it would be discussed and decided as a team.
- The research. A 2013 study finds meeting engagement depends on relevance, giving everyone a voice and managing the clock; a 2015 study finds more than 50% of participants think their meetings (all kinds, not just staff meetings) waste their time.
Five words on a whiteboard
Coachees went to Campbell, not the reverse: his plain office off Palo Alto's quieter California Avenue, about a mile south of University Avenue, behind an unmarked door, up the stairs, past a hug for his longtime assistant Debbie Brookfield. It seemed a waste of time until the authors saw the logic: you go to your therapist. For Schmidt's sessions there were always five words on the whiteboard, each naming a topic (a person, a product, an operational issue, an upcoming meeting).
Rosenberg corrected Schmidt's memory while they wrote the book. With him, Campbell held his five back like a poker hand and, after the family talk, asked for Rosenberg's top five. The point was diagnostic: it showed how Rosenberg was prioritising, which he could have hidden by simply agreeing with Campbell's list. Discussing the list was itself coaching (one, the authors joke, Schmidt apparently never needed). In his Google seminar Campbell recommended a simultaneous reveal: both lists go up at once, overlaps get covered, and merging the agendas becomes a lesson in prioritisation.
Whoever goes first, both sides must arrive with topics and ready to cover them. Campbell prepared carefully because he saw the 1:1 as the best opportunity to help people grow. As a full-time coach he adapted to each person, but as a CEO he used, and always taught, a standard sequence.
The standard 1:1 sequence
- Not-so-small talk. Real conversation about life and family, layered enough that it sometimes felt like the point of the meeting. His interest was sincere, and useful: a 2010 study finds substantive conversation, unlike true small talk, makes people happier.
- Performance. What are you working on, how is it going, how can I help?
- Peers. Which Campbell rated above relationships with bosses. When Rosenberg complained he got no feedback from the founders, Campbell told him to stop worrying about top-down feedback and ask what his teammates thought of him; they then went through his peers, what they valued and what he could do better.
- Teams. Are you setting a clear direction and reinforcing it constantly, and do you understand what your people are doing? If they are off track, how will you correct them? "Think that everyone who works for you is like your kids": help them course-correct.
- Innovation. Are you making space for it, and how are you balancing the inherent tension between innovation and execution? Either alone fails.
- Performance on job requirements. Could be sales figures, product delivery or milestones, customer feedback or product quality, or budget numbers.
- Relationships with peer groups. Product and engineering, marketing and product, sales and engineering; critical for company integration and cohesion.
- Management and leadership. Are you guiding and coaching your people, weeding out the bad ones, working hard at hiring, and able to get your people to do heroic things?
- Innovation (best practices). Are you constantly moving ahead and thinking how to get better, evaluating new technologies, products and practices, and measuring yourself against the best in the industry or world?
Communicating well
- Face to face, or the phone. Old-school: talk in person, or call. Do not wait four weeks for a meeting slot; pick up the phone. As GO's CEO an email from him was an event; later he spent evenings returning the day's calls, and every voicemail got a call back.
- One email from the top. Instead of cascading emails (a leader writes, each layer rewrites for its own staff), send one message straight from the senior person. Rereading years of his emails, the authors found them consistently concise, clear and compassionate; on the death of Rosenberg's father he wrote that he was sorry never to have met him, and that he would have been proud of his son.
- Substance over style. Nirav Tolia (later cofounder and CEO of Nextdoor) met Campbell in summer 2000 via Bill Gurley, while running the hot dot-com Epinions. His deck was full of Churchill quotes; Campbell let him strut a while, then asked why he had said nothing about Epinions, and told him to drop the quotes and just say what was going on and what had to be done. Tolia's self-assessment: he was then 90% style, 10% substance; Campbell was 100% substance.
The throne behind the round table
Late in Schmidt's tenure, two managers fought a turf war over whose team would build a mobile app for one product's users; for weeks it slid from affable to acrimonious. Schmidt's usual tool was the rule of two: the two people most involved gather more information and work out the best answer together, usually returning in a week or two with a joint recommendation the team almost always accepts because it is obviously best.
- Why the rule works. It usually yields the best solution, builds collegiality, and empowers the disputants to solve their own problem (a basic principle of successful mediation). It also forms a lasting habit of resolving conflict together. Research on conflict resolution finds that having any standard process for handling conflict makes people happier and more effective.
- When it fails. This time both were dug in. Campbell's advice: tell them "either you two break that tie, or I will." Schmidt gave them one more week; they failed, and Schmidt decided.
Bill's decision method
Facilitating decisions was, for Campbell, a core manager's job, and his method was specific.
- No democracy. Intuit used to vote in meetings; Campbell stopped it.
- Improv, not lobbying. He likened good decision-making to improv comedy, where the whole cast is at risk and works together to keep the scene alive until the last moment. He wanted ensembles and a politics-free room. A boss who makes every decision invites politics, because people spend their time lobbying the top dog instead of finding the best idea.
- Best idea, not consensus. "I hate consensus!" he would growl, anticipating research showing that aiming for consensus produces groupthink and inferior decisions. The best idea comes from getting every opinion on the table, airing the problem honestly and making sure people give authentic views, especially dissent.
- Who leads the discussion. A mainly functional decision (say marketing or finance) is led by the functional expert; a cross-functional one by the team leader. Either way, everyone's view is part of it.
- Pre-meet. He often sat with individuals before the meeting to learn their views. That helped him, but mainly it let people arrive prepared, their thinking already gathered and talked through, aligned or not.
- Let it get heated. Fireworks are fine. Emil Michael, former chief business officer of Uber, says once a leader gets people past passive aggression, heated but honest argument can happen; if the team thinks company-first, the best idea usually emerges. Framing matters: a 2016 study finds that calling it a debate rather than a disagreement makes participants share more information and see others as more open to dissent.
- Speak last. Marissa Mayer at Google tended to know (or think she knew) the answer. Campbell's rule for her: in team decisions she must always speak last, because blurting the right answer robs the team of getting there together. She disliked it, but it worked, and she gained new respect for her team.
When the best idea doesn't emerge
- Break the tie. Then the manager forces or makes the decision: "A manager's job is to break ties and make their people better." Campbell learned it the hard way at Apple, where decisions festered between the Apple II and Mac groups and people came to him to arbitrate; as the sales and marketing chief he could not break ties between product groups, nothing got done, and Apple "went to its knees".
- Decide, even if wrong. Indecision can do as much damage as a wrong decision; there is never a perfect answer. A well-run process matters as much as the outcome, because it gives the team confidence and keeps it moving. Bruce Chizen, later Adobe CEO, who worked with Campbell at Claris, calls this making decisions with integrity: a good process, always putting the business ahead of any individual, then moving on.
- Commit, or leave. When Dan Rosensweig of Chegg saw his CFO try to back out of an agreed financial move over a minor issue, Campbell told him how, as CEO, his own CFO had announced to the board that he disagreed with a strategy he had signed up to. Campbell asked him not to come back: disagreeing is allowed, failing to commit is not, and someone who cannot commit is off the team.
King Arthur's table
When Brad Smith became Intuit CEO, Campbell described a round-table model: have the right conversation and eight times in ten people reach the best conclusion themselves; the other two times the leader makes the hard call and everyone rallies behind it. Smith keeps a model of the legendary table, knights seated, in a corner of his office. The table has no head, but there is a throne behind it.
Lead based on first principles
How do you make that hard call? Rooms are full of opinions. Campbell's advice was to cut through them to the first principles, the immutable truths about the company or situation that everyone has already accepted. Opinions can be argued; principles generally cannot. The leader's job in a hard decision is to state and remind everyone of them, after which the decision often becomes easy.
Mike McCue met Campbell soon after raising $250 million for Tellme Networks at the 1999 dot-com peak; Campbell sat in on its board and some staff meetings, and later counselled him at Flipboard. Tellme built the first cloud-based speech recognition platform for large businesses, answering the phones at FedEx, Fidelity and American Airlines.
- The offer. AT&T, its largest customer, offered tens of millions to license Tellme's software, on condition Tellme quit cloud speech recognition so AT&T could build a rival; if Tellme refused, AT&T would pull all its business.
- The room. Tellme needed money, and smart, debate-trained colleagues sincerely favoured the deal, as did CEO John LaMacchia (ex-Cincinnati Bell, CEO 2001-2004 after McCue demoted himself to COO). McCue, who never went to college (he went to work after his father died when he was 18), knew he could not win a debate with them; pushing it through would win the decision but lose the team.
- The principles. He called Campbell, then walked the railroad tracks outside the office and named two: Tellme had a working business model (why switch to licensing?), and it had objectively the best product, ahead of its time (could AT&T build better? probably not).
- The outcome. He put the principles to the team; all agreed they were foundational. The meeting ended in under an hour and the deal was off. AT&T later deprioritised its rival product and quadrupled its business with Tellme (AT&T merged with SBC in 2005).
- The sale. In 2007, selling Tellme to Microsoft, a higher unsolicited bid from another company nearly killed the deal. After talking to Campbell, McCue concluded Microsoft was the best home, and he had already agreed terms with Steve Ballmer, so a third principle applied: integrity. He flew to Redmond; Ballmer asked whether they were getting divorced before marrying. McCue said no and explained why; the two became partners in closing the deal. The authors say it would not have happened without first principles.
Manage the aberrant genius
The diva, a star performer who is a pain to work with, is one of management's hardest problems. Campbell called them aberrant geniuses: quirky people who can be great differentiators, whom the manager must handle so they do not disrupt the company. His bottom line: they must be able to collaborate; if they cannot, let them go.
The method the authors learned, with much trial and error: support them while they perform, minimise time spent fighting them, and invest that energy in coaching them past the behaviour, so you get more genius and less aberrant. Campbell once wrote to Rosenberg about a problem report that he now had everything he needed, so Rosenberg should get him to behave as a leader: "He has all of his space. No more arguments." (A 2017 HBR article by Manfred Kets de Vries on managing narcissists, as many aberrant geniuses are, likewise advises minimising direct confrontation.)
Such people can build great products and teams and have quick insights, but come with ego and fragility to match their talent, and often chase personal gains at the expense of peer relationships; the resulting me-first attitude breeds resentment and hurts others' work.
- The absolute line. Never tolerate ethical breaches: lying, lapses of integrity, harassing or mistreating colleagues. These are the easy cases.
- The hard cases. For behaviour short of that line, there is no perfect test of when the damage outweighs the contribution, but there are four warning signs. All are coachable; if nothing changes, they should not be tolerated.
- Breaks team communication. Interrupts, attacks or rebukes others, or makes people afraid to talk.
- Consumes management time. Hours spent on damage control, mostly unproductive argument, mean it has gone too far. Coaching a Google manager, Campbell asked how to keep a star's brilliance and dismiss the bad, adding that "you can't be with him eighteen hours a day!" (barely an exaggeration). That person eventually left.
- Puts self above team. Eccentricity in service of the company is fine; constantly putting oneself first is not. It shows less in the core work than in adjacent areas: compensation, press and promotion.
- Seeks attention and self-promotion. Campbell distrusted people who chased media coverage. Publicity for the company is part of a CEO's job, but a team member who keeps seeking it, nominally crediting the team while hogging the spotlight, breeds slow resentment. A 2008 study finds that, other things equal, narcissists are more likely to emerge as group leaders, so the trait is not rare at the top; it still hurts if the team suspects the star cares more about the spotlight than the team.
Money's not about money
Campbell advised Google on compensation for years and always urged generosity. Everyone needs a fair salary that affords a good life, and for many people money really is about money. But pay also carries emotional value: it is a signal of recognition, respect and status, and it binds people tightly to company goals. Even the financially secure need to feel appreciated, which is why a superstar athlete worth tens or hundreds of millions still fights for the next huge contract: it's for the love.
Innovation is where the crazy people have stature
When Campbell moved from J. Walter Thompson to Kodak in 1980, colleague Eric Johnson says he acted like a "virus", bringing a fresh way of thinking about how to make things better for Kodak, dealers and consumers. Kodak then owned photography: in 1976 it sold 90% of the film and 85% of the cameras bought in the US (a Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson, had invented the digital camera in 1975; Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, undone by digital).
Soon after Campbell joined, Fuji launched a film it billed as better, and it was: faster, so it worked with less light or quicker shutter speeds without losing quality. While marketing discussed it, Campbell suggested asking the research engineers. At Kodak, marketing people did not visit the lab; Campbell either did not know or did not care. He walked over, introduced himself and challenged the engineers to beat Fuji, which helped start the work that produced Kodacolor 200, a major product and empirically better than Fuji's film.
Campbell began in advertising and added sales at Apple, but his years in tech convinced him of the primacy of technology and product. His conference line: the purpose of a company is to take the product vision and bring it to life, then surround it with finance, sales and marketing to ship it and make it succeed. That inverted the 1980s Valley model, in which founders were soon replaced by business people from sales, finance or operations who did not think about engineers. Campbell, a business person himself, held that nothing beats an empowered engineer: product teams are the heart of the company.
- Speed when the fit is right. The aim of product teams is product-market fit; with the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can and fix the small things that go wrong. Eddy Cue, who helped create the App Store, recalls presenting it to Apple's board: others asked how it worked, while Campbell, grasping its potential when some saw a nice-to-have, asked only how to move faster.
- Problems, not orders. Finance, sales and marketing should not tell product teams what to build; they supply intelligence on customer problems and opportunities (the "market" half of product-market fit), then clear obstacles. His line: marketing lost its clout because it forgot its first name: product. (Consultant Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, HBR January-February 2017, adds that teams often solve the wrong problem, and offers seven practices for reframing problems.)
- The banking product manager. At Intuit, a newly hired product manager with banking experience handed engineers a feature list. Campbell told him that if he ever did it again he would be thrown out on the street: tell engineers what problem the consumer has and who the consumer is, and let them design the features, which will beat anything you dictate.
- Freedom inside a team. This does not mean engineers run unfettered. Product teams partner with other functions from the outset, in cross-functional groups; Campbell himself was the marketer who walked down the street to the lab. But engineers need clout and some freedom. Apple director Ron Sugar (ex-CEO of Northrop Grumman) learned from Campbell that a nonconformist streak is a strength at a company like Apple.
- Friday pizza. As Intuit CEO, Campbell lunched with all engineering directors every Friday for a couple of hours over pizza on what they were doing and what was slowing them down. A non-techie, he got into details; executives must be able to talk to engineers, and the engineers knew they had the CEO's attention every week. That is how he gave them stature.
