On a warm April day in 2016, a large crowd gathered on the football field at Sacred Heart School, in the heart of Atherton, California, to honor William Vincent Campbell, Jr., who had recently succumbed to cancer at the age of seventy-five. Bill had been a transcendent figure in the technology business since moving west in 1983, playing a critical role in the success of Apple, Google, Intuit, and numerous other companies. To say he was tremendously respected would be a gross understatement—loved is more like it. Among the audience that day were dozens of technology leaders—Larry Page. Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg. Tim Cook. Jeff Bezos. Mary Meeker. John Doerr. Ruth Porat. Scott Cook. Brad Smith. Ben Horowitz. Marc Andreessen. Such a concentration of industry pioneers and power is rarely seen, at least not in Silicon Valley.
We—Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt—sat among the audience, making subdued small talk, soft sunshine contrasting with the somber mood. We had both worked closely with Bill in the previous fifteen years, since we had joined Google as the CEO (Eric, in 2001) and the head of products (Jonathan, in 2002). Bill had been our coach, meeting with us individually every week or two to talk through the various challenges we had faced as we helped grow the company. He had guided us as individuals and teammates, working mostly behind the scenes as Google went from a quirky startup to one of the most valuable companies and brands in the world. Without Bill’s help, there was a chance that none of that would have happened. We called him Coach, but we also called him friend, and in this we were like pretty much everyone around us. In fact, as we later found out, many of the people in the audience that day, an audience that numbered well over a thousand people, considered Bill to be their best friend. So who, among all of these best friends, would have the honor of eulogizing our Coach? Which high-tech luminary would step to the podium?
THE CHAMPION FROM HOMESTEAD
Bill Campbell didn’t even get to California until his early forties, and he had started his business career only a few years before that. In fact, this Silicon Valley success story packed a few lifetimes’ worth of accomplishments into his seventy-five-year span. He grew up pugnacious and smart in the western Pennsylvania steel town of Homestead, where his father taught physical education in the local high school and moonlighted at the mill. Bill was a good student and worked hard. Astute too: he wrote an April 1955 op-ed in his school newspaper that reminded his fellow students “there is nothing more important to you in later life” than good grades. “Loafing in school may prevent one’s chances of success.” He was a freshman at the time.
A football star at Homestead High, Bill left home in the fall of 1958 to attend Columbia University in Manhattan. He was an unlikely-looking football hero even in that era when football players were far more human-sized than they are today: maybe five ten, 165 pounds (although listed in the program at 180). But he quickly earned the respect of coaches and teammates alike with his all-out play and on-field intelligence. By his senior year, the fall of 1961, Bill was the captain of the team, playing practically every minute of every game as a linebacker on defense and lineman (guard) on offense. He earned All-Ivy honors and helped lead the team to the Ivy League title, the only one in Columbia’s history. The team’s coach, the wonderfully named Buff Donelli, called Bill “a tremendous influence” in winning the title. “If he stood 6 feet 2 and weighed 225 pounds and played pro ball, he’d be the greatest lineman the league ever had, a ball of fire. But he’s a little guy who weighs only 162. Not even in college ball do you find guards that small. Ordinarily you can’t play football with little guys. Attitude generally isn’t enough. A coach needs attitude plus players.”1
Bill’s attitude, naturally, was all about the team, saying that it succeeded “because the players worked together and had senior leadership.”2
TOO MUCH COMPASSION
Bill didn’t have much money, so he helped pay for his education at Columbia by driving a cab. He learned the city so well that later in life he often argued with his longtime driver and friend, Scotty Kramer, about the best route to take. (When it came to navigating New York you didn’t question the coach, Scotty says.) He graduated from Columbia in 1962 with a degree in economics, received a master’s degree in education in 1964, and migrated north to become an assistant football coach at Boston College. Bill was an outstanding coach and quickly became highly respected among his peers. So when his alma mater, Columbia, asked him to return as its head coach in 1974, he agreed. Although Columbia’s football program was woeful, Bill’s loyalty guided him back to Manhattan.
