Trillion Dollar Coach Book Summary - Trillion Dollar Coach Book explained in key points

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Trillion Dollar Coach summary

Name: Trillion Dollar Coach
Rating: 4.1 (232 reviews)
Author: Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle

Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle

The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

4.1 (232 ratings)

22 mins

Topics

Leadership Entrepreneurship Coaching

Table of Contents

Trillion Dollar Coach
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What’s in it for me? A look at the life and philosophy of a Silicon Valley legend.

What comes to mind when you think of Silicon Valley? Chances are that black turtlenecks, vast fortunes and Facebook rank high on your list of associations. But what about a working-class Pennsylvanian football coach who cursed like a sailor and blew kisses to his colleagues across the boardroom?

Well, meet Bill Campbell, a business guru every bit as unorthodox as he was instrumental in helping start-ups like Apple and Google become the household names and multi-billion dollar ventures they are today. A friend and mentor to everyone from Steve Jobs to Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, Bill’s unique insights into leadership and team-building made him one of the world’s most influential and important business minds by the time of his death in 2016.

That might sound like the work of a lifetime, but Bill crammed his amazing achievements into just a few decades. And unlike so many other would-be gurus, Bill was a one-off, a true original who never forgot his roots or the lessons he’d learned as a college football coach.

Based on over 80 interviews with the people who knew and loved him, these blinks explore the life and ideas of a true Silicon Valley legend. Along the way, you’ll learn

what flat hierarchies can and can’t do;
why the most effective leaders don’t shy away from showing their emotions; and
why trust is the most important currency in the boardroom.

Bill Campbell started out as a football coach.

Silicon Valley is often associated with whip-smart university dropouts who revolutionize the world from their garages before they hit their mid-twenties. But innovation in the Golden State isn’t just a young man’s game – in fact, one of the tech mecca’s greatest pioneers didn’t arrive in California until he was already in his forties.

Born in the Pennsylvanian steel town of Homestead in 1940, Bill Campbell was the son of a physical education teacher who moonlighted at the local mill. A quick-witted and determined student, Bill was set on making something of himself early on in life. In his teens, he took to the op-ed pages of the school newspaper to remind his peers of the importance of good grades and to warn them against “loafing.”

But it wasn’t an academic career that he’d set his sights on – his true passion was football. After heading to New York to study economics at Columbia University in 1958, he joined the college team, the Lions. He wasn’t the most likely candidate: weighing 165 pounds and standing five foot ten, he was the team’s smallest member by some margin. But what he lacked in physical stature, he made up for in fearlessness and willpower – qualities that earned him the nickname “Ballsy.” Under his inspired captaincy, the Lions won the Ivy League title in 1961, a feat they’ve never managed to repeat.

At the end of his studies, Bill was offered a position as an assistant football coach at Boston College. He jumped at the chance and moved north in 1964. Over the next decade he established himself as a highly capable coach, and offers from other universities began flooding in. One came from Penn State, home of the nation’s top college football coach, Joe Paterno. It was a golden opportunity but Bill turned it down. Why? In a word, loyalty – his alma mater had also offered him a job.

Returning to Columbia in 1974 was a sentimental rather than a practical decision. The university’s football facilities were in poor shape and badly underfunded. This showed through in the team’s results. During Bill’s tenure, the Lions won just 12 games and lost 41, a run of bad form which ended in a humiliating 69-0 drubbing at the hands of Rutgers at Giants stadium. It was time to move on, and in 1979 Bill resigned.

Bill’s decision to move to California launched his business career.

Bill’s coaching career was over and, aged 39, he entered the business world. His first job was at the ad agency J. Walter Thompson. He showed the same enthusiasm in his new role as he had on the gridiron, and clients loved him – especially Kodak, who decided to poach Bill from the agency and install him as their head of consumer products in Europe. It was a brilliant start to a late-blooming career.

Things got even better in 1983, when Bill received a call from an old Columbia buddy. John Sculley had just left Pepsi to become the CEO of a tech start-up called Apple. Convinced he was on to the next big thing, John offered Bill a chance to get in on the ground floor. It was a huge move, but Bill accepted.