Heads held high
Layoffs and firings are inevitable, especially in startups. Campbell's view: letting people go is a failure of management, not of the people leaving, so they should leave with their heads held high: treat them with respect, be generous with severance, and send an internal note celebrating their accomplishments.
- Rehearse it. Campbell practised these talks with coachees. Before Shishir Mehrotra fired an engineering lead at a startup, they went through the meeting line by line, down to who would sit where. Rules: be clear early in the conversation, then give the reasoning and details. When Mehrotra admitted the news would surprise the engineer, Campbell said he had already failed: it should not have been a surprise.
- Mind the survivors. Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things) notes that many people you lay off are closer to those who stay than you are, so treat them with respect, but the company must move on, so do not over-apologise. Research agrees: laid-off employees care who does the layoff and how good the explanation is, and doing it properly helps both leavers and stayers.
- Firing for performance. It deserves the same respect.
No one ever succeeds at their third chance.
To Horowitz, about a departing executive, Campbell put it in one line: you cannot let him keep his job, but you can absolutely let him keep his respect.
Bill on boards
The section opens with a scene from an Apple board dinner in the late 2000s at Mitsunobu, a Menlo Park sushi restaurant: while one table talked business, Campbell's table was in uproar as he and Al Gore threw napkins at each other mid-story. The point is that Campbell made every table the kids' table, even the usually dull post-board dinner, while taking the board's work itself very seriously.
Campbell sat formally on few boards (Apple's among them) but took part informally in many, and had managed boards as CEO of Claris, GO and Intuit. A good board is a tremendous asset; a weak one sucks up time. His guidelines also apply to any big meeting of people short on time and long on ego. Who manages whom is a standing tension: a 2003 University of California, Berkeley paper notes CEOs have incentives to "capture" the board, while directors have incentives to stay independent, monitor the CEO and replace a poor one.
- The CEO manages the board. Not the reverse; board meetings fail when the CEO does not own and follow the agenda.
- Operations first. Open with a frank, open, succinct review of how the company is doing: financial and sales reports, product status, and operating metrics (hiring, communications, marketing, support). Committees (audit and finance, compensation) meet beforehand, in person or by phone or video, and report.
- Pre-read the details. Send financials and operating detail ahead of time and expect questions; a spreadsheet on screen means endless discussion of detail the board does not need.
- Homework is mandatory. A Chegg director never read his packet and wasted meetings on questions it answered. When Rosensweig lost his temper, Campbell told him not to, and to send a packet a week ahead marking exactly which pages would be covered and what was expected. The director came unprepared again. Campbell's verdict: "I was wrong. Fire him."
- Honest highlights and lowlights. Report what went well and what did not. Highlights are easy; teams resist candid lowlights, so Schmidt often rejected first drafts as not honest enough. Real lowlights can cover revenue growth, product limitations, attrition and the pace of innovation. Product managers, not finance or communications, compile them. A 2002 HBR article names a virtuous cycle of respect, trust and candour as what makes great boards great, and a company honest with its board learns that sharing bad news is expected.
- Keep them out of the pre-read. Send highlights and lowlights in the meeting, not before, or members will obsess over the lowlights and want to start there.
- Pick operators. Choose smart people with business expertise who care about the company and want to help the CEO. When Dick Costolo became Twitter CEO, the board was VCs, founders and him; Campbell helped him add people who had run businesses. The bad board member: someone who walks in wanting to be the smartest guy in the room and talks too much.
| Board meeting part | Content | Campbell's rule |
|---|---|---|
| Before | Financials, committee work | Pre-read, homework expected |
| Opening | Operations review | Frank, succinct, CEO-led |
| Core | Highlights and lowlights | Honest, handed out in the room |
| After | Dinner | Have fun |
The executive behind the coach
Later chapters cover Campbell as coach, but the authors stress his acumen as an operator: he went from college football coach to senior executive at a Fortune 500 company in under five years. He did it by practising this chapter's points: operational excellence, people first, decisiveness, good communication, getting the best from difficult people, product excellence, and treating people well when they leave.
- Correlation sold as proof. The authors say Google's 2008 manager study "proved" its point, but such internal studies are correlational: good coaching and good team results may share causes.
- Hindsight. The Tellme story is told by the winner after the fact; the same principles could have justified a deal that later looked wise.
- Dissent versus commitment. Expelling a CFO who voices disagreement in front of the board sits awkwardly with the chapter's praise of candid dissent and honest lowlights; the line Campbell drew is that debate happens before the decision, inside the team.
- Pay as love. "Money's not about money" is offered without evidence, and the book does not engage the research on when pay crowds out intrinsic motivation.
Build an Envelope of Trust
Trust was Campbell's superpower: without it he had no relationship with you; with it, everything else in the relationship rested on it. The authors never mentioned trust in their analysis of Google for How Google Works, yet almost every interviewee for this book raised it. The chapter sets out how he built it, in a fixed order: coach only the coachable, listen fully, give candour with caring, guide with stories, believe in people more than they do, and let them be wholly themselves. Build trust first, because a team that trusts itself can fight hard over the task without the fight turning personal.
The chapter is organised around six practices, each closing with a one-line rule in the source. Read together they form a sequence: a selection filter, three conversation habits, a motivation habit, and an identity habit.
| Practice | What Campbell did | His rule, condensed |
|---|---|---|
| Only coach the coachable | Screened for humility and honesty before investing time | Coachable means honest, humble, persevering, always learning |
| Free-form listening | Gave undivided attention and asked questions | Listen fully, don't rehearse your reply, dig for the real issue |
| No gap between statements and fact | Told the unvarnished truth, with affection | Candour plus caring, delivered fast, negative feedback in private |
| Don't stick it in their ear | Told stories, rarely gave orders | Offer stories and help people reach their own best decision |
| Evangelist for courage | Pushed people past self-imposed limits | Believe in people more than they believe in themselves |
| Full identity front and center | Was always himself and expected the same | People work best when they bring their whole identity to work |
Backing the coach
While Campbell was Intuit's CEO, a weak quarter put revenue and profit targets at risk. Most directors were happy to miss and keep investing rather than cut spending and hurt long-term growth. Campbell wanted to get leaner and hit the numbers, less for the quarter than for the culture: he would not tolerate anything short of operational excellence, saw delivering results as a duty to shareholders, team and customers, and regarded operating discipline as its own long-term investment.
The board kept siding against its CEO until John Doerr said they should back the coach. Doerr dates Campbell's trust in him to that moment. The board may have been right on the merits, he concedes, but the better answer is to back your CEO: the subject mattered less than the fact that Campbell cared intensely, so Doerr bet on the man.
What trust means
The authors treat trust as the most important currency in any relationship, whether friendship, romance, family or work. In ordinary business it competes with personal agendas and the exchange of value; for Campbell it always ranked first. He was as good at honouring trust as at creating it: late in his life he told Alan Eustace he would do anything for him, and meant it.
The academic definition they use (from a 1998 cross-disciplinary review by Rousseau, Sitkin, Burt and Camerer) frames trust as a willingness to accept vulnerability because you expect good behaviour from the other person. Stripped down: people feel safe to be vulnerable. In Campbell's practice that broke into four commitments.
- Keep your word. If you told Campbell you would do something, you did it; his own word was always good.
- Loyalty. To one another, to family and friends, to the team and company. Campbell was one of the few Apple executives who fought to keep Steve Jobs when he was pushed out in 1985; Jobs never forgot it, and it became the base of their later friendship and working partnership.
- Integrity and ability. Honesty given and expected, plus confidence that the other person has the talent, skills, power and diligence to deliver what they promise. Trust covers competence as well as character.
- Discretion. A member of Schmidt's Google team was diagnosed with a serious illness (he fully recovered) and told only Campbell, who told no one, Schmidt included. When Schmidt found out he was pleased, not annoyed. A coach must know everything that is going on yet be seen to protect privacy; that is what lets him be everyone's confidant.
Why trust comes first
The authors admit the point can sound like "Captain Obvious" material. Their evidence that it is not: it is absent from many business books, and it never surfaced as a factor in Google's success when they wrote How Google Works. In dozens of interviews with Campbell's coachees, it surfaced constantly.
- Dean Gilbert (former Google and @Home executive, now a management coach himself) gave the chapter its title: Campbell built an envelope of trust very fast, a natural rapport and feeling of comfort and protection that Gilbert calls the cornerstone of any business coaching.
- Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems cofounder, head of Khosla Ventures) says their relationship rested on trust whether they agreed or not. The authors draw the lesson: trust is not agreement; it makes disagreement easier.
The research: trust before task
The claim is stronger than "trust matters": trust is the thing to create first, the foundation for everything else.
- Task versus relationship conflict (2000). A heavily cited study of top management teams (Tony Simons and Randall Peterson, Cornell, Journal of Applied Psychology) separates task conflict (disagreement about decisions, healthy and needed for good outcomes) from relationship conflict (emotional friction, which degrades decisions and morale). The snag is that the two are highly correlated. The remedy: build intragroup trust first; trusting teams still disagree, but with far less emotional rancour.
- How technologists get it backwards. Business people tend to jump straight to the task, and technologists (not known for high EQ) most of all. The Valley's implicit rule is prove you are smart, then I may trust your intellect. Campbell reversed the order and started by knowing the person beyond résumé and skills.
- Shishir Mehrotra's reading: Campbell moved among driven technologists but saw the world as a network of people learning each other's strengths and weaknesses, with mutual trust as the main mechanism for reaching goals.
Sports coaches agree
- Stanford, 2012. Trust was the subject of Campbell's pregame talk when he was made honorary captain of the Stanford football team for a game.
- Red Auerbach (in a 1987 Harvard Business Review interview) led the Boston Celtics, as coach and executive, to 16 NBA titles in 30 years, including eight in a row. His formula: players don't con him because he doesn't con them. The causal chain he described runs from integrity to players feeling secure, from security to wanting to stay, and from wanting to stay to playing all-out to keep their place.
Psychological safety
Trust is the base layer of what is now called psychological safety. A 1999 paper (Amy Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly) defines team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, a climate where people are comfortable being themselves. That is how the authors say working with Campbell felt.
When Google studied what made its highest-performing teams (the project reported in the New York Times in February 2016, known internally as Project Aristotle), psychological safety topped the list. Two common beliefs were disproven: that the best teams combine complementary skill sets, or people with similar personalities. The best teams were simply those with the most psychological safety, and that starts with trust.
The hard part, and Campbell's method
Agreeing that trust matters is easy; building it among high-stakes, big-ego executives is not, especially as Campbell himself had a healthy ego, strong opinions and stubbornness to match. His method had a set order:
- Filter. Coach only the coachable.
- Then, for those who passed: listen intently, practise complete candour, believe they could achieve remarkable things, and stay intensely loyal.
Only coach the coachable
- Setting. In January 2002 Jonathan Rosenberg, then an SVP at @Home, drove to Google in Mountain View expecting to collect a formal offer to run the product team. He considered the job a lock and himself a big deal. He was shown into a plain conference room to meet a gruff older man he could not quite place, and did not grasp that this was the last gate to the job.
- The opening. After a long silent look, Campbell said he had checked with @Home cofounder Tom Jermoluk, its first CEO William Randolph Hearst III, and investor John Doerr (also on Google's board): all agreed Rosenberg was smart and hard-working. Campbell then waved this away and asked a single question: was he coachable?
- The wrong answer. Rosenberg shot back: "It depends on the coach." Campbell declared that smart alecks are not coachable and stood to leave. Realising this had to be the man coaching Eric Schmidt, Rosenberg retreated from the quip into grovelling and asked him to stay.
- The lesson. Campbell sat back down and explained that he picked people for humility. Leadership is service to something bigger (the company, the team); good leaders grow over time because leadership accrues to them from their teams; curious people who want to learn suit this best; smart-aleck hubris has no place in it.
- The save. Asked what he wanted from a coach, Rosenberg blanked, then threw a Hail Mary: a line from Tom Landry (Dallas Cowboys coach for 29 years, 20 straight winning seasons, two Super Bowls) about a coach who makes you hear and see what you would rather avoid so you become who you always knew you could be.
- Outcome. He got the job and the coach he did not think he needed but badly did.
Campbell's premise was that almost everyone has value, rooted in who they are rather than title or role, and that his job was to make them better. The condition was coachability, judged on much more than an apt quotation.
- Honesty. Coaching needs far more vulnerability than normal business dealings. The coach must gauge self-awareness: not just your strengths and weaknesses, but how accurately you see them, where you are honest with yourself and where your blind spots sit. The coach's job is then to raise that awareness and expose flaws you cannot see. Nobody likes discussing flaws, so without honesty with yourself and the coach the relationship stalls.
- Humility. Needed for the same reason (admitting you are not perfect), and because leadership is service to something bigger than you. Coachable people see themselves as part of a larger whole; a considerable ego is fine if it serves an even bigger cause.
- Perseverance and hard work. The willingness to keep going when the work is hard.
- Constant openness to learning. The humble, hungry lifelong learner profile.
Servant leadership
Campbell practised what is now called servant leadership long before it became fashionable. The authors cite a 2012 study (Peterson, Galvin and Lange, Personnel Psychology) finding that tech firms earn higher return on assets under servant-leader CEOs and lower ROA under narcissistic CEOs. The same belief explains why Campbell threw himself into coaching at Google: he foresaw a company with the potential to be bigger in every way than any of its executives.
The bullshitter
The opposite of the honest, humble coachee is the BSer. John Hennessy, former Stanford president, who worked with Campbell on several fronts, says Campbell could not stand them. His objection was less that they misled others than that they misled themselves: they come to believe their own story and shade the truth to fit it, which makes the BS more dangerous. A coach cannot help someone who is not brutally honest, starting with himself. Hennessy traces the intolerance to football, where BS has no place on the field.
Practise free-form listening
In a session Campbell gave complete attention: no phone, no glance at the watch or out of the window. The authors doubt the words "being present" ever crossed his lips, yet he practised it. Al Gore says Campbell taught him that the sequence matters: first give the person careful, undivided attention, and only then turn to the issue.
- The label. Alan Eustace called it free-form listening; academics say active listening, a term coined in 1957 by Carl Rogers and Richard Farson.