Bill (67) leads the blocking for Columbia during the Lions’ 26–14 victory over Harvard on October 21, 1961.3
(One of Bill’s coaching colleagues, Jim Rudgers, notes that before Bill “let his heart take him” back to Columbia, he was considered one of the top assistant coaches in the country and was offered the opportunity to coach at Penn State under Joe Paterno. At the time, Paterno was one of the top coaches in the country, and it seems likely that Bill would have continued to thrive as a coach had he joined the Nittany Lions. In fact, this book might have been about Bill Campbell, college football legend, rather than Bill Campbell, Silicon Valley legend. And to learn more about him you might be doing a Yahoo or Bing search!)
Bill’s teammates carry him off the field after Columbia’s 37–6 win over University of Pennsylvania on November 18, 1961. The victory clinched Columbia’s first Ivy League championship.4
Despite his abundant coaching talent, Bill did not win in his return to Columbia. Hampered by crummy facilities that were at least a thirty-minute bus ride from campus in afternoon traffic, an administration that was perhaps not fully committed to gridiron success, and a city in general decline, the Lions won only twelve games during his tenure, losing forty-one. His most hopeful season was 1978, when the team started 3-1-1 but then got crushed at Giants Stadium, 69–0, by a much bigger (physically and numerically) Rutgers squad. Bill decided partway through the 1979 campaign that he was going to resign. He completed the season and was done.
Bill worked so hard during his time at Columbia that at one point he had to take a break in a hospital to recover from exhaustion. Recruiting players was particularly challenging. Bill later said that he would have to visit a hundred prospects just to get twenty-five of them to come. “I’d leave after workout programs, at 4:30, and I’d drive to Albany and back in a night. Scranton and back,” he added. “Just so I could be back in the office the next day.”5
His failure, though, wasn’t for lack of players. It was, according to Bill, for too much compassion. “There is something that I would say is called dispassionate toughness that you need [as a football coach], and I don’t think I have it. What you need to do is not worry about feelings. You’ve got to push everybody and everything harder and be almost insensitive about feelings. You replace a kid with another kid; you take an older guy and replace him with a younger guy. That is the nature of the game. Survival of the fittest. The best players play. In my case, I worried about that. I tried to make sure the kids understood what we were doing. I just think I wasn’t hard-edged enough.”6
Bill may have been correct in believing that success as a football coach depends on “dispassion,” but in business there is growing evidence that compassion is a key factor to success.*7 And as it turned out, this notion of bringing compassion to the team worked much better for Bill in the business world than on the football field.
LET’S RUN IT
His football career was done. At age thirty-nine, Bill entered the business world by taking a job with the ad agency J. Walter Thompson. He started in Chicago, supporting Kraft, then several months later moved back to New York to support Kodak. He dove into his job with customary passion, impressing his clients in Rochester, New York, so much with his knowledge and insights about their business that they soon hired him away from the agency. Bill rose quickly at Kodak, and by 1983 he was working in London as the company’s head of consumer products for Europe. During his initial job search in 1979, one of his Columbia football buddies had connected Bill with John Sculley, who was then a senior executive at PepsiCo. Bill didn’t take the job that John offered at Pepsi, but in 1983 Sculley decamped to Silicon Valley to become CEO of Apple, and shortly thereafter he gave Bill a call. Would he be willing to leave Kodak and move his young family—he had married the former Roberta Spagnola, a dean at Columbia, in 1976—west to come to Apple?
“My career had been blunted by a lot of years as a dumb-ass football coach,” Bill later said. “I felt that because of my background, I would always be below my peer group and trying to catch up. Going out to the wild, woolly west, where it was more a meritocracy, I would have a chance to move quickly and sit on the management team.”8 Move quickly, indeed. Within nine months of joining Apple, Bill was promoted to VP of sales and marketing and given the task of overseeing the launch of the highly anticipated Macintosh, Apple’s new computer that would replace the Apple II as the company’s flagship product.
