Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell

At Google, Bill didn’t just meet with Eric. He worked with Jonathan and several other people, and he attended Eric’s staff meetings on a regular basis. This can be a hard thing for an executive to accept—having a “coach” getting involved in staff meetings and other things can seem like a sign of lack of confidence.

In this book we will examine both what Bill coached—what were the things he told people to do—and how he coached—what was his approach.

Bill was the greatest executive coach the world has ever seen. And not an executive coach in the traditional mold, working solely to maximize the performance of individuals; Bill coached teams.

How the leader frames this discussion matters: a 2016 study shows that when it is called a debate rather than a disagreement, participants are more likely to share information.

Bill set high standards for his coachees; he believed they could be great, greater than what they believed. This created an aspiration for each of us, and disappointment when we thought that we were not living up to that aspiration. Bill set the bar higher for us than we set it for ourselves, and when you approach people with that mind-set, they re

John Donahoe faced a situation somewhat similar to Eric’s when he stepped down as CEO of eBay in 2015: successful businessman, past age fifty, kids grown … What do you do next? John tackled this question by interviewing dozens of people who were older than him but had retained plenty of vitality, asking them how they had approached similar transiti

It’s not that he told us what to do—far from it. If Bill had opinions about product and strategy, he usually kept them to himself. But he made sure the team was communicating, that tensions and disagreements were brought to the surface and discussed, so that when the big decisions were made, everyone was on board, whether they agreed or not.

From the (not so) small talk, Bill moved to performance: What are you working on? How is it going? How could he help?

“New managers soon learn … that when direct reports are told to do something, they don’t necessarily respond. In fact, the more talented the subordinate, the less likely she is to simply follow orders.”

Trust is a multifaceted concept, so what do we mean by it? One academic paper defines trust as “the willingness to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations about another’s behavior.”