- Wooden's warning. UCLA basketball coach John Wooden (in a 2008 Fortune conversation with Starbucks' Howard Schultz) counted poor listening among the commonest leadership flaws, and singled out listening while planning your own reply.
- Socratic questions. Campbell's listening came packed with questions. A 2016 HBR article by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman finds people rate as the best listeners those who periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.
Getting past the prepared question
Ben Horowitz says Campbell never told him what to do; he kept asking questions until he reached the real issue. Horowitz now uses the technique with the CEOs in his fund. Because CEOs feel they must always know the answer, their requests for advice usually arrive as prepared questions that are really bids for approval. Horowitz never answers those. He asks more questions to see the situation from several sides, gets past the prepared question and its prepared answer, and finds the heart of the matter.
Listening surfaces the best ideas
Per Jerry Kaplan's book Startup, GO moved its pen computer from Intel processors to RISC chips (Reduced Instruction Set Computer, the design inside most computers and smartphones today) after a rowdy management meeting. Campbell, as CEO, only framed the problem: GO was starting to compete with Microsoft, so perhaps it should go where Microsoft was not. Then he let the team argue. Mike Homer (Apple colleague and lifelong friend) proposed switching processors and cofounder and software head Robert Carr proposed RISC; met with disbelief at first, the idea gradually proved best and was adopted. The CEO supplied the framing and the floor, not the answer.
Listening makes people feel valued
- Lund University, 2003. Mats Alvesson and Stefan Sveningsson find that "mundane, almost trivial" acts such as listening and chatting with staff are real parts of leadership, because people feel more respected, more visible, less anonymous and more included.
- Respectful inquiry, 2016. Niels Van Quaquebeke and Will Felps argue that a leader who asks open questions and listens attentively raises followers' sense of competence (challenge and mastery), relatedness (belonging) and autonomy (control and options). These are the three core needs of self-determination theory, the motivation model of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.
- Salar Kamangar (early Google executive who helped build AdWords and later ran YouTube) found Campbell uplifting: whatever the topic, he felt heard, understood and supported.
No gap between statements and fact
Dan Rosensweig had just given the Chegg board an upbeat update: a company that had been close to failing was now stable, though not growing, and his team was celebrating. Campbell turned up wearing an old accountant's green eyeshade, greeted staff desk by desk, then congratulated Rosensweig on having saved the company and become the valley's most successful nongrowth CEO. The accountants might be pleased, he said, but that was not what Rosensweig had come to do. He hugged him and tossed him the eyeshade. Rosensweig saw that he had solved one big problem but wanted to grow Chegg, not merely save it, and went back to work.
Campbell was 100% honest (he told the truth) and candid (he was not afraid of a harsh opinion). Two witnesses:
- Ram Shriram (Google director, ex-Amazon): Campbell was transparent, had no hidden agenda, and his statements and the facts were always the same thing, which gives the section its name.
- Scott Cook (Intuit cofounder): Campbell taught him that you can deliver tough news about performance and still keep the person's respect and loyalty.
Candour that comes from caring
The candour worked because everyone knew it came from caring. Kim Scott, ex-Googler and author of Radical Candor, defines great bossing as saying what you really think in a way that shows you still care. The eyeshade is the template: a hard message (nongrowth CEO) carried by a funny prop, and nobody wears that hat for someone they do not care about.
- Candour plus caring. Couple the hard message with humour, a hug or obvious affection.
- In the moment. Cook's maxim is that a coach coaches in the moment: it is more real and authentic, though many leaders shy away. Saving it for the performance review is too little, too late. Campbell's feedback was immediate or nearly so, task-specific, and followed by a grin and a hug to draw the sting.
- Criticism in private. Diane Greene (head of Google Cloud, ex-VMware CEO, who sat with Campbell on Intuit's board) learned never to embarrass anyone publicly. When annoyed, she steps back and makes herself find what the person does well (there is always something) and praises that in public. The critique follows as soon as possible, but only once the person feels safe and supported, slipped in with a "by the way".
- Leave them better. However brutal, his candour made people feel better, because they trusted he was kicking them to improve them. Vinod Khosla: most people will not state their mind; Campbell always did, and people left disappointed but charged up, which Khosla calls an unusual talent.
Candour in five scenes
| Who | Campbell's message | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Pat Gallagher, Giants front office | Worst ballpark, a bad team: customer experience is all you have | Compete on what you control |
| Jesse Rogers, Altamont Capital | Seconds after seeing the new site: it's garbage, then minutes of detail | No second-rate look in the Valley |
| Hannah, Rosenberg's daughter | Division I bench, or Division III star with a great education | Honest options beat flattery |
| Mason Randall, 8th-grade QB | Head up after the loss: we lost as a team | Own the error, then move on together |
| Claris executive | A planned dressing-down | Delivered with care, it energised him |
- Gallagher. Campbell's neighbour and friend, in the San Francisco Giants front office during the Candlestick Park years, before the move to AT&T Park and three world championships. With a poor park and team, the customer experience was the only lever left.
- Rogers. A Sacred Heart school parent who became a coachee while deciding to leave his job and cofound Altamont Capital. Expecting praise for the new website, he got an expletive verdict within minutes and a rant: a Valley startup cannot look shoddy. He calls Campbell naturally oppositional and prizes his aggressive, tenacious negative feedback. Like several interviewees, he still spoke of Campbell in the present tense, still asking how he would advise.
- Hannah. Deflated but convinced, she took an engineering degree at Washington University in St. Louis, helped win an NCAA Division III championship as a senior and earned Scholar All-America honours.
- Mason. After his late interception lost the game to archrival Menlo, Campbell popped a finger out of his cheek and asked what the noise was; Mason, knowing the routine, said it was his head coming out of his ass. Campbell agreed and told him to get his head up.
- The Claris executive. Campbell warned his operations head Dave Kinser before chewing out a colleague and asked him to offer moral support afterwards. Kinser found the man pumped up, and jokingly took credit for repairing confidence that had never been damaged.
The authors confirm the pattern from their own experience: being told how badly you erred should feel awful, but from Campbell it did not, because candour plus caring works.
Don't stick it in their ear
After the questions, the listening and the verdict, Campbell usually did not tell you what to do. Managers, he held, should not walk in with an idea and force it on people; they should tell stories about why the work matters.
- Dan Rosensweig used to describe success and prescribe the route. Campbell taught him to tell stories that people can connect with and then work out their own actions, which wins buy-in. His football image: you don't give a running back his exact path; you show him where the hole is and the blocking scheme, and let him find the way.
- Story as a test. Rosenberg often experienced a Campbell story as homework: he was left to work out its lesson and implications before the next session.
- Chad Hurley (YouTube cofounder) likened sessions to chatting with a friend at the Old Pro, a Palo Alto sports bar: Campbell talked about his own experiences, not preaching, simply present.
Candour runs both ways
Campbell demanded the candour he gave. Alan Gleicher, Intuit's head of sales and operations, reduced success with him to two words: "Don't dance." If you do not know the answer, say you don't know. For Campbell honesty meant keeping your word, telling the truth and also being forthright. A good coach does not let hard topics hide; he draws them out.
What the scholars call it
- Relational transparency. Listening, honest feedback and demanded candour together make up relational transparency, a core component of authentic leadership (measured in a 2008 scale by Walumbwa, Avolio and colleagues).
- The retail evidence. A 2009 study of a retail chain (Clapp-Smith, Vogelgesang and Avey) found that where employees rated managers as authentic (for instance, agreeing the manager says exactly what he means), they trusted them more and the stores posted higher sales, with trust as the link.
Adam Grant told the authors by email that Campbell was a disagreeable giver: gruff and tough on the surface, devoted to others' interests underneath, delivering the critical feedback nobody wants to hear but everybody needs. Social science reaches the same verdict for leaders as for parents: choosing between supportive and demanding is a false dichotomy. Hold high standards and give the encouragement to reach them. In short, tough love.
Be the evangelist for courage
In 2014 Twitter was negotiating to let Google show tweets in search results. Wary of the terms, CEO Dick Costolo's team favoured a small trial deal, which Costolo reported at his next 1:1. Campbell called it onesy, twosy stuff: stop nibbling at the edges, there is a big idea here, find a more courageous path. Since nobody can foresee every detail of a big deal, sign a shorter-term contract if needed, but go big. Costolo pushed his team, and months later they announced a deal giving Google access to Twitter's data stream.
The principle: people naturally fear failure and shy from risk, so it is the manager's job to push the team past its reticence.
- Shona Brown (longtime Google executive) coined the phrase evangelist for courage for this role, and Campbell was a never-ending one.
- Bill Gurley says Campbell blew confidence into people, believing you could do things you doubted and pushing you past self-imposed limits.
- Danny Shader (founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a colleague from GO) took courage above all from their meetings, always leaving convinced he could do it.
- Emil Michael got a boost of boldness every time, and learned to be the person who gives energy, not one who drains it.
- The research. A 2011 Ashridge Business School study (de Haan, Culpin and Curd) of executive-coaching clients ranks encouragement third among the qualities they value in a coach, behind only listening and understanding.
In 2001, soon after Shishir Mehrotra founded Centrata, an investor called: the struggling company had to cut costs, and he had gone through the résumés and chosen who should go, mostly junior staff, since he wanted to keep the experienced hands. Most of those named were Mehrotra's cofounders. Mehrotra, then 22, doubted the move but complied under pressure, then called Campbell, who was furious: where was his courage? Campbell's standing advice was to trust his instincts, so he asked whether cutting the juniors was right. Mehrotra said no: the cofounders cared more, while the seniors were mercenaries who would leave when things went south. Coached to act on that, he rehired them all, and they formed the company's core for years.
Credible confidence, not cheerleading
Campbell's boldness was not blind cheerleading. He believed most people have value, and he had the experience and eye for talent to judge. When he said you could do something, you believed it because he was a coach and seasoned executive, and because the message was built on your actual capabilities and progress. Research agrees that encouragement must be credible: a paper by Y. Joel Wong of Indiana University identifies the perceived trustworthiness of the encourager as what separates effective encouragement from cheerleading.
Belief is contagious: once you believed him, you began to believe in yourself, which made the daunting task more achievable.
- Ruth Porat (Alphabet CFO): he gave her permission to go forth and confidence in her own judgement.
- Mickey Drexler (former CEO of J.Crew and Gap, 16 years on Apple's board with Campbell) champions the CEO-as-coach model, above all in bad times. When everyone arrives each day feeling beaten up, a leader cannot fix problems alone or while morale is down, so the first job is to rebuild the team's confidence.
- The higher bar. Campbell believed coachees could be greater than they believed, which gave each an aspiration, and genuine disappointment when they fell short. He set the bar higher than they set it themselves, and people rise to that.
Full identity front and center
The authors never received this advice themselves: as white, heterosexual men from top schools, they say, being themselves at work was never a problem. Interviews showed how often Campbell gave it to others, years before bringing your whole self to work became a slogan. He had reason to understand: a working-class kid, ex-football coach with a nontechnical degree who landed in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, he knew what feeling out of place was like. Yet he was always fully himself and expected the same from coachees. His reasoning: people who bring their full selves earn more respect from colleagues and value it more when others do the same.
- David Drummond (Alphabet's head of corporate development and legal, African American) describes heavy pressure on Black professionals to conform and hide that part of themselves, in a Valley where you are expected to be technical or from an elite business school. Campbell was neither, yet put his full identity front and center. He told Drummond that his origins were a source of motivation and strength to hold on to, which made Drummond less self-conscious about being different.
- Brad Smith (former Intuit CEO) was advised early to take speech training to lose his West Virginia accent. He refused, deciding the accent was a feature, not a bug: people like leaders who are different because it makes leadership look attainable.
- Shellye Archambeau (former MetricStream CEO, African American) tried, while in sales at IBM, to shed her cultural background and dress and act like everyone else. Campbell told her to dress however she felt comfortable: people can tell when you are not being yourself, they start wondering why, and that breeds distrust.
The foundation
These practices were the base of Campbell's coaching, and his coachees carried them into their own management: trust first, deepening over time; select hard for humble, hungry lifelong learners; listen without distraction; tell stories and let people draw the conclusion; give and demand candour; and evangelise courage with outsized confidence and high aspirations.
The combined effect was a room dedicated to making you better. John Donahoe (former eBay CEO) says the value lay less in the advice than in who Campbell was: he felt it more than heard it. Trust was the condition that turned Campbell's bluntness into help rather than injury.
- Survivorship bias. The stories of brutal candour that worked come from people who stayed close to Campbell and succeeded; anyone flattened by an expletive verdict was not interviewed. The same words from a less trusted boss could read as abuse, and the chapter's own logic is that trust must come first.
- Selection does part of the work. Coaching only the coachable means Campbell's success rate partly reflects who he chose, not only how he coached.
- The identity advice is second-hand. The authors admit they never heard it directly; it rests on a few successful executives' accounts, without counterexamples.
- Citation slips. The 1999 psychological-safety paper is Amy Edmondson's (Harvard Business School) in Administrative Science Quarterly, a journal housed at Cornell, which is presumably why the text calls it a Cornell study. The footnote credits the February 25, 2016 New York Times piece on Google's team study to "James Graham"; it was written by Charles Duhigg. The text dates Wong's encouragement paper 2014, the notes 2015; and the respectful-inquiry paper, dated 2016 in the text, appeared in print in 2018.
Team First
Campbell was above all a coach of teams: he assembled them, placed the right people in the right seats (and moved the wrong ones out), cheered them and kicked them when they slacked. His governing rule was that the team is paramount, and the trait he demanded most was a team-first attitude: loyalty, and a readiness to subordinate a personal agenda to the team's. Faced with any problem, his first question was never about the problem but about the team working on it: get the team right and the issue follows.
The 2004 IPO crisis: keeping the team intact
The chapter opens with the moment Google's senior team nearly broke up. The trigger was a governance fight, and the fix was pure team coaching.
- The dual-class structure. At the August 2004 IPO Google issued Class A shares to the public at one vote each and Class B shares, held by insiders (Larry Page, Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt), at ten votes each. The founders, admirers of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway's structure, saw Google as an institution as much as a business and wanted to keep making long-term, big bets without bowing to quarterly market swings. A footnote lists earlier dual-class firms (Ford, the New York Times Company, Berkshire) and later adopters (Facebook, LinkedIn, Snap).