To kick off the launch, the company made a big move: it bought a slot to run a commercial during the Super Bowl, which would be played in Tampa, Florida, on January 22, 1984. Once the ad was produced, Bill and the team showed it to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. An allusion to George Orwell’s novel 1984, it showed a young woman running through a dark hallway, fleeing guards, and emerging into a chamber where hundreds of gray-clad, head-shaven men are listening, zombie-like, to a droning “big brother” figure on a large screen before them. With a yell, she throws a large mallet through the screen, causing it to explode. A narrator promises that the Apple Macintosh will show us why “1984 won’t be like 1984.”*
Steve loved the ad. E. Floyd Kvamme, Bill’s boss at the time, loved the ad. Bill loved the ad. About ten days before the game, they showed it to the board.
The board hated the ad. This is terrible, was the universal opinion, too costly and too controversial. They wanted to know if they could sell the airtime to some other advertiser. Was it too late to back out? A couple of days later, one of the Apple sales executives told Bill and Floyd that she had been able to find a buyer for the slot. “What do you think we should do?” Floyd asked Bill.
“Fuck it! Let’s run it,” was Bill’s response. They never told the board or other top executives that they had a potential buyer for the slot, and ran the ad. It became not only the most popular spot of the game, but one of the most famous commercials of all time, ushering in the era of Super Bowl ads becoming as big as the game itself. A Los Angeles Times column in 2017 called it the “only great Super Bowl commercial ever.”9 Not bad for a “dumb-ass football coach” less than five years removed from his final season.
In 1987, Apple decided to spin off a separate software company called Claris and offered Bill the position of CEO. He jumped at the opportunity. Claris did well, but by 1990 Apple pulled it back into the fold as a subsidiary rather than follow the original plan of letting it become its own public company. This shift spurred Bill and several other Claris executives to leave. It was an emotional decision, and when Bill departed, several Claris employees demonstrated their gratitude to him by taking out a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News. “So long, Coach,” the headline read. “Bill, we’ll miss your leadership, your vision, your wisdom, your friendship and your spirit . . .” the ad continued. “You taught us how to stand on our own. You built us to last. And even though you’re no longer coaching our team, we’re going to do our best to keep making you proud.” Claris continued as an Apple subsidiary until 1998.
Bill became the CEO of a startup named GO Corporation, which attempted to create the world’s first pen-based handheld computer (a precursor to the PalmPilot and today’s smartphones). It was an ambitious vision but ahead of its time, and the company shut down in 1994. “GO didn’t go,” Bill was fond of saying.
Around that time, Intuit cofounder and CEO Scott Cook, along with his board of directors, was looking to replace himself as CEO. John Doerr, a Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist,* introduced Bill to Scott. At first, the founder wasn’t impressed with the coach. A couple of months passed and Scott still didn’t have a new CEO, so he agreed to meet with Bill again. They went on a walk around a neighborhood in Palo Alto, California, and this time the two clicked. “The first time we met, we talked about business and strategy,” Scott says. “But when we talked again, we got off of strategy and talked instead about leadership and people. The other people I had interviewed had a cookie-cutter approach to developing people. You can have any color you want as long as it’s black. But Bill, he was a technicolor rainbow. He appreciated that each person had a different story and background. He was so nuanced and different in how he approached growth challenges and leadership challenges. I was looking for a way to grow our people in a way I couldn’t. Bill was great at that.”
Photo credit: Chris Gaede
In 1994, Bill became Intuit’s CEO. He shepherded the company through several years of growth and success, stepping down in 2000.* Although he did not know it at the time, he was about to enter the third chapter of his career, a return to coaching full-time, but not on a football field.
When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, Bill Campbell was one of the few leaders at the company who fought against the move. Dave Kinser, an Apple colleague of Bill’s at the time, recalls Bill saying that “we’ve got to keep Steve in the company. He’s way too talented to just let him leave!” Steve remembered that loyalty. When he returned to Apple and became its CEO in 1997, and most of the board members stepped down, Steve named Bill as one of the new directors.* (Bill served on the Apple board until 2014.)
