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

There is another, equally critical, factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company. Research shows that when people feel like they are part of a supportive community at work, they are more engaged with t

This was a constant theme from Bill and something he preached to us and others: if you have the right product for the right market at the right time, go as fast as you can. There are minor things that will go wrong and you have to fix them quickly, but speed is essential.

every bookstore has a self-help section, but there isn’t a help-others section.

The way to get the best idea, he believed, was to get all of the opinions and ideas out in the open, on the table for the group to discuss. Air the problem honestly, and make sure people have the opportunity to provide their authentic opinions, especially if they are dissenting. If the problem or decision at hand is more functional in nature (for e

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.

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

When he interviewed job candidates to assess these points, he wouldn’t just ask about what a person did, he would ask how they did it. If the person said they “led a project that led to revenue growth,” asking how they achieved that growth will tell you a lot about how they were involved in the project. Were they hands-on? Were they doers? Did they

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.”

D. S. Wilson, E. Ostrom, and M. E. Cox, “Generalizing the Core Design Principles for the Efficacy of Groups,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 90, Supplement (June 2013): S21–S32.