- Schmidt's position. After long talks with the founders, Schmidt became convinced the structure would protect the mission of organising the world's information and create more shareholder value, and argued it to a board that was still divided.
- The board's move. Some directors already wanted a more independent chairman, and the dual-class argument pushed them further. They asked Schmidt to give up the chair and stay CEO.
- The reaction. Schmidt felt he had earned the role in three years as chairman and CEO: the founders and staff trusted him, results were strong, the IPO was imminent. Hurt and proud, he told Campbell on the phone that he would quit Google. Campbell's reply was a flat two words: "Okay. When?"
The decisive board meeting was on Thursday, two days away, and it could have cost Schmidt the CEO job too. Campbell judged that emotions were raw over the IPO, the governance debate and the chairmanship, that the team needed Schmidt, and that Schmidt was the right chairman for the foreseeable future. He called back the next day with a deal: step down as chairman now, stay as CEO, and Campbell would see him reinstated as chairman before long. He framed it as loyalty and judgment: this was not a fight for today, and Schmidt's pride was blocking what was best for Google and for himself. Schmidt agreed, the two rehearsed the meeting, and on Thursday he gave up the chair and kept the CEO job. He was restored as chairman in 2007, held it until April 2011, and was executive chairman until January 2018.
What the episode shows, in the authors' reading:
- Money is not the only motivator. Walking away from a mountain of unvested stock looks irrational, but in high-performing teams purpose, pride, ambition and ego drive behaviour too. Campbell appealed to Schmidt emotionally and rationally at once.
- Credibility was the collateral. When he promised reinstatement, Campbell had nobody's agreement; he simply knew it was right and trusted his own influence. His integrity and record of sound judgment made the promise believable, and once the IPO was done and tempers cooled he made the case, as promised.
- Senior teams need coaches most. Team-building matters at every level, but it is hardest at the top, where egos and ambitions are biggest. Executives may get individual coaches; team coaches at that level are rare, because all-star teams seem not to need one.
- The scepticism and the answer. Patrick Pichette found it "bizarre" on arrival that Google's talent needed a coach. Omid Kordestani answers that the senior team's community was what made Google special and that Campbell was the glue. Sheryl Sandberg says his coaching was never about her career, always about the team.
Lee C. Bollinger (Columbia president) supplies the chapter's premise: everything is achieved through the collective and its common purpose; most people do not grasp this, and those who do still do not know how to do it. Campbell's own version was blunter: you can't get anything done without a team. The authors add Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, 1871): a tribe whose members are loyal, brave, sympathetic and ready to sacrifice for the common good will beat most other tribes, which is natural selection at work. Teams succeed only when every member is loyal and will, when needed, put the team's win above their own agenda.
The ten team-building principles
The rest of the chapter unpacks how Campbell coached teams. He worked the team, not the problem; built teams by judging talent and finding doers; ran at the biggest, most festering problems; insisted on winning right; doubled down on values when things went badly; and closed gaps between people through quiet behind-the-scenes conversations.
| Principle | Bill's rule (as the book boxes it) |
|---|---|
| Work the team, then the problem | Facing a problem or opportunity, first make sure the right team is in place and working on it. |
| Pick the right players | Look for smarts and hearts: learning fast, hard work, integrity, grit, empathy, team-first attitude. |
| Pair people | Peer relationships are critical and overlooked, so pair people on projects or decisions. |
| Get to the table | Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams have more women. |
| Solve the biggest problem | Name the elephant in the room, bring it front and centre, and tackle it first. |
| Don't let the bitch sessions last | Air every negative issue, don't dwell, move on as fast as possible. |
| Winning right | Strive to win, but always with commitment, teamwork and integrity. |
| Leaders lead | When things go badly, teams want more loyalty, commitment and decisiveness from leaders. |
| Fill the gaps between people | Listen, observe and close communication and understanding gaps. |
| Permission to be empathetic | Teams work better and leading is more joyful when you know and care about people. |
Work the team, then the problem
At a Google meeting on rising costs in some of the newer businesses, investor and director Ram Shriram pressed for more detail: the numbers were getting big. Campbell cut in that the right team was in place and working on it. Shriram's lesson: Campbell did not analyse the problem first; the discussion was about the people and whether they could deliver. Managers instinctively ask what the situation, issues and options are; the coach asks the more basic questions: who is working on it, is it the right team, and do they have what they need? When Sundar Pichai became Google CEO, Campbell told him that at that level, more than ever, you must bet on people and think much harder about choosing your team.
- Apple v. Android, 2010. Steve Jobs believed Android infringed iPhone patents, and Apple sued the makers of Android phones, Google's partners. For Campbell, Jobs's close friend, an Apple director and Google's coach, this was personal, like two of his children fighting. Although he knew the technology and the disputed features well, he never gave an opinion on the merits. He told Schmidt to put the right person on it: Alan Eustace became chief diplomat to Apple, charged with keeping the relationship from imploding.
- Alphabet, 2015. Google was creating the Alphabet holding company, spinning speculative "other bets" into separate companies, promoting Pichai to run Google and moving Page to Alphabet CEO, all while sales chief Nikesh Arora had just left. Google asked Omid Kordestani, its first head of sales, to come back. Kordestani notes the path was full of complex steps, yet his talks with Campbell covered no tactics or strategy, only the team: Campbell wanted someone who cared about the company and its people to steer the change. Kordestani calls that care rare at a level that is usually cutthroat; the management team was Campbell's primary love.
Pick the right players
Campbell's starting point sounds like a cliché (surround yourself with excellent people), but he gave it an edge. Everyone running a function for the CEO should be better at it than the CEO, and should wear their company hat most of the time rather than their HR or IT hat, so the group produces the best idea, not a set of departmental positions.
- Smart. Not academic brilliance but the ability to get up to speed fast in new areas and connect them: what he called making far analogies.
- Hard-working. Willingness to put in the effort.
- High integrity. Non-negotiable.
- Grit. The passion and perseverance to get knocked down and go at it again.
The chapter then layers on the signals he and his coachees used to detect these traits and the team-first attitude.
| Signal | How to read it | Source in the book |
|---|---|---|
| How, not what | Ask how a result was achieved (hands-on? built the team? a doer?), not just what it was. | Campbell's interviewing |
| "I" versus "we" | He listened for pronouns: "I" as me-first, "we" as team player (research disagrees; see the lens below). | Campbell's interviewing |
| Still learning | More answers than questions is a bad sign. | Campbell |
| Commitment to the cause | People who see their success as depending on give-and-take and put the company first; "we would cherish them". | Pichai |
| Sacrifice and joy for others | Note when people give things up and when they are excited by someone else's success. | Pichai |
| Courage | Willingness to take personal risk to speak up for what is right for the team. | Pichai's own record |
| Doers | Not what you used to do or plan to do, but what you do every day. | Sandberg |
| Team composition | Don't staff a team with only quarterbacks; weave different talents together. | Schindler |
| Potential | Project what someone could become, not just their experience. | Dweck |
Commitment, sacrifice and the cheering bench
Pichai says that when he and Campbell found people who understood that success depends on working well together, they cherished them. His method for spotting them: he overindexes (Google-speak for pays close attention) on moments when people give something up in a decision, and on moments when someone is visibly excited about a success unrelated to them. His image is Steph Curry leaping off the bench when Kevin Durant hits a big shot (Pichai, a Warriors fan, said it just after their third title in four years): genuine joy for a teammate cannot be faked.
Rosenberg puts ego ahead of the team
When Schmidt stepped down as CEO in 2011, the reorganisation eliminated Jonathan Rosenberg's job as head of products. Hurt, he turned down every option offered, including running the Enterprise business (today Google Cloud, a multibillion-dollar division), seeing them as demotions. Campbell was deeply disappointed and called it a mistake born of ego and emotion. He urged Rosenberg to take more time, kept meeting him regularly, and helped him find his way back into other Google roles. He never gave up on him, but never let him forget he had let the team down. The lesson Rosenberg draws: when change comes, what is best for the team has to be the priority.
Courage and the "misshapen diamonds"
Campbell prized courage: taking risks and standing up for the team even at personal cost. Before he became CEO, Pichai often objected when he thought a decision was wrong, to Schmidt's team and later to Page as CEO. Campbell welcomed it because he knew Pichai spoke out of care for the company and its products; Pichai now gives extra weight to dissent from people he knows are team players.
He was also drawn to "difficult" people: outspoken, sometimes abrasive, unafraid to buck the crowd. Alan Eustace likens them to diamonds that are somehow misshapen. His long partnerships with Jobs, Page and Brin, and Intuit's Scott Cook featured no easygoing personalities. The authors doubt he sought prickliness out, but he tolerated and even embraced it, found such people worth developing and sometimes helped smooth their edges. Their rule: effective coaches allow some eccentricity, because outstanding performers in sport, startups and business are often difficult, and you want them on your team.
Doers, not titles
In late 2001, during Sheryl Sandberg's first week at Google, Campbell asked her what she did there. Her title was business unit general manager, but Google had no business units. She mentioned her past at the Treasury Department; he asked again. She described what she planned to do; he asked a third time, until she admitted that so far she did nothing. Her takeaway: what counts is not your past or your ideas but what you do every day. The authors call this perhaps the most important trait Campbell sought: people who show up, work hard and have impact daily, the doers.
Composition: smarts and hearts, potential over experience
- No team of superheroes. Silicon Valley, especially at senior levels, hunts for people who are best at everything. Philipp Schindler recalls Campbell's warning against a team of only quarterbacks: understand each person's limits and differences and weave diverse talents together.
- Smarts and hearts. Campbell valued high cognitive ability but also soft skills such as empathy, rarely prized in tech; he taught Google that the combination makes better managers.
- Bet on potential. He looked at skills and mindset and projected what people could become, a coach's skill. Carol Dweck (Mindset, 2006) warns that true potential is unknowable, since years of passion and training can achieve the unforeseeable. The authors' conclusion: even imperfect judgment of potential beats writing people off for lack of experience; high-performing teams should hire for potential as well as experience.
Adding players to the team
Picking players also means rethinking who is in the room. Rosenberg's product staff meeting included product management leaders but, because of Google's structure, no engineering leads. Resource and staffing calls set product against engineering, and meetings filled with argument and complaints about the absent engineers.
- The fix. Invite the engineering leads permanently, force plans to be discussed with them, air the arguments and secure buy-in on decisions.
- The real purpose. The meeting was not for Rosenberg to show command of the topics and hand out orders (a habit Campbell had noticed); it was to make the team gel, which required bringing in the source of the friction.
- The result. Arguments continued but were resolved faster with all the players present, and cross-group relationships grew stronger.
Eric Johnson, a colleague from Campbell's Kodak days, saw the talent early. Kodak was profitable enough to tolerate mediocre performers, and Campbell was not a head-roller then (he learned to deal with poor performers later, as Intuit CEO). Instead he found the doers in every department, using the same four traits, and brought them together formally or informally around projects. People looked forward to his meetings: results-oriented, everyone contributing, and actually enjoyable.
The authors' own footnote concedes this is a rare case where research contradicts Campbell (they add, drily, that they are not amused). James Pennebaker (The Secret Life of Pronouns, 2011) finds pronoun choice signals status, not team spirit: lower-status people (individual contributors, first-year students) say "I" more; higher-status people (executives, professors) say "we" more. An interviewer applying the pronoun test may simply be rewarding seniority and penalising junior candidates.
Pair people
Campbell treated peer relationships as too important to leave to chance. His technique: take two people who don't usually work together, hand them a task, project or decision, and let them handle it on their own. Working together builds trust between the pair, more or less regardless of the task. The supporting study is Daniel McAllister (Georgetown, Academy of Management Journal, 1995), which distinguishes affect-based from cognition-based trust and finds trust between a manager and a peer rises with frequency of interaction.
- First advice to Rosenberg. After sitting in on a couple of his staff meetings, Campbell told him to stop acting as a dictator assigning tasks and to coach and pair people instead.
- What got paired. Material for public events such as earnings calls, team off-sites, compensation and promotion ladders, and internal tools. The result was better decisions and a stronger team.
- The hidden objective. When Patrick Pichette joined as CFO, Campbell asked Rosenberg to seek him out and teach him Google's ways. It helped Pichette, but the real goal was a new trusted pair on Schmidt's team. The deliverable matters; the chance for two teammates to learn to know and trust each other matters as much.
The peer feedback survey
Because he considered peers the most important evaluators, Campbell helped design a peer survey Google used for years. It began with four dimensions (job performance, peer relationships, management and leadership, innovation). Campbell then insisted on a question about behaviour in meetings, because he was dismayed by how many executives sat on phones and laptops; a collaboration question and a product block for product leaders were added later.
Core attributes. For the past 12 months, to what extent do you agree or disagree that each person:
- Displayed extraordinary in-role performance.
- Exemplified world-class leadership.
- Achieved outcomes in the best interest of both Google as a whole and their own organisation.
- Expanded the boundaries of what is possible for Google through innovation and/or best practices.
- Collaborated effectively with peers (worked well together, resolved barriers with others) and championed the same in their team.
- Contributed effectively in senior team meetings: was prepared, participated actively, listened well, was open and respectful, disagreed constructively.
Product leader attributes. For the past 12 months, did each person show exemplary leadership in product vision, product quality and product execution?
Open-text questions. What differentiates each SVP and makes them effective today? What advice would make each SVP more effective or give them greater impact?
Notice how the survey encodes the chapter's values: item 3 tests company hat over functional hat, item 5 tests pairing and collaboration, and item 6 turns Campbell's meeting etiquette into something peers formally rate.
Get to the table
In the 1980s few technology executives were women. Deb Biondolillo, head of US human resources at Apple, would sit in the row of chairs along the wall at the weekly CEO staff meeting rather than at the table. Campbell kept asking what she was doing back there and telling her to get to the table. One day she arrived early and nervously took a seat at it. Al Eisenstat, Apple's powerful and famously gruff general counsel (and a marketing head before Campbell), sat down beside her and barked at her presence. She answered that she was going to the meeting; Eisenstat stared at her, then looked across at Campbell, and she knew she would be backed.
The authors call Campbell the strongest advocate they ever met for women being at the table, long before diversity was a common topic, and they admit the paradox: he swore, loved football, beer and a dirty joke, and perfected the guys' trip. Most of that happened outside work (the swearing excepted), and it probably made some women feel excluded at times. Yet every woman they interviewed was comfortable with him, because he was a straight shooter who delivered hard messages with respect, warmth and candor.