Steve and Bill became close friends, speaking frequently and spending many Sunday afternoons walking around their Palo Alto neighborhood discussing all sorts of topics. Bill became a sounding board for Steve on a wide variety of subjects, a coach, mentor, and friend. But Steve was not Bill’s only coachee. In fact, even though he left football in 1979, “the Coach” never stopped coaching. He was always available to chat with friends, neighbors, colleagues, fellow parents from his kids’ school; he’d give them a hug, listen to whatever was going on, and usually spin some story that helped them gain some perspective, draw some insight, or make a decision.
So when Bill stepped down as Intuit’s CEO in 2000 (he remained as chairman until 2016) and was looking for his next challenge, John Doerr invited him to come to Kleiner Perkins, the venerable venture capital firm, and become a coach for its portfolio companies. Venture firms often have “entrepreneurs in residence,” bright, usually young, technologists who work at the firms while they noodle over their next big idea. Why not have an executive in residence, John thought, someone who was seasoned in operations and strategy, to help the firm’s startups through the ups and downs of growth (or lack thereof)? Bill agreed and settled into life on Sand Hill Road.
THE GOOGLE COACH
One day in 2001 a local startup, run by a couple of brash kids from Stanford, decided to bring in a “professional” CEO: Eric Schmidt. Eric built the software operations at Sun Microsystems and served as CEO and chairman at Novell. John Doerr advised Eric that he needed Bill Campbell as his coach. Eric had met Bill when Sun CEO Scott McNealy tried to hire him and was impressed with his accomplishments and energy. Once, when Bill came into the Sun offices for a meeting, he remarked that he had just returned from a one-day trip to Japan! This made a huge impression on Eric.
But still, Eric was a rightfully proud man and Doerr’s suggestion offended him. By that time, Eric was already a big deal: CEO of Novell, former CTO of Sun, MS and PhD in computer science from Cal, and BS from Princeton. That’s a lot of letters; what could this gruff guy from Pennsylvania—an ex-football coach!—have to teach him?
A lot, it turns out. In less than a year, Eric’s self-review showed how much he had come around: “Bill Campbell has been very helpful in coaching all of us,” he wrote. “In hindsight, his role was needed from the beginning. I should have encouraged this structure sooner, ideally the moment I started at Google.”
For fifteen years, Bill met with Eric just about every week. And not only Eric: Bill became a coach to Jonathan, Larry Page, and several other Google leaders. He attended Eric’s staff meeting every week and was a frequent presence on the company’s Mountain View, California, campus (which, conveniently, was a stone’s throw from the Intuit campus, where Bill was still chairman).
For those fifteen years, Bill’s counsel was deeply influential. 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. We can say, without a doubt, that Bill Campbell was one of the people most integral to Google’s success. Without him, the company would not be where it is today.
Which would be enough for just about anyone, but not Bill. While he was working with Google’s senior team and with Steve Jobs at Apple, he was also helping so many more. He coached Brad Smith, former CEO of Intuit. He coached John Donahoe, former CEO of eBay. He coached former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. He coached Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter. He coached Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard. He coached Donna Dubinsky, CEO of Numenta. He coached Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor. He coached Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University. He coached Shellye Archambeau, former CEO of MetricStream. He coached Ben Horowitz, partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He coached the boys and girls flag football teams at Sacred Heart. He coached Bill Gurley, general partner at venture capital firm Benchmark. He coached NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott. He coached Danny Shader, CEO of Handle Financial. He coached Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. He coached Dan Rosensweig, CEO of Chegg. He coached Charlie Batch, fellow Homestead native and former quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He coached Jesse Rogers, managing director of Altamont Capital Partners. He coached John Hennessy, former president of Stanford University. He coached Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.
BALLSY AND BRUNO
And when it came time to eulogize Bill at his memorial, none of those people took the podium. In fact, the first person who stepped to the microphone that day was Bill’s college football teammate Lee Black. Lee started talking about his friend “Ballsy,” who we quickly figured out was none other than Bill.