After leaving Apple, Bill set himself on the path to coaching and mentoring.

The first leg of Bill’s journey with Apple came to an end in 1990. In his last years at the company, he headed up a spin-off software venture called Claris. It did well under his stewardship, but Apple ultimately decided against making Claris public. That was Bill’s signal to leave and begin a new chapter in his career. He would spend the next decade at the tablet computer startup GO and software manufacturer Claris, before trying his hand as a business coach.

And his first client? His old employer, Apple. We’ve already seen that it was Bill’s sense of loyalty that brought him back to Columbia as a coach. Well, that quality ran deep. When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple back in 1985, Bill was one of the only prominent team members to argue that the company couldn’t afford to lose their talented figurehead.

True leaders champion their companies’ core values and break ties rather than dictating terms.

In 2001, when Bill started working with Google, the company was in the middle of a radical experiment. Fed up with top-down interference in creative projects, Google’s co-founder Larry Page had decided to do away with managers altogether.

Larry’s so-called “disorg” model seemed to be working, but Bill thought it wasn’t sustainable. Their argument went back and forth until Bill made a suggestion: Why not ask the folks at the sharp end of the action – Google’s engineers – what they thought?

Effective leaders aren’t afraid to show their emotions.

There’s a common idea that people who show their emotions in the workplace aren’t as competent as their less “touchy-feely” peers. But that’s a fallacy. Few people know that better than the folks who worked with Bill.

Bill was famous for his personal warmth and informality. He gave his colleagues bear hugs, had a breezy – and often downright profane – way of talking, and wouldn’t hesitate to blow a kiss to a colleague on the other side of a meeting room. More importantly, he’d drop everything to help people out if they were in trouble. When Steve Jobs was incapacitated by cancer, for example, Bill visited him in the hospital every day.

Bias can prevent top talent getting a hearing, so it’s important to bring everyone to the table.

In the 1980s, when Bill was first starting his Silicon Valley career, most executives at tech firms were men. One of the few women in a senior position at the time was Deb Biondolillo, Apple’s head of HR in the US.

Bill had noticed that Deb always chose a chair at the back of the room rather than at the conference table at the company’s weekly staff meetings. He asked her what she was doing all the way back there and told her to “get to the table!” One day, Deb finally took the plunge and grabbed a front-row seat. That’s when gruff executive Al Eisenstat sat down and asked her what she was doing there. Deb nervously told him she was waiting for the meeting. He eyed her suspiciously and then turned to Bill, who subtly indicated that he’d made the call. That, she recalls, was the moment she knew things would work out.

Trust is the most important currency in the boardroom.

In the previous blink, we saw how Bill helped Deb Biondolillo get a place at the table. The reason he could persuade Deb to grab a seat next to an intimidating executive and Al Eisenstat to accept this was simple: they both trusted him.

But what is trust? Well, here’s how an influential 1998 article published in the Academy of Management Review journal defines the concept: trust is all about a willingness to take a chance because you have positive expectations for someone else’s behavior. And that’s often what makes boardrooms tick.

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What is Trillion Dollar Coach about?

Trillion Dollar Coach (2019) pays homage to Bill Campbell, a coach and mentor whose advice and insights helped some of Silicon Valley’s brightest lights build multi-billion dollar companies. In these blinks, Google leaders Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle chart Campbell’s remarkable life, from the Columbia University football field to the Californian boardrooms in which the digital revolution was planned and rolled out. Along the way, they shed light on Coach Bill’s leadership philosophy.

Best quote from Trillion Dollar Coach

To truly include everyone, everyone needs to be at the table.

—Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle

Who should read Trillion Dollar Coach?

Entrepreneurs
Team leaders and managers
Lovers of inspiring true stories

About the Author

Eric Schmidt served as Google’s CEO, chairman and chief executive chairman before taking charge of its parent company Alphabet from 2015 to 2018.

Jonathan Rosenberg ran the Google product team from 2002 to 2011, and currently advises Alphabet’s management team.

Alan Eagle has been a director at Google since 2007, and currently runs Google’s sales programs.

Schmidt, Rosenberg and Eagle are the co-authors of the best-selling How Google Works.

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