The evidence and the rules
His logic was simple: winning depends on the best team, and the best teams include more women. Everyone has biases, so put your bias blinders on.
- Collective intelligence. The authors cite "a pair of 2010 studies", published together by Anita Woolley, Christopher Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi and Thomas Malone in Science. They asked why some teams are smarter than their members' IQs suggest, and found three features of the best teams: everyone contributes rather than one or two dominating; members are better at reading complex emotional states; and they include more women, partly because women tend to read emotions better.
- Recruit actively. You can always find a woman for a job; it may just take a little longer. Campbell helped recruit Ruth Porat as Google CFO in 2015.
- Push for P&L. He urged the women he coached to seek bigger jobs with profit-and-loss responsibility, outside the "typical" female functions of HR and PR.
- Connect and protect. He linked successful women with each other and had zero tolerance for gender bias in business conversations.
- 20% of high-tech executives were women, per a 2016 US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report.
- 10%, per Entelo's 2018 Women in Tech report.
- 30% female staff at Shellye Archambeau's 1,000-plus-person Bangalore office, high for Indian tech at the time.
- $200 million+ combined value of the women-led companies in HearstLab.
Four women, four interventions
- Eve Burton and HearstLab. Campbell brought Eve Burton, SVP and general counsel of Hearst, onto the Intuit board, coached her on content deals, and worked with her on a Columbia-Stanford journalism and technology partnership. Most important to him was HearstLab, a "greenhouse" for women-led companies that Burton founded at his urging. She calls it the last thing he pushed her to do.
- Diane Greene and the girls' team. At an Intuit board meeting Diane Greene mentioned that her fifth-grade daughter resented that only boys played flag football. Campbell told her to bring the girl to Sacred Heart in Atherton on Thursday afternoon without saying why. There he was coaching a girls' flag football team with the same energy and colourful language as the boys'. He wanted the girl to see that girls play football too, and he barely mentioned it.
- Shellye Archambeau's CEO group. After becoming CEO of MetricStream, Shellye Archambeau formed a mentoring group of women CEOs. Campbell came once, it went so well that it became a regular event in his Palo Alto conference room, and he prepared for and orchestrated each session, telling stories and asking questions rather than giving orders. Gender rarely came up, but when members described bias he got frustrated and pressed them to think of the other women at the table when opportunities arose; looking for directors, look around the group first. The authors cite a 2017 HBR article (Laura Sherbin and Ripa Rashid, "Diversity Doesn't Stick Without Inclusion") showing minority leaders often hesitate to bring in members of their own group, fearing accusations of favouritism or that recruits won't make the grade.
- The Bangalore role reversal. Launching a women's diversity programme at MetricStream's Bangalore office, Archambeau convened the diversity committee and leadership in a room with too few chairs. The women took the wall; the men took the table. She swapped them, ran the meeting, then asked the men how the wall felt: weird and uncomfortable. Her point: real inclusion means everyone at the table.
The "pair of studies" is in fact one 2010 Science paper reporting two studies (about 700 participants in small groups). By the authors' own account, the women effect was largely carried by social sensitivity, so the finding supports hiring for emotional perceptiveness at least as much as for gender. Later work has questioned how robust a general "collective intelligence" factor is (for example Bates and Gupta, 2017, who found group performance tracked members' individual IQ). Campbell's push for women stands on fairness and talent grounds anyway; the study is a weaker crutch than the book implies.
Solve the biggest problem
Highly analytical teams (Google's was full of computer scientists and mathematicians) tend to assume data and process will settle everything, and to treat the messy emotional tension in any human team as an irrational irritant that a data-driven process will dissolve. It doesn't: tensions arise and don't go away on their own, and because they are awkward people avoid them, which makes them worse.
- No hidden elephants. Former Avon CEO Andrea Jung says that with Campbell there was never an elephant in the room; more precisely, the elephant was never left hiding in the corner. He dragged it into the centre.
- Football mentality. Shona Brown, who worked with him weekly on operational issues while Google grew far ahead of its processes, likens it to finding the weakest link on the offensive line or in the secondary. His rule: tackle the hardest problem first.
- The litmus test. An issue has simmered too long when the team can't even discuss it honestly. That is when the coach acts as a tension spotter.
- Tension is politics. When people say things are getting political, it usually means data and process failed to produce a decision and personalities have taken over. Campbell wrote to Rosenberg that politics was very toxic and that Google had grown big with a welcome absence of it; the authors credit that absence to his habit of attacking the ugliest problems head-on. Former communications head Rachel Whetstone says he would beat the politics out of a situation by stating the problem clearly and forcing everyone to focus on it.
Two leaders, one product group
A few years before the book, two Google product leaders both had legitimate claims to manage the same group of products. For a while it was handled as a technical question that data and logic would settle. They didn't; the dispute festered, tension rose inside the teams and spilled over to external partners, who wondered who was in charge. Campbell saw a fundamental tension that would not resolve itself and forced a meeting where one executive would win and the other lose. He had no view on the answer, only that it had to be decided now. It was one of the most heated meetings the authors remember, and it had to happen.
Don't let the bitch sessions last
The iPhone 3G went on sale on July 11, 2008, and launch day went wrong twice over. Every new phone had to connect to Apple's servers to activate, and the servers went down: customers could buy phones but not use them. Owners of the original iPhone who installed the new iOS (the first to support the App Store) found their phones bricked. At Cupertino, Eddy Cue and his team gathered in a conference room amid what he calls mass chaos, his worst day at Apple, with people who had queued all night unable to buy phones.
- The insight. Cue saw that the negativity in the room was itself a problem. The team had to stop fretting about lost sales and fix the right problems.
- The sequence. First pull the iOS update so original-iPhone owners stopped bricking their phones; then restore the servers, which took a couple of hours.
- Campbell's imprint. He was not involved, but his method was: air problems completely and transparently, then move on. Cue's version: get the negatives out and get to the issues, but don't let the meeting dwell on them.
Problem-focused coping. Direct energy at changing the situation: define the issue, plan, act. The right default in business, where venting must be brief so that energy goes to solutions.
Emotion-focused coping. Direct energy at managing the feelings the situation causes. More appropriate when the problem cannot be solved. (The framework comes from Carver, Scheier and Weintraub's 1989 coping-strategies paper, which the book cites.)
Learning forward and relentless positivity
The Apple board had ample practice after Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, when the company was near bankruptcy, and again in hard moments after the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Campbell stayed level-headed and went straight to what to do next. Andrea Jung, who joined Apple's board in 2008, calls it learning forward: not what happened and who is to blame, but what we do about it.
- The most positive director. Cue says that in the tough early years Campbell was by far the most positive board member, which mattered because negativity is infectious, breeding cynicism and draining optimism.
- Not cheerleading. What separated him from a cheerleader was that he was equally relentless in finding and attacking problems.
- Praise first, then the hard question. Studies show positive leadership makes problem-solving easier (the book cites Isen, Daubman and Nowicki, 1987, on positive affect aiding creative problem solving). Campbell praised, hugged and clapped people on the shoulder, so when the tough questions came everyone knew he was on their side and pushing because he wanted them to succeed.
- Positive coaching at work. Parents coaching kids' soccer or baseball are taught to lead with praise, then give constructive feedback; back at the office they forget it and rip into people. The authors don't advise treating executives like children, but the same basics work at the top of an organisation.
Winning right
Sport talks about a culture of winning and its dynasties. The authors list some: the Boston Celtics (eight straight NBA titles, 1959-1966), Santos FC of São Paulo (eleven titles, 1955-1969), UCLA men's basketball (ten titles, 1964-1975), Manchester United (twelve titles, 1992-2011), and the New England Patriots and San Francisco 49ers (five Super Bowls each). Then they add Campbell's: ten league titles in fourteen years with the Sacred Heart middle-school flag football team in Atherton, one of America's richest zip codes. His message to the players: you are not the rich kids from Atherton, you are the tough kids from Sacred Heart.
- Same standards as business. Middle school or not, private school or not, it was football and you played to win. He demanded commitment, passion and above all loyalty.
- No second priority. When parents said a child would be late because of soccer or another sport, Campbell said that was fine and the child would do very well on the B team. Nobody got special treatment for outside interests.
- Commitment from the coaches too. He and his volunteer assistants (all with demanding jobs) ran practice every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon each autumn. When his phone rang he would glance at it long enough for the kids to see the caller ID, then pocket it, leaving Steve Jobs unanswered. A former player says nothing was cooler than knowing that for that hour they were what mattered most to him.
- Even when absent. He once arrived at practice with new plays he had drawn up during presentations at a Google meeting.
The humanity of winning
Campbell liked to say he went into business because he was not a good football coach (pointing to his record), which the authors dispute. Beyond dispute was his ability to build a culture of winning, and winning right, at Sacred Heart, Google and elsewhere. Todd Bradley, a former Hewlett-Packard executive, calls it the humanity of winning: winning as a team, not as individuals, and winning ethically. Much can be done when nobody cares who gets the credit.
- Kids and executives treated alike. People who knew him only as a coach describe the same commitment and loyalty, the same intolerance of integrity lapses, the same intent listening and quick 1:1s on the sideline, the same tough talk and sincere love.
- The swear jar. The players ran a "Coach Campbell Swore" fund, charging him $10 per curse; it became a down payment on the school's new football field.
Charlie Batch: "Told you."
Charlie Batch, from Campbell's hometown of Homestead, Pennsylvania, played quarterback at Eastern Michigan and then fifteen years in the NFL for the Detroit Lions and Pittsburgh Steelers; the two men worked together on Homestead causes. In 2012 starter Ben Roethlisberger was injured, Batch stepped in, threw three interceptions, and the Steelers lost to the Cleveland Browns. At a Homestead event that week Campbell, who had watched the game, chewed him out: change your attitude, step up, take responsibility, be a pro. Batch was taken aback but knew the coach was right. The next Sunday he led a comeback from ten points down to beat the Baltimore Ravens, completing five passes on the winning drive, and walked out of the locker room to a two-word text from Campbell.
Leaders lead
Dan Rosensweig joined Chegg in 2010 believing it was six months from an IPO; it was about three months from bankruptcy. He turned it round and took it public in 2013, after which the stock fell well below its IPO price. Worn down after a multiyear slog, he privately doubted the company and himself and considered quitting, telling no one. Campbell, who had coached him for years, phoned and proposed a walk: not in person but a virtual walk on the phone, destination behind the woodshed. The lecture: leaders lead; you can't afford doubt; you can make mistakes, but you can't have one foot in and one foot out, because if you aren't fully committed nobody around you will be. If you're in, be in. Rosensweig never learned how Campbell knew, but he stayed, rallied a team that is still intact, and rebuilt the company.
Winning is the fun part; Campbell also knew losing, from his Columbia teams and from GO, which failed and lost investors a great deal of money (about $75 million; he liked to thank Webvan, which raised over $400 million privately plus $375 million in a 1999 IPO before going bankrupt in 2001, for making people forget GO). His lesson from failure: loyalty and commitment are easy when winning and much harder when losing, which is exactly when teams need more loyalty, commitment, integrity and decisiveness from their leaders.
- The lost locker room. After a bad loss at Columbia he screamed at his players. He later said that was the moment he lost the team: he showed no loyalty, made no decision that might help, and offered nothing but yelling. He filed the moment away.
- Decisiveness at GO. Jerry Kaplan (Startup, 1995) recounts Campbell calling an emergency meeting when GO had almost no sales and fierce competition from Microsoft. He concluded it would not survive and proposed selling the company; after discussion the team agreed. The motive was not salvaging returns: the aim was to save the project and the organisation by selling to a larger firm that could fund the work, even if that cost him his job. His loyalty was to the cause more than to the company.
- Recommit to the cause and name the betrayal. Nirav Tolia (later CEO of Nextdoor) ran Epinions, which survived several near-death experiences before merging with DealTime and relaunching as part of Shopping.com. When Tolia told his team he and the board were seeking a merger, a key executive (the book calls him "Bob") got spooked and left within weeks, a body blow. Campbell said he was coming over, walked into the assembled team, told them he loved them, called the departure a betrayal in profane terms, and walked out of the building. Minutes later he called Tolia: he bet nobody else would quit now.
Fill the gaps between people
Schmidt once joined a Google meeting by videoconference. Time ran out on one issue, and a late remark struck him as a sign the decision would go against him. He brooded on it for a full week and arrived at the next meeting ready for battle, only to find he had completely misread the comment: everyone was in fact aligned. The authors call this an everyday failure: an offhand remark, a hasty email or text, and people careen off emotionally, out of all proportion to reality.
- The coach's job description. Campbell described it as spotting little flaws in the organisation that a bit of massage could fix: he listened, observed and filled the communication and understanding gaps between people.
- The counterfactual. Had he been in that meeting, Schmidt would have gone to him to test his assumption, been told he was wrong, and been spared a week of angst.
Listen and observe
- Off the board. The power of any coach is a perspective unaffected by being in the game. Patrick Pichette says Campbell saw all the chess pieces because he was not on the board. He sat in Schmidt's weekly staff meetings watching body language and sensing mood shifts.
- The whole field. Jim Rudgers, a Columbia assistant, says most people watch football like a raised finger, tracking only the ball carrier; Campbell saw and recalled all 22 players. In meetings he read the reactions and intentions of the silent people, the ones without the ball.
- Tension as smoke. Even in open, transparent staff meetings where everyone was encouraged to weigh in, people simmered; Campbell looked for rising tension and its source, the smoke to a problem's fire. Lee Bollinger calls his capacity to understand people and their motivations the highest he had seen. The skill is natural to some but can be developed: listen to the words and also watch body language and side conversations.
The associate product managers
Marissa Mayer created Google's associate product manager (APM) programme for computer-science graduates fresh from college. Schmidt told her she had hired the smartest 23-year-olds on the planet, that they were driving everyone crazy, and that the programme would be a home run or blow up. Mayer asked Campbell for help. He attended an evening session where the first APM class gave project updates; Mayer thought it a boring failure of status reports and griping. Campbell saw something else: the APMs were all getting stuck, and Mayer, an early employee who knew how to get things done, was the wrong person to help because she couldn't relate to their problems. His prescription: find someone who will help them work out the next step, and create a forum where they help each other. It worked.