When Bill showed up at Columbia, he was the smallest guy on the team, but he proved to be the most pugnacious in tackling and blocking drills. He’d get knocked down time after time, then get back up and do it again. One day, they were riding on the bus to practice when Lee said, “Campbell, you have more balls than a brass monkey.” Everyone on the team had nicknames, and thereafter “Ballsy” was Bill’s. Even when he was named the captain of the team his senior season, he was never Captain, always Ballsy. Indeed, the Campbell Sports Center at Columbia, which houses a strength and conditioning space, meeting rooms for student athletes, and offices for coaches, is sometimes referred to as “Balls Hall,” at least within the football community.
We learned a lot about Bill that day, but nothing more surprising than the fact that this great business leader, this CEO, Steve Jobs confidant, Ivy League champion, Columbia football coach and chairman of the board, father of two and stepfather of three,* had earned the honorific “Ballsy” through his aggressive play on the Columbia football field. Besides his Columbia teammates, no one else had heard Bill’s nickname. But it made sense.
In the audience were people from many different walks of life. Scotty Kramer, Bill’s longtime New York driver and buddy, made the trip to California, as did Danny Collins, a head waiter at one of Bill’s favorite New York restaurants, Smith & Wollensky. Jim Rudgers, a retired college football coach who worked with Bill at Columbia and at whose wedding Bill served as best man, hates flying, but there was no way he was going to miss Bill’s service, so he drove across the country from Rhode Island. There were Bill’s Columbia football clan, men he had played with, men he had coached. There were the Stanford football players who lived at the Campbell home during summers. There was the staff from the Old Pro, the Palo Alto sports bar that Bill co-owned and frequented. There were the friends Bill took on his annual Super Bowl trip, the friends he took on his annual Cabo trip, and the friends he took on his annual baseball trip to Pittsburgh and other eastern locales. Because this was not a gathering of professionals who sort of knew Bill and came to pay their respects and network. This was a gathering of people who loved Bill.
Among them was Bruno Fortozo, Bill’s regular caddie at the El Dorado golf course in Cabo San Lucas, where Bill played when he visited his vacation home there. Bill, Bruno, and their families had become friends over the years, enjoying plenty of banter on the course and dinners together at restaurants around Cabo. “Most of the guests, you don’t cross the line with them,” Bruno says. “But Bill, he was such a happy guy. He was nice to every single person.”
Bill had hosted Bruno, along with his wife and sons, at his homes in Palo Alto and Montana when the Fortozo clan came north for vacation a few years before. So there was no way Bruno was going to miss Bill’s memorial. When he arrived at Sacred Heart that afternoon, he was ushered toward the front, close to Bill’s family. “I was sitting right behind Mr. Cook and Eddy Cue, from Apple,” he says. “And right next to a guy, I forget his name. I think he runs Google.”
Bill Campbell was known for many things, but perhaps his most notable characteristic, his signature, was the hug. Bill hugged everybody. In fact, when Microsoft announced its proposed acquisition of Intuit at a public event in October 1994, Bill strode across the stage and gave Bill Gates (not noted for his hugging skills) a big hug. (The deal later fell apart. Causality between the hug and the deal failure has never been proven.) Bill’s was never a wimpy, lean-in, don’t-really-mean-it, let’s-not-upset-the-lawyers, pat-on-the-back hug with a couple of air kisses thrown in. Nope, he was a bear when it came to hugging. He hugged you like he meant it, because he did. As Lee neared the end of his remarks, he looked out at the audience and invited them to do Bill proud and hug the people around them.
Which is how Larry Page, the cofounder of Google and CEO of Alphabet, came to be hugging Bruno Fortozo, the caddie from Cabo San Lucas. “Mr. Campbell treats everyone the same way,” Bruno says. “I didn’t know who all the people were around me, they were all just friends of Bill.” Which is as good a tribute to Bill as any of the other words spoken that day.
Lee was followed by Pat Gallagher. Pat is a highly accomplished person, a former longtime senior executive with the San Francisco Giants and one of the most admired sports business minds in the country. His thirty-three years with the Giants ended in 2009, a departure, he says, that led directly to the team winning World Series titles in 2010, 2012, and 2014. But he wasn’t given the honor of eulogizing Bill through résumé or pedigree. He earned the honor through friendship. He and Bill had been neighbors in Palo Alto, meeting shortly after Bill and Roberta moved west in the mid-1980s, and built a friendship the way neighbors of a similar ilk do: coaching youth sports together, gathering with team families after games at beer and burger joints, playing with kids at the park, taking walks around the neighborhood, and having spontaneous dinner parties. Friends who stay true through many ups and a few downs.
As Pat said that day, “Most of us have a circle of friends and acquaintances in our lives that come and go through the years. And then we have a much smaller subset of our close friends and our family. And then an even smaller number, maybe enough to count on one or two fingers, our best friends. Best friends are the ones who you can talk to about anything and you don’t have to worry. You know they will always be there. Bill Campbell was my best friend. I know that there are only about two thousand other people who also considered Bill to be their best friends, too. But, I was okay with that because somehow Bill found the time for each one of us. He had the same twenty-four-hour days that the rest of us have, but somehow he found the time to always be there for everyone on that list. It didn’t matter to Bill where you were on the list of friends. He would always be there for you no matter what.”
As the memorial came to a close and people milled around and chatted, Philipp Schindler sought out Eric. Philipp runs the business side of Google and was one of the Googlers who had been influenced by Bill for several years. Just a few weeks earlier, Philipp had attended a training seminar at Google where Bill was teaching his management principles to a group of Google execs so that they could pass them on to the company’s next generation. Now Bill was gone, and Philipp wanted to help funnel his principles to others, not just at Google but to everyone. When he saw Eric, he asked him, Why don’t we take the amazing wisdom Bill taught us and turn it into something we can share with the rest of the world? We have had the great privilege to work with a management legend. All of this could be lost if we don’t do something.
THE TRILLION DOLLAR COACH
Bill Campbell was a trillion dollar coach. In fact, a trillion dollars understates the value he created. He worked side by side with Steve Jobs to build Apple from near bankruptcy to a market capitalization of several hundred billion dollars. He worked side by side with Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric to build Google (now Alphabet) from a startup to a market capitalization that’s also several hundred billion dollars. So that’s well over a trillion dollars already, and doesn’t include the numerous other companies Bill advised. By that measure, 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.
After Bill passed away, Google started teaching his principles via internal seminars to emerging leaders. So when, spurred by Philipp, we started to think about writing a book about Bill, we quickly rejected the idea of writing a hagiography.* After all, as Bill would have said (in more colorful language), who would want to read about the life of some dumb guy from Homestead, Pennsylvania? We don’t know, but what we do know is that Bill’s approach to coaching, both what he coached and how he coached it, was unique and incredibly—a trillion dollars!—successful. It is also something needed in today’s business world, when success lies in moving quickly and continually creating innovative new features, products, and services.
In our previous book, How Google Works, we argue that there is a new breed of employee, the smart creative, who is critical to achieving this speed and innovation. The smart creative is someone who combines technical depth with business savvy and creative flair. These people have always existed, but with the advent of the internet, smartphones, cloud computing, and all their attendant innovations, they can have a much greater impact than ever before. For companies to be successful, they must continually develop great products, and to do that they must attract smart creatives and build an environment where these employees can succeed at scale.