Then talk to people
- Clear it with the boss. At a Google management seminar Campbell explained he had more time than Page or Pichai for these conversations, so he would offer to see someone, tell Pichai what he planned to say, get a yes, and get things moving.
- "Suck it up." When Rachel Whetstone, then running communications and policy, lost a decision she had pushed for on an issue causing PR headaches, he found her after the meeting: we decided against the change this time, I'm sorry, I know it's tough, deal with it. Barely a pep talk, but often enough: acknowledge the loss, show empathy, remind people to soldier on for the team. Such messages were short, timely and highly effective, and he delivered them constantly.
- Make the time. Observing tension is hard to learn, but walking round and talking to people is not: it takes time and communication skill. It wasn't Campbell's job to fix Whetstone's problem; he made the short connection anyway, and made such conversations a priority in a busy day.
The authors back Campbell's empathetic brevity with oncology research: a 2000 paper by Walter Baile and colleagues finds that until the emotion is cleared through empathy, it is hard to discuss a plan. Its six-step protocol:
- Setting. Arrange privacy and time for the conversation.
- Perception. Find out what the person already understands.
- Invitation. Ask how much they want to know.
- Knowledge. Deliver the news clearly, without jargon.
- Emotions. Respond to feelings with empathy before moving on.
- Strategy and summary. Agree the plan and next steps.
In the shadows
None of this was underhanded or secret, but all of it happened behind the scenes: Campbell rarely mentioned his quiet 1:1s. That was deliberate, and it marks a difference between a sports coach, out in front and visible, and a business coach. Deb Biondolillo calls him the shadow behind you: you hear him, but you stand in front, which let him be freer and more genuine. He worked without an agenda, usually voicing no view on which way a decision should go and pushing only for a decision to be made. He drew out viewpoints, closed gaps and fixed miscommunications so that when the meeting came everyone was prepared; then he sat back, observed and began the cycle again.
Permission to be empathetic
Bradley Horowitz, after a career at Virage and Yahoo, co-led Google+ and then its far more successful offspring, Google Photos. In his meetings with Campbell, Campbell always opened with personal matters: Horowitz's family, what motivated him. Human connection first, then the work. Horowitz sums up Campbell's team principles as giving yourself permission to be empathetic: this touchy-feely material is not in the manual, it is easy to obsess over what you produce rather than how, and leading becomes far more joyful, even freeing, when you know and care about people. The authors add, citing John Gerzema and Michael D'Antonio's The Athena Doctrine (2013), that empathy is missing from the manual partly because it is coded as a feminine trait, and the manual was mostly written by men.
Google Photos: team before technology
Google+, launched with fanfare as Google's social network, never caught on, but some components, especially photo management, were popular. Horowitz and colleagues won senior buy-in to spin Photos out as a stand-alone product with strong product-market fit for mobile users. The problem was the team: many engineers and product managers, including senior ones, had left the team or Google, and many who remained had never led a project of that scope. Horowitz spent his time on team issues rather than technical ones: getting to know people, pumping them up, pushing them, and building momentum as milestones fell. Given more freedom, senior leads stepped up. Then one of the most important technical leads, sharing authority with another lead, demanded more power or he would join Facebook, which had made him a rich offer. Horowitz decided almost at once that the team he had built through empathy mattered more than any individual and told him he guessed he was going to Facebook.
The team-first pattern
Across the chapter's cases the same move recurs: Campbell refuses to solve the content problem and fixes the team around it instead.
| Situation | What Campbell did not do | What he did to the team |
|---|---|---|
| IPO chairmanship fight (2004) | Argue governance | Kept Schmidt with a face-saving compromise |
| Rising costs in new businesses | Dig into the numbers | Confirmed the right team was on it |
| Apple v. Android (2010) | Judge the patents | Installed Eustace as chief diplomat |
| Alphabet transition (2015) | Plan the reorganisation | Recruited Kordestani to care for the people |
| Product-engineering fights | Referee each dispute | Added engineering leads to the staff meeting |
| Disputed product ownership | Pick the winner | Forced the decision meeting |
| Struggling APM class | Manage the APMs | Swapped the helper, built a peer forum |
| Epinions defection | Analyse the merger | Named the betrayal, rallied loyalty |
Every principle in the chapter, from hiring and pairing to forcing hard decisions and closing gaps, serves one rule: team first. All players, stars and scrubs alike, must put the team's needs above their own, and a coach's first question about any issue is who is tackling it.
The Power of Love
The word the authors least expected to hear from tech executives and venture capitalists about Campbell was love: entirely chaste, fierce and genuine care for colleagues as whole people, which researchers call companionate love (affection, compassion, caring, tenderness). He refused to split people's working selves from their human selves. His hugs, curses and brutal candor all worked because people knew they came from love, and teams grow stronger when leaders tear down the wall between the professional and the personal.
Hugs, curses and the licence they bought
In February 2003 Brad Smith (later Intuit CEO) had just joined Intuit after a messy hiring: a former employer claimed he had broken non-compete agreements, and settling it took time, lawyers and money. At his first internal leadership conference, as he worked the coffee-hour crowd trying to make a good first impression, someone grabbed him from behind in a bear hug. It was Campbell, greeting him (in saltier words) as the so-and-so who had cost him a fortune, and adding that he had better be worth it.
- Not a recommendation. The authors stick to handshakes and ordinary pleasantries themselves; hugs and curses were simply Campbell's style. What matters is what the style meant: it was rooted in his heart, so people did not merely tolerate it, they looked forward to it, because it meant he loved them.
- Chaste, and clearly so. He hugged almost everyone and never came near the line. When he could not reach you he would wink and blow a kiss across a board meeting or Schmidt's staff meeting, and everyone understood it as care.
Warmth versus competence
Research describes a compensation effect: people tend to assume warm people are less competent and cold people more competent (the book cites Kervyn, Judd and Yzerbyt, 2009). Campbell defied it; Sergey Brin calls him a rare mix of a sharp mind and a warm heart. Yet when Jerry Kaplan first met him at GO, he took him for a rough-and-tumble middle-aged man. The practical rule: lead with warmth, but expect to work a little harder to establish your competence.
Why love is missing at work
Business people profess love for ideas, products, brands, plans, even the cafeteria dessert, but not for people. We are trained to keep personal emotion out of work; we hire for passion only in the business sense, lest lawyers and HR worry. The result is a daily existence in which our human and working selves are practically separate beings.
- Campbell's alternative. He treated everyone as a single whole: professional, personal, family and emotions together, and if you were one of his people he cared about you fiercely and genuinely.
- A party arriving. Bill Gurley of Benchmark says Campbell's arrival at the firm felt like a party: greeting people by name, hugging them, then talking families, trips and friends.
- The authors' conclusion. You cannot be a coach of teams without being a lover of people.
- The evidence. The book cites Sigal Barsade and Olivia O'Neill (Administrative Science Quarterly, 2014), a longitudinal study of a culture of companionate love in a long-term care setting: such cultures showed higher employee satisfaction and teamwork, lower absenteeism and better performance.
Love as licence for candor
Jesse Rogers, whom Campbell had once berated over his new company's crummy website (a story from an earlier chapter), tells it laughing and crying, and insists the ranting came from love. People are unused to talking about male love, he says: the yelling meant Campbell cared and wanted you to succeed. John Donahoe (eBay) borrows Huey Lewis and the News to call it the power of love: because Campbell made you feel loved, he had licence to tell you that you were full of it and could do better, and since it was never about him, the truth didn't hurt.
The chapter's thesis follows: it is okay to love. The people on your team are people, and the whole team gets stronger when you break down the wall between professional and human personas and embrace the whole person (in Campbell's case, literally).
Compiled by Columbia friend and teammate Ted Gregory and printed on the back of the memorial service programme, these were Campbell's favourite ways of telling you he loved you, in countdown order:
- No. 10. "You should have that shirt cleaned and burned."
- No. 9. "You're as dumb as a post."
- No. 8. "He's one of the great horse's asses of our time."
- No. 7. "You're a numbnuts."
- No. 6. "You couldn't run a five-flat forty-yard dash off a cliff."
- No. 5. "You've got hands like feet."
- No. 4. "You'd f--- up a free lunch."
- No. 3. "You're so f---ed up you make me look good."
- No. 2. "Don't f--- it up."
- No. 1. "That's the sound of your head coming out of your ass."
The six principles of love at work
| Principle | Bill's rule (as the book boxes it) | Signature example |
|---|---|---|
| The lovely reset | To care about people you have to care about people: ask about their lives outside work, understand their families, and when things get rough, show up. | Near-daily visits to the ailing Steve Jobs |
| The percussive clap | Cheer demonstrably for people and their successes. | Five loud claps at a Google VR demo |
| Always build communities | Build community inside and outside work; a place is much stronger when people are connected. | Endowed Super Bowl trip; Friday beers at the Old Pro |
| Help people | Be generous with your time, connections and other resources. | A conference invitation for Susan Wojcicki |
| Love the founders | Hold a special reverence for, and protect, the people with the most vision and passion for the company. | Telling Amazon's board to keep Jeff Bezos |
| The elevator chat | Loving colleagues may not come naturally, so practise until it does. | Bruce Chizen's elevator and cafeteria talks at Adobe |
The lovely reset
The authors heard one line so often that they assumed it was an old saying; finding no trace of it online, they claim it as their own: to care about people you have to care about people. Corporate rhetoric says people are the most important asset, and most executives genuinely do care about employees, just not about the whole person. Campbell did: he learned names, greeted everyone warmly, and showed care for families through actions more than words.
- Jesse Rogers's daughter adored him because he always stopped to give her a big hello hug.
- Ruth Porat, commuting from New York after becoming Google CFO, found his first concern was whether her husband was happy with the arrangement and what Campbell could do to help. He cared about the whole you, she says.
- Sundar Pichai says every weekly Monday meeting opened with Pichai's family and weekend, and Campbell's own. However busy Pichai was, the talk restored perspective: work mattered, but what really matters is how you live and the people in your life. Pichai calls it a lovely reset. The authors' point: this "small talk" was not small; it gave coachees a respite and a moment's relief from work-family conflict.
- Mickey Drexler, J.Crew CEO and Apple director, would stop at the J.Crew store at Stanford Shopping Center on his way to Apple board meetings and hear the sales associates rave about Campbell, who knew their names and treated them exactly as he treated the Apple board. Drexler says he learned from that.
Going past "how are the kids?"
None of this sounds novel: colleagues always ask about each other's families. The hard part in a busy business, and Campbell's difference, is that he got to know the families, mostly by pushing his questions a few steps further than the norm. With Rosenberg it was not how is the family but how his daughter Hannah did at her last soccer game, which grew into where she was thinking of going to college, which grew into detailed advice on where she would fit best. When he saw the family at events, they got the same hug as everyone else.
Families as part of the team
- Marc Mazur's promise. Recruiting Marc Mazur (later an advisor at Brightwood Capital) as a kicker for Columbia in the late 1970s, Campbell read the household as a maternal one and promised Mrs. Mazur he would always look after her son. As a freshman Mazur wrecked the knee of his kicking leg and would never kick for the Lions. Campbell called his mother: the promise held, and Marc would keep his financial aid even though he could not play. Head coaches rarely bothered with freshmen; the two stayed close for the rest of Campbell's life because of that loyalty to the family.
- The father call. Nirav Tolia, now Nextdoor's CEO, was 26 when Campbell began coaching him, and Campbell soon asked for his father's phone number. Asked afterwards how it went, his father said fine, but Campbell had asked him to keep the details private. Recruiting had taught Campbell that a player's family must know the organisation cares about the player, and vice versa. Outside football he rarely called parents, but he often cared for people by caring for their families.
- Father figure. Eric Schmidt lost his father at 26, and Omid Kordestani lost his young; both came to see Campbell as a father figure. When Kordestani became executive chairman of Twitter he met Campbell to draw on his experience as Intuit's chairman, yet they spent most of the time on family and reached Twitter only afterwards.
When things turned dire, Campbell made himself available to families. Mike Homer, his close friend and colleague from Apple and GO, fell ill with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; Campbell visited his home often, helped however he could, put Homer ahead of his Google and other work, and learned the caregivers' names. Homer's widow, Kristina Homer Armstrong, says he wanted the caregivers to know Mike was well loved, hoping it would spur them to their best. When Steve Jobs was incapacitated by cancer, Campbell visited him nearly every day, at home, at the office or in hospital. Phil Schiller, Apple's longtime marketing head and friend of both, took the lesson that when a friend is hurt, ill or in need, you drop everything and just go.
Compassion as an organisational signal
- The chartered jet. As Intuit CEO, when team leader Mari Baker was hospitalised on a business trip, Campbell chartered a jet to fly her husband to the East Coast to be with her and to bring her home. The authors argue (citing Inside Intuit, 2003, by Suzanne Taylor, Kathy Schroeder and John Doerr) that such stories signal the leader's devotion to the whole company and win tremendous loyalty in return.
- The roses are your people. Mark Human runs the El Dorado Golf and Beach Club in Cabo San Lucas, where Campbell had a vacation home. Human was in his twenties when Campbell began greeting him with a hug and a whispered word of encouragement. His lesson: take time to smell the roses, and the roses are your people, who want to talk about more than the job. When an employee was badly injured helping a family at the club, Human rallied a support group to fund months of medical care; the young man is finishing his education and returning to work. Human also makes the year-end staff party special: everyone dresses up and, whatever their rank or background, everyone dances. His turnover is low for Cabo's many resorts, which he credits to the culture Campbell inspired.
The research behind the diagram: a 2004 paper by Jason Kanov, Sally Maitlis, Monica Worline, Jane Dutton, Peter Frost and Jacoba Lilius argues individual compassion becomes organisational compassion when members collectively notice, feel and respond to a colleague's pain, which happens when the organisation legitimates that empathy, typically through leaders like Campbell or Human acting first. Compassion can start at the top.
The authors' honest caveat: they don't try to love people the way Campbell did. They don't hug, don't dig as deep into family lives, and certainly don't call fathers. If your heart is not naturally that big, faking it won't work. But most people like their colleagues and still check all but the most sanitised feelings at the office door. Campbell taught the reverse: bring it in. Ask about the family, learn names, ask more questions, look at the photos, and above all care.
The percussive clap
Picture presenting a new product (an iPad, an iPhone, a Mac operating system) to the Apple board in the 2000s, with Steve Jobs and Al Gore in the room and Campbell between them. You cover timing, hold your breath and run the demo, and the clapping starts.