As we were researching this book and talking to the dozens of people Bill had coached in his career, we realized that this thesis misses an important piece of the business success puzzle. 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 their jobs and more productive. Conversely, a lack of community is a leading factor in job burnout.10
But as anyone who has ever been a member of high-performance teams can tell you, teams don’t always operate this way. Such teams are by their nature populated with smart, aggressive, ambitious, strong-willed, opinionated people with large egos. These people may work together, but they can also be rivals, competing for career advancement. Or if they are executives, they are often positioning their divisions or other organizational silos against each other—in “status conflicts”—to capture more resources and glory. People may want to rise to the next level, and it is awfully tempting to pursue that goal alongside or above the goal of team success. All too often, internal competition takes center stage, and compensation, bonuses, recognition, and even office size and location become the ways to keep score. This is problematic: in such an environment, selfish individuals can beat altruistic ones. This sort of “intragroup” conflict in teams will have, according to several studies (and common sense), negative effects on team outcomes.11
But teams of people who subordinate individual performance to that of the group will generally outperform teams that don’t. The trick, then, is to corral any such “team of rivals” into a community and get them aligned in marching toward a common goal. A 2013 paper presents a set of “design principles” for doing this, such as developing strong mechanisms for making decisions and resolving conflicts.12 But adhering to these principles is hard, and it gets even harder when you add in factors such as fast-moving industries, complex business models, technology-driven shifts, smart competitors, sky-high customer expectations, global expansion, demanding teammates . . . in other words, the reality of managing businesses today. As our colleague Patrick Pichette, Google’s former CFO, puts it, when you have all of these factors in play and a team of ambitious, opinionated, competitive, smart people, there is tremendous “tension in the machine.” This tension is a good thing; if you don’t have it you will fade to irrelevance. But the tension makes it harder to cultivate community, and community is necessary to cultivate success.
To balance the tension and mold a team into a community, you need a coach, someone who works not only with individuals but also with the team as a whole to smooth out the constant tension, continuously nurture the community, and make sure it is aligned around a common vision and set of goals. Sometimes this coach may just work with the team leader, the executive in charge. But to be most effective—and this was Bill’s model—the coach works with the entire team. 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. A 2014 study finds that it is the most insecure managers who are threatened by suggestions from others (in other words, coaching). So, conversely, publicly accepting a coach can actually be a sign of confidence.13 And a 2010 article notes that “group coaching” is effective but generally underused as a way to improve team or group performance (which the authors call “goal-focused change”).14
At Google, Bill walked the halls and got to know people. His remit wasn’t just about Eric and a few other individuals, it was about the team. He made the entire team better. When you think about what Bill accomplished, it’s kind of amazing that there aren’t more former sports coaches rising to prominence in the business world. There are plenty of books by athletic coaches offering lessons that go beyond sports, but not many successful sports coaches have found success as business operators. It was no accident that Bill Campbell spent the first decade of his career coaching football, perhaps the ultimate team sport. In football, when teammates don’t work well together, not only does the team lose but people can get hurt. Over those years of playing and coaching, Bill learned that great teams need to work together, and he learned how to make that happen. Not just on the field, but in offices, hallways, and conference rooms. He came to master the art of identifying tensions among teammates and figuring out how to resolve them.
Every sports team needs a coach, and the best coaches make good teams great. The same goes in business: any company that wants to succeed in a time where technology has suffused every industry and most aspects of consumer life, where speed and innovation are paramount, must have team coaching as part of its culture. Coaching is the best way to mold effective people into powerful teams.
The problem is, it’s not possible or practical to hire a coach for every team in a company, or even for just the executive teams. The questions are numerous: Where do you find the coaches? How much would that cost? More important, though, is that it just wouldn’t work. As we talked to the dozens of people who had worked with Bill, something new and surprising started to emerge. Yes, Bill coached them, as he had coached us, on how to deal with numerous situations and challenges in their lives and businesses. But through that coaching he also showed them how to coach their people and teams, which made them much more effective managers and leaders. Time and time again, they note that whenever they face an interesting situation, they ask themselves, what would Bill do? And we realized, we do it, too. What would Bill do? How would the coach handle this situation?
It’s not possible or practical to hire a coach for every team in the company, nor is it the right answer, because the best coach for any team is the manager who leads that team. Being a good coach is essential to being a good manager and leader. Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach. You need to, according to a 1994 study, go beyond the “traditional notion of managing that focuses on controlling, supervising, evaluating and rewarding/punishing” to create a climate of communication, respect, feedback, and trust. All through coaching.15
Many of the other skills of management can be delegated, but not coaching. This is ultimately what Bill taught us. The path to success in a fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form high-performing teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things. And an essential component of high-performing teams is a leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach. At this, Bill Campbell was the best there ever was.
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. We break the what and how into four sections: how Bill got the details right in management skills ranging from one-on-one and staff meetings to handling challenging employees; how he built trust with the people he worked with; how he built and created teams; and finally, how he made it okay to bring love into the workplace. Yes, you read that correctly: we said love. Where relevant, we refer to a selection of the many academic studies and articles that support Bill’s techniques. Both the what and the how may seem so simple at first that they are practically aphorisms. But, as any experienced leader knows, they may be simple in concept, but they are hard in practice.*16
So hard, in fact, that as we were writing this book, we sometimes wondered if Bill was so unique that no one else could possibly combine the what and the how in the way that he did. Were we creating a “how to” manual to teach managers to be better coaches that only one person in the world, now, sadly, gone, could effectively use?
Our conclusion was no. There was only one Bill Campbell, perhaps the most extraordinary individual we have had the pleasure and honor to meet and befriend. But much of the what and the how of his coaching, we believe, can be replicated by others. If you are a manager, executive, or any other kind of leader of teams, in any kind of business or organization, you can be more effective and help your team perform better (and be happier) by becoming the coach of that team. Bill’s principles have helped us and many others do that; we believe they can help you, too.
There was only one Coach Bill. But this book, we hope, captures his insights in a way that makes them available to current and future leaders, so those leaders can benefit from his wisdom and humanity as much as the people who knew him did. As Ben Horowitz puts it, “You don’t want to channel Bill, because no one can be him. But I learned from him how to get better: a higher level of honesty, a better understanding of people and management.”
DON’T F*** IT UP
In writing this book, we interviewed dozens of people whose lives have been profoundly touched by Bill in one way or another. Boyhood friends, Columbia teammates, players he coached at Boston College and Columbia, fellow football coaches, colleagues at Kodak, Apple, Claris, GO, and Intuit, business executives he coached, Stanford players who regularly crashed at his Palo Alto home, family, friends, and even kids at Sacred Heart he coached as middle schoolers on the flag football team. Many of them got choked up at some point in their interview. Bill created that level of love and devotion in the people whose lives he touched. We have been entrusted with a legacy and know that this book matters to those who loved Bill.
Bill was a delightfully profane man. He used the F-word the way people today use like, almost as if it’s a new part of speech, not verb, adverb, adjective, pronoun, or noun, but a word of its own category. Jonathan once sent Bill a study he had found showing that swearing in the workplace enhances morale. Bill’s uncharacteristically understated response: “A good one for me!”*
But as Pat Gallagher put it in his eulogy, “Somehow when Bill did it, it didn’t seem like swearing.” He continued, “We’ll see now what God thinks. Bill’s been up there in heaven for a week now . . . is it possible for the Lord to take his own name in vain?” Pat tells us that when, shortly before his passing, Bill asked Pat to deliver the eulogy at his service, he did so with an admonishment: “Don’t fuck it up!”
We’re not sure Bill would have liked the idea of this book very much. He preferred operating behind the scenes, shunned the spotlight when it sought him out, and rejected several inquiries from prospective book authors and agents. But toward the end of his life we believe he had started to come around to the idea. He wouldn’t have cared for a biography, but he might have thought that a book that would codify his approach to business coaching and might possibly be helpful in carrying his legacy of success at Apple, Intuit, Google, and the like to other companies—now that might not be such a bad idea after all. We imagine him up there in heaven, leaning back, nodding, and getting used to the idea. Then he leans forward with a big grin on his face and tells us, in his raspy voice, “Don’t fuck it up!”
We’ll do our best, Coach.