- An emotional reaction, not a board reaction. Phil Schiller recalls Campbell clapping, cheering and throwing double fist pumps, out of his seat in an explosion of emotion, instead of the dry, revenue-driven response boards usually give. It signalled approval of the team more than the product, like appreciation from an uncle or a father. Schiller's lesson: get out of your seat and show love for the work.
- The second purpose. Bob Iger, Disney CEO and Apple director, says everything Campbell brought to the boardroom came from the heart, but also that once he started applauding it was hard to disagree: the applause felt like the whole board's verdict. It was cheerleading and a way of moving things along. The authors, on hearing this, realised one gesture did both jobs: it patted the team on the back and generated momentum in the room.
In April 2015 Clay Bavor, head of Google's virtual and augmented reality products, presented a new VR headset and camera at an executive product review, then handed out Cardboard, Google's low-end viewer, to demo Expeditions, an app that lets teachers take classes on virtual field trips. That cast Bavor as "teacher" and the executives as "students", which felt awkward, until five loud claps came from the back of the room: Campbell. Bavor calls it percussive, a gestural exclamation mark; it put him at ease and gave others permission to get excited. He made the Bill Campbell clap (BCC) part of team culture: good news in a meeting draws five loud claps, a burst of applause prompts the question of what the BCC was for, and new hires practise it in orientation. Hundreds of people on his team have now learned it.
Always build communities
Super Bowl XIX was played in January 1985 at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, walking distance from Campbell's home. The 1921 bowl was lined with wooden benches notorious for leaving splinters (a footnote admits the victims included two local kids named Jonathan and Alan). Campbell and Apple marketing seized the moment and covered all 80,000-plus seats with cushions bearing the Apple logo on one side and the Super Bowl's on the other. Having saved tens of thousands of backsides, he gathered friends at his house and walked to the game, collecting Steve Jobs on the way. On a cool, misty day the 49ers beat the Miami Dolphins.
The Super Bowl group
- Origins and logistics. That game started an annual Super Bowl group: Campbell got tickets and transport, Columbia friend Al Butts booked hotels. The core was Campbell, Butts, John Cirigliano and Ted Gregory.
- The widening circle. Over the years it took in Donna Dubinsky; Campbell's brother Jim, his daughter Renee and her husband; Butts's son Derek; Dave Kinser, his wife Norma and a rotation of their four kids; Spike Bloom (Kodak and Apple) and his son; Columbia friend Gene Schatz; and Campbell's children Jim and Maggie Campbell with friends.
- The ritual. Arrive Thursday or Friday, adopt a good bar as headquarters, and fill the time until kickoff with bad jokes, put-downs, laughter and the occasional deep conversation.
- Random generosity. Once he gave spare tickets to two kids he saw haggling with a scalper, explaining to the baffled scalper that now the kids could enjoy themselves. Another year, after late cancellations, he invited the restaurant servers from the previous night's dinner, who happily accepted.
Butts says the point was never the game but the group: Campbell's friends and their bonds with him and each other mattered enormously to him. So he endowed the trip, leaving enough money to fund it for at least another decade.
More trips, more communities
- Baseball. An annual trip with a Pirates game in Pittsburgh, a visit to Homestead and other games in the Eastern time zone.
- Golf. The "yips and salsa" golf trip to Cabo San Lucas.
- Hall of Fame. The annual College Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
- Fishing and charity. An annual trip to Butte, Montana, where he helped launch a charity event. All of these were endowed too.
- Homestead reunions. He sponsored his high school reunions so the old gang could keep meeting.
- Post-game burgers. Even before Sacred Heart he organised gatherings after games for families to share burgers, beer or soda and stories. Paying was never an option: as an assistant coach at Boston College he had seen colleagues skip social events, perhaps because they couldn't afford them, and he never wanted anyone excluded for money, so he always picked up the tab.
The Old Pro and Mary Ann's
The Old Pro opened in 1964 in a funky steel Quonset hut at El Camino Real and Page Mill Road, Palo Alto. Campbell started going with his Intuit team in the 1990s, and when the bar had to move in the mid-2000s he helped owners Steve and Lisa Sinchek set up in a swankier spot downtown. Most Friday afternoons he held his own TGIF there, with plenty of food and beer, introducing newcomers by highlighting their best feature or accomplishment. The one rule: no agenda; nobody came to network or talk deals. It was the physical form of his communities and is still one of Palo Alto's most popular spots.
Bars recur. After Boston College gave him an honorary degree, he took BC alumnus Phil Schiller to Mary Ann's, a dive bar near campus, and told the bartender the Bud Lights (his beer) were on him for the whole bar. It was graduation, so arriving parents and new graduates got a cold beer and a bear hug from an old football coach.
The trips were never the goal of the communities; the communities were the goal of the trips. Once you have a team or community, what matters most is the bonds between its members, forged by caring for each other and the common good. Sociologists call the result social capital (the book cites Nan Lin, 1999).
John Cirigliano, a friend since Columbia, says Campbell fed on the energy his communities generated, as he did on the people he coached, making him a kind of perpetual motion machine. The authors stress that the luxurious version (Super Bowl trips, a bar) is beyond most people, but social capital is cheap:
- Instant introductions. Mid-conversation he would say you should talk to so-and-so, and minutes later the email was sent. It was never random: he quickly judged the connection would benefit both people, which the authors call a good definition of community.
- A few pitchers a week. The Old Pro gatherings cost a few pitchers of beer and gathered people weekly.
- Teams, not communities. Campbell never used the word community with the authors, only team; they learned it by watching. The lesson: invest in real emotional bonds between people, because those endure and make teams strong.
Help people
Susan Wojcicki, an early Google employee and later head of YouTube, could not get invited to an important tech and media conference, despite YouTube's size and her considerable contacts. When she mentioned it in her 1:1, Campbell erupted in colourful outrage (of course she should be there). The meeting ended, he made a few calls, and the next day the invitation was in her inbox.
- The contrast. The authors recall asking colleagues for small favours that meant bypassing a process or waiving a minor rule, harmless and clearly right on the merits, and being turned down because there's a process. Campbell's verdict on that answer is unprintable: he believed in doing favours.
- Chadé's law school. Campbell chatted with Chadé, one of Rosenberg's assistants, when Rosenberg kept him waiting. She told him she was weighing the LSAT and law school, and worried about the timing and how to tell her boss. Rosenberg admitted he didn't know she was aiming at top schools. Campbell told him to know his people better, to reassure her he would survive whenever she left, and, as her boss, to write her a recommendation: it was his job. She went to Columbia Law School the next year and now practises law in Boston.
- Generous before rich. Nobody could buy Campbell a drink. In Cabo he took all the kids to dinner and bought everyone the bar T-shirt; for his annual Christmas party he bought cases of fine red wine he didn't enjoy, because he enjoyed watching friends enjoy it. Easy for a rich man, the authors concede, but he was the same before he was rich, and generosity of spirit is affordable to anyone.
- Generous with time. A calendar slot might take a couple of months, but if you truly needed him the call came at once.
- Five-minute favours. Adam Grant, crediting entrepreneur Adam Rifkin in Give and Take (2013), defines them as favours that cost the giver little but mean a lot to the receiver. Most of Campbell's were of this kind.
- Self-protective givers. Grant and Reb Rebele (HBR, 2017, "Beat Generosity Burnout") argue effective giving is not dropping everything for everyone but ensuring benefits outweigh costs. The best givers are generous but know their limits, seeking high-impact, low-cost ways to help so they can sustain and enjoy it.
- The authors' rule. Apply judgment that the favour is right and leaves everyone better off; then do it.
The authors tie favours back to love and community: you would do a sensible favour for your best friend without hesitation, but for a colleague the excuses appear (process, perceived unfairness). Campbell erased that double standard.
Love the founders
A favour that built Amazon's cap table. During Microsoft's failed attempt to buy Intuit, Campbell got to know the product manager of Microsoft Money, Intuit's rival product. They kept in touch; she later joined a Seattle startup called Amazon and asked him for an introduction to John Doerr. He made it, and Kleiner Perkins invested.
In 2000 founder-CEO Jeff Bezos took time off to be with his family, leaving COO Joe Galli in charge, and returned to a struggling company. The board, including Doerr and Intuit's Scott Cook, wondered whether Bezos should become chairman and hand the CEO job to Galli, the arrangement that had worked at Intuit when Campbell replaced Cook. Unsure, they asked Campbell to investigate. For a few weeks he spent two days a week in Seattle, sitting in management meetings and observing operations and culture, then told a surprised board that Bezos must stay CEO. Per Brad Stone (The Everything Store, 2013), he found Galli unnaturally focused on pay and perks like private planes and employees loyal to Bezos. His view carried the day.
Why founders deserve special love
- Sane and crazy. Founders are sane enough to know every day is a fight for survival against daunting odds and crazy enough to think they will win anyway; keeping them meaningfully involved is essential.
- Vision versus operations. Campbell valued operational excellence, but reducing leadership to operations loses vision. Professional operators may run the company better yet lose its heart and soul. He loved founders for their chutzpah, their vision and their love of the company; he saw their limitations but usually judged that their value outweighed the shortcomings.
- The Apple lesson. He watched "business guy" John Sculley become CEO and eventually force out Jobs. When Jobs returned and asked him onto the board to save a company months from bankruptcy, Campbell was at the top of his list of trusted allies. They became close friends, taking long walks nearly every weekend, and Campbell shielded Jobs from the many people who pursued him wanting something. Schiller likens them to college friends at a reunion trying one more thing together; sometimes Jobs just needed an arm around the shoulder.
- The business guy, three times. Campbell was the incoming business leader at GO (founder Jerry Kaplan stayed central), at Intuit (founder Scott Cook remains important to this day), and as coach to the hardest pairing of all: Schmidt with Page and Brin at Google. His rule each time: love the founders and keep them meaningfully engaged whatever their operating role.
- Costolo and Twitter. He told Dick Costolo, new CEO of Twitter, to work closely with founders Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams: one day Costolo would be the ex-CEO and they would still be the founders. It is not you versus them but you and them, and you are there to help them.
- Beyond startups. In older companies the founder may be long gone, but the argument stands: vision, heart and soul matter, and other people often embody the company's mission and spirit. They appear on no balance sheet or org chart, yet they are very valuable.
The elevator chat
Much of the book seems to depend on personality, and Campbell was the most natural "people person" the authors ever met. Their answer for everyone else is practice. Bruce Chizen worked with Campbell at Claris; joining Adobe in 1994, he copied what he had watched there even though it did not come naturally: he worked at remembering names, struck up conversations in the elevator, and went out of his way to lunch in the cafeteria with new people.
- The payoff. Chizen credits part of his success to these social habits. Before he became CEO, Adobe's founders asked him, a sales and marketing man, to take over products, because engineering leaders respected his willingness to engage them and their developers.
- The script. In the elevator, the hallway or the cafeteria, stop and chat; Chizen's openers work: how's it going? what are you working on?
- It gets easier. The principles may not feel natural, but they can be learned by pushing yourself until they become habit.
Conclusion: love in the huddle
Love came up in interviews far more than anyone expected among tech executives and VCs. Campbell made it acceptable at work by creating a culture of companionate love through five habits: caring about people's lives outside work, cheering enthusiastically, building communities, doing favours, and keeping a special place for founders. It was partly his ebullient personality, but the authors suspect he also learned it from football.
Why did the 49ers do so great from 1981 to 1998? It's because we had a love for each other.
Steve Young, the 49ers' Hall of Fame quarterback, described coach Bill Walsh announcing each season that he would integrate the team, breaking up the cliques formed by position, college, class, geography, language and religion. The payoff came at Lambeau Field (home of the rival Green Bay Packers): down four with ninety seconds left, third and ten, sleet, wind and 80,000 people screaming, when instinct says get me to the bus. In that huddle the players look at each other and find they are integrated, with a reason, a depth and love and respect for one another. The 49ers reached the playoffs 16 times in those 18 seasons.
- Not easily copied. The authors concede that faking it won't work and that much rested on Campbell's personality and wealth (endowed trips, a bar, a chartered jet). Copying the hugs, blown kisses and profane put-downs without the trust behind them invites harassment complaints, not devotion; the transferable parts are cheap: names, family questions, five-minute favours, cheering.
- Stretched research. The compensation effect paper (Kervyn and colleagues, 2009) studied how people judge groups compared with each other, not individual leaders. The companionate-love evidence comes from a long-term care facility; extending it to boardrooms is plausible but a leap.
- The love has a gender. The book celebrates male love and a "guy's guy" culture of trips, bars and football that the previous chapter admits may have left some women feeling excluded.
The Yardstick
The authors only truly felt their thesis when Eric Schmidt faced a major career transition and Campbell was no longer there to help. Their conclusion: things everyone cares about, love, family, money, attention, power, meaning and purpose, shape every business situation, and positive human values produce positive business results. Campbell's real yardstick was not money but how many of the people he had worked with or helped became great leaders.
Missing the coach
In December 2017, as the first draft of the book was being finished, Schmidt decided to step down as Alphabet's executive chairman. The timing suited the company: it had completed the shift from Google to Alphabet, a holding company over Google and "other bets" such as Verily (life sciences) and Waymo (transportation); a new generation led by Sundar Pichai ran a thriving Google; it had made the move to a mobile-first (often mobile-only) world; and its pipeline was full of products driven by breakthroughs in machine learning.
March 2001 Becomes chairman of Google's board.
August 2001 Joins full-time as CEO.
2004 Gives up the chair before the IPO, at Campbell's urging, and stays CEO.
2007 Reinstated as chairman, as Campbell had promised.
April 2011 Moves from CEO to executive chairman.
December 2017 Decides to step down as Alphabet executive chairman after nearly 17 years, effective January 2018.
At each earlier transition (becoming CEO, the pre-IPO chairmanship, the move to executive chairman) Campbell had worked the human side, talking to everyone involved so that the changes felt right rather than transactional. This time there was broad agreement on next steps and the outcome was good for all, but nobody guided Schmidt through it; the process was businesslike, without the love and affirmation Campbell would have added. Schmidt knew what Campbell would have said, and what to do, but badly missed hearing him say it: mentorship and coaching are intensely personal.
Why an Eric Schmidt needs emotional support
To an outsider, the worries of executives with lofty titles look trivial. The authors answer that the highest performers often feel most alone:
- Interdependent but separate. They have more interdependent relationships yet feel more independent and apart. The book cites Fiona Lee and Larissa Tiedens (2001), who show the two reinforce each other and that power creates a subjective sense of separation from others.
- Ego with insecurity. The big egos and confidence that drive success can coexist with insecurity and uncertainty.
- Friends with motives. Many people seek their friendship for personal gain.
- Still human. They need affirmation and to know they are appreciated. Leaving a place that had been part of his heart for seventeen years called for a pat on the back, a hug and assurance of an exciting future, which Campbell was not there to give.
The thesis: every team needs a coach, and that coach is the manager
Interviews and research produced a more detailed model of Campbell's approach than the authors' own experience had, and a thesis:
- Teams as communities. Successful companies need teams that work as communities, where individuals merge their interests, set aside differences and are collectively obsessed with what is good and right for the company.
- It doesn't happen naturally. Especially among high-performing, ambitious people, this requires someone acting as a team coach. In an era when technology pervades every industry and speed and innovation dominate, team coaching must be part of the culture, above all at the top: executive teams must have a coach to perform at their best.
- The manager is the coach. Few teams have a Bill Campbell, and that is fine, because the best coach for a team is its manager. Coaching is no longer a specialty: you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach. The path to success is high-performing teams given resources and freedom, led by someone who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.
The authors recap the playbook the book has laid out:
| Theme | What Campbell believed and did | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| Management basics | Insisted on operational excellence built from simple practices; managers earn leadership by putting people first | 2 |
| Communication and decisions | A consistent communication approach; recognise when debate is over and decide | 2 |
| Aberrant geniuses | Value strong performers whose behaviour strays, but move on fast if they endanger the team | 2 |
| Product at the core | Great products and the teams that make them are the core; everything else serves them | 2 |
| Letting go | Sometimes people must go, but let them leave with dignity | 2 |
| Trust | Build trust and loyalty: listen completely, be relentlessly candid, believe in people more than they do | 3 |
| Team first | Look at the team before the problem; name the elephant; fill gaps in 1:1s and hallway talks; push leaders to lead when things are bleak; back diversity and being yourself | 4 |
| Love | Love people, build communities around that love, make it acceptable at work | 5 |
What would Bill do?
On a December afternoon in 2017, Jonathan Rosenberg was walking his dog Bo with his wife Beryl. That morning Schmidt had emailed that he was stepping down; the news unsettled Rosenberg, and he sensed Schmidt's uncertainty was greater still. Beryl insisted he had to help (Bo wagged in agreement), so Rosenberg asked what Campbell would do:
- Help him make his own plan. Not tell Schmidt what to do, but help him work out his own next steps.
- Affirm him. A hug, a pat on the back, and a reminder of how well he had done at Google over seventeen years.
- Rally a community. Surround him with what he loves most: big ideas, new momentum, fascinating science, advanced technology.
- Do it with love. All of it delivered with love and affirmation.
Rosenberg did exactly that. He talked with Schmidt and with Jared Cohen, head of Alphabet's Jigsaw subsidiary and a close friend of Schmidt's, brought in Alan Eagle, and began building ideas and a plan for a project they called "Eric 3.0". Mostly, he cared and rallied others who cared. The small team produced a plan, and the authors' moral is in the order of importance: having a plan matters; having a team is paramount.
The essential truth they draw: Campbell understood that human values are factors in every business situation, whatever someone's age, level or status. By knowing people as people he could motivate them as businesspeople. Too many leaders ignore this link; the authors call it counterintuitive in business but essential to success.
After stepping down as eBay CEO in 2015 (successful, past 50, children grown), John Donahoe interviewed dozens of older people who had kept their energy and drive through later-career transitions. Their answers:
- Be creative. Your post-50 years should be your most creative: you have experience and the freedom to apply it. Ban metaphors like being on the "back nine", which belittle your potential impact.
- Don't be a dilettante. Not a portfolio of dabbling: whatever you take on, accept accountability and consequence, and drive it.
- Find people with energy. Surround yourself and engage with them; often they will be younger.
- Apply your gifts. Work out what you are uniquely good at and what gives you purpose, then apply both.
- Don't waste time worrying about the future. Let serendipity play a role; most turning points can't be predicted or controlled.
The yardstick
Campbell usually took no compensation for coaching. Arriving at Dan Rosensweig's office, he announced he took no cash, no stock and no nonsense (in earthier words). He repeatedly declined payment from Google, and when he finally accepted some stock he gave it all to charity. That is unusual: most company advisors are paid in stock or cash. He felt amply rewarded by his business career and wanted to give back. To Ron Johnson (later CEO of Enjoy), after Johnson left the JCPenney CEO job in 2013, he said: "If you've been blessed, be a blessing."
Asked why he refused pay, Campbell said he used a different yardstick: count the people who have worked for him or been helped by him, and how many are now great leaders. The authors interviewed more than 80 such leaders, all crediting him with a major role in their success, and know of more they missed.
The book closes with an invitation: become a better manager and coach, make your team great, push past self-imposed limits, and become another leader on Bill's yardstick, because the world's large problems can only be solved by teams, and teams need coaches.
- Survivorship in the sample. The 80-plus interviewees were chosen because they succeeded and credit Campbell; the people he coached who failed, or who found his style alienating, are not on the yardstick. The count measures loyalty as much as impact.
- Free coaching was a privilege. Declining pay was generous, but it was possible because Campbell was already wealthy, and an unpaid, unaccountable advisor with board seats and deep personal ties (Apple and Google at once) also raises governance questions the book does not address.
- The manager-as-coach claim is asserted, not tested. The authors draw on Google's own management research elsewhere, but here the case for "every manager a coach" rests on stories rather than comparative evidence.
Master Takeaways
Campbell's playbook reduces to one sequence: know people as people, earn their trust, put the team first, and care openly. Every technique in the book, from five words on a whiteboard to the bear hug, is a way of building a team that behaves like a community.
- Coach your own team. No company can hire a coach for every team, so the manager must be the coach; coaching cannot be delegated.
- Leadership is granted from below. Your title makes you a manager; your people decide whether you are a leader.
- Build trust before tackling the task. Trusting teams fight hard over decisions without the fight turning personal; without trust, candour reads as abuse.
- Work the team, then the problem. Faced with any issue, first ask who is on the team and whether they are the right people.
- Coach only the coachable. Look for honesty, humility, perseverance and openness to learning; time spent on the rest is wasted.
- Love is a management tool. Caring openly about the whole person, family included, licenses tough feedback and binds teams into communities.
- Structure every 1:1. Cover job performance, peers, team management and innovation; open with personal talk; merge both people's top-five lists into the agenda.
- Open meetings as humans. Trip reports or a thank-you round build rapport and get everyone talking early.
- Seek the best idea, not consensus. Hear everyone, speak last, and if debate does not converge (about 2 times in 10), break the tie and demand commitment.
- Argue from first principles. Restate the business's immutable truths and many hard decisions make themselves, as at Tellme.
- Protect aberrant geniuses, within limits. Keep difficult stars unless they lie, abuse colleagues, or cost the team more than they deliver.
- Pay generously. Money signals respect, recognition and status, not only economics.
- Product is the heart. Empowered engineers working on customer problems, not feature lists, drive innovation.
- Fire with dignity. Layoffs are a management failure; be clear, generous and celebratory, and never let it be a surprise.
- The CEO runs the board. Lead with operations, send detail ahead, and report honest highlights and lowlights.
- Trust has four parts. Keep your word, be loyal, show integrity and ability, and keep confidences, even from your own boss.
- Listen first, then turn to the issue. Give undivided attention, don't rehearse your reply, and ask questions until the prepared question gives way to the real one.
- Candour plus caring. Deliver hard truths in the moment, task-specific, with humour or a hug; criticise in private, after naming what the person does well.
- Tell stories, not orders. Show where the hole is and the blocking scheme; let people find their own route and own the decision.
- Demand candour back. "Don't dance": if you don't know, say so; a good coach draws the hard topics out.
- Be an evangelist for courage. Push people past self-imposed limits and toward the bigger deal; credible belief, rooted in real ability, is what makes encouragement work.
- Bring your whole self. People who show their full identity earn more respect; hiding it breeds distrust.
- Hire for smarts and hearts. Fast learning, hard work, integrity and grit, plus empathy and a team-first attitude; potential over experience.
- Pair people. Give two rarely connected peers a joint task; trust rises with interaction.
- Get everyone to the table. Diverse teams, women included, show higher collective intelligence.
- Name the elephant. Tackle the biggest unspoken problem first, and cut short the venting sessions.
- Lead harder when things go badly. Teams in trouble want more loyalty, commitment and decisiveness, not less.
- Fill the gaps between people. Spot misreads and tensions, and resolve them quietly in 1:1s and hallway talks, cleared with the leader.
- Cheer and build communities. Applaud loudly, make introductions, do five-minute favours, and keep traditions that connect people outside work.
- Love the founders. Protect the people with the most vision and passion for the company, as Campbell did for Jeff Bezos in 2000.
- Measure yourself in leaders. Count how many people you helped become great leaders, not what you were paid.
- Written by insiders. Three coachees wrote a loving tribute under an Alphabet copyright; every witness is a survivor who liked Campbell.
- Thin evidence linkage. Footnoted studies are fitted to anecdotes, some mis-dated or mis-attributed; none tests his methods, and the trillion-dollar figure is association, not causation.
- Style does not transfer. Hugs, curses and "Billisms" relied on earned trust; copied by a less trusted manager they can be harassment.
- Selection flatters the method. Coaching only the coachable means his record partly reflects whom he chose.
- Silence on failures and conflicts. GO's collapse and Columbia's record get light treatment, and coaching rivals Apple and Google (the 2010 patent war) raises questions the book waves away.
Connect it
- Enterprise architecture. The ensemble-then-throne process maps well onto architecture review boards: let the closest owners converge, and reserve tie-breaking for the chief architect.
- Banking leadership. First principles (capital, risk appetite, customer trust) are a bank's immutable truths; restating them settles many product debates faster than votes.
- AI teams. Research groups of "aberrant geniuses" fit Campbell's four warning signs neatly; peer feedback and pairing curb the star culture that erodes collaboration, and psychological safety makes people report model failures early.
Frameworks & mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Ten principles (Ch. 2) | People first, trip reports, 1:1s, tie-breaking, first principles, geniuses, pay, product, exits, boards | Auditing your basics |
| Whiteboard agenda | Both list top topics, compare, merge into the 1:1 agenda | Preparing a 1:1 |
| 1:1 framework | Job performance, peer relationships, management, innovation | Reviews and coaching |
| People manifesto | Managers liberate people through support, respect and trust | Setting team values |
| Throne and round table | Ensemble debate first; leader breaks ties and all commit | A team is stuck |
| First principles | Restate the immutable truths everyone accepts | Opinion drives debate |
| Signs of aberrance | Breaks communication, eats time, self over team, seeks attention | Judging a difficult star |
| Board rules | CEO owns the agenda; ops first; pre-reads; honest lowlights | Preparing a board |
| Four parts of trust | Word, loyalty, integrity and ability, discretion | A relationship breaks |
| Coachability test | Honesty, humility, perseverance, openness to learning | Choosing whom to coach |
| Six trust practices | Coachable only, listening, candour, stories, courage, full identity | Starting to coach |
| Feedback rules | Candour plus caring, in the moment, criticism in private, leave them better | Delivering hard news |
| Ten team rules (Ch. 4) | Team before problem, players, pairs, the table, elephant, venting, winning right, leaders lead, gaps, empathy | Building a team |
| Hiring traits | Smart, hard-working, high integrity, grit | Picking players |
| Peer survey | SVPs rated on six core and three product attributes, plus advice | Peer accountability |
| SPIKES | Setting, perception, invitation, knowledge, emotions, strategy | Breaking bad news |
| Six principles of love | Lovely reset, percussive clap, communities, help, founders, elevator chat | Building a caring culture |
| Project Aristotle | Psychological safety, clarity, meaning, dependability, impact | Checking team health |
| Donahoe's rules | Be creative, don't dabble, find energy, use gifts, trust serendipity | A late-career move |
Who's who
| Name | Role, and why they matter |
|---|---|
| Steve Jobs | Apple cofounder and CEO. Campbell fought to keep him in 1985; weekly walks and board work after 1997. |
| Eric Schmidt | Google CEO 2001-2011, author. Resisted a coach, then met Campbell weekly for 15 years. |
| Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Google cofounders. Credited Campbell with Google's survival; Page coached from the disorg on. |
| Jonathan Rosenberg | Google SVP of products, author. Hired after the "coachable?" test; pairing and peer lessons. |
| John Doerr | Kleiner Perkins investor. Backed the coach at Intuit; told Schmidt he needed Campbell. |
| Sundar Pichai | Google CEO from 2015. Told to bet on people; Monday "lovely reset". |
| Brad Smith | Intuit CEO. Bear-hugged on arrival; kept his accent as a feature. |
| Dick Costolo | Twitter CEO. Trip reports; pushed to go big on the Google data deal. |
| Dan Rosensweig | Chegg CEO. Green eyeshade; learned to tell stories, not prescribe. |
| John Donahoe | eBay CEO. "The power of love"; later-career rules. |
| Marissa Mayer | Google executive, Yahoo CEO. Told to speak last; the "family prayer". |
| Ben Horowitz and Bill Gurley | Venture capitalists. Questions, not answers; "blew confidence into people". |
| Shishir Mehrotra | Centrata founder, YouTube. Rehired his cofounders; rehearsed a firing with Campbell. |
| Eddy Cue | Apple services chief. App Store pitch; iPhone 3G launch failure. |
| Omid Kordestani | Google, Twitter executive. Father figure; steered the Alphabet transition. |
| Ruth Porat | Alphabet CFO from 2015. Recruited by Campbell; "permission to go forth". |
| Shellye Archambeau | MetricStream CEO. Full identity; women CEOs' group. |
| David Drummond | Alphabet legal chief. Counselled to treat his background as strength. |
| Bruce Chizen | Adobe CEO. Learned names and elevator chats at Claris. |
| Al Gore | Former US vice president. Apple director; attention first, then the issue. |
| Charlie Batch | Steelers quarterback. Fellow Homestead native; "Told you." |
About this book
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle, 2019. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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