Book SummaryTrillion Dollar Coach, by Bill Campbell

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Trillion Dollar Coach

The human values that motivate us in our personal lives—love, family, friends, money, power, meaning, purpose—are the same values that motivate us at work. That's the core message of business guru and ex-football coach Bill Campbell, whose principles for how to successfully lead people and manage a company are outlined in Trillion Dollar Coach, authored by Google’s ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, Senior Vice-President of Products Jonathan Rosenberg, and Director of Executive Communications Alan Eagle.

Campbell as Coach

For 15 years, Campbell walked Google's hallways, chatted with employees, and attended staff meetings led by the CEO. Nearly every week, he also met one-on-one with Schmidt and Rosenberg, two members of a big club of tech titans who turned to Campbell for advice. Before their tenure at Google began, he coached Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He worked with Steve Jobs to pull Apple out of bankruptcy. He mentored Brad Smith, former CEO of Intuit, and John Donahoe, former CEO of eBay. He coached U.S. Vice President Al Gore, NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, and Stanford University President John Hennessy.

According to Schmidt, the book's title is an understatement—if you add up the market capitalization of all the companies he coached, Campbell's value was worth much more than one trillion dollars. Yet he never accepted compensation for his services.

Campbell’s Early Career

Campbell began his career as a football coach, first at Boston College and then at his alma mater, Columbia University. Realizing that he was too compassionate to succeed in coaching, he left the world of athletics. Within five years, he became a senior executive at Kodak, then a Fortune-500 company. A career move led him to Apple Computer, where he made waves as vice-president of sales and marketing. He held CEO positions at several Silicon Valley tech companies before branching into executive coaching and becoming a legendary CEO-whisperer.

Campbell’s Philosophy

Campbell's coaching can be distilled into a simple equation: Humanity and compassion in the workplace equals happy employees, and happy employees are more productive. Campbell built his business principles around two main themes: 1) create and maintain strong teams; and 2) bring love and compassion into the workplace.

One of Campbell's most often-repeated lines was "positive human values generate positive business outcomes." Team members who feel genuinely listened to, respected, and cared for will work harder, innovate more, and feel happier and more fulfilled in their jobs.

Campbell coached executives on how to nurture their employees so they could grow and develop into the best version of themselves. He believed a leader's or manager's primary role was to help his or her employees succeed. In Campbell’s view, running a successful business was not much different than winning at sports. His approach centered on teamwork—he sought to maximize the performance of teams, not individuals. He insisted the only way to thrive in the cutthroat tech business was to build high-performing teams, then install a team leader who was both a caring coach and a strong operations manager.

Campbell died of cancer in 2016, but his management principles live on at Google, where leaders continue to teach Campbell's lessons to new managers and executives. In Trillion Dollar Coach, the authors outline both the content of Campbell's coaching and also his nonconformist methods—like hugging everyone in the room and peppering his language with four-letter words.

Operational Leadership

The main principles are grouped into four themes. The first is operational leadership, offering advice on how to be a better manager, including:

• Don’t demand respect from your employees;...

Trillion Dollar Coach Summary Chapter 1: The Caddie and the CEO

Bill Campbell was one of the most influential players in Silicon Valley from 1983 until his death in 2016. Campbell was known as “Coach” partly because he coached Columbia University's and Boston College's football teams in the 1970s but mostly for his role as a business mentor. He helped to build some of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies, including Google, Apple, and Intuit. He coached numerous titans of the tech world, including Steve Jobs (Apple), Sundar Pichai (Google), Brad Smith (Intuit), Dick Costolo (Twitter), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), John Donahoe (eBay), and Marissa Mayer (Yahoo).

In Trillion Dollar Coach, authors and Google executives Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle have compiled Campbell's principles for business and life. They're intertwined with anecdotes and stories from some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley history.

(Shortform note: For the sake of coherency, material from Chapter 6 is included in our summary of Chapter 1.)

Campbell's Early Life and Career

Born in a western Pennsylvania steel town in 1940, Campbell was the son of a physical education teacher. He became a high-school football star despite the fact...

Trillion Dollar Coach Summary Chapter 2: Your Title Makes You a Manager, Your People Make You a Leader

Campbell instructed hundreds of CEOs and executives that leadership is not about you; it's about service to the company and more importantly, service to the team you're leading. He felt strongly that being a skilled manager was important, but it wasn’t enough. Savvy management is critical, but it's ineffective if you don't combine it with caring people skills.

Chapter 2 outlines management principles that can help you become a better leader.

You're Not a Leader Unless Your Employees Say So

The principle: Don’t demand respect from your employees; earn their respect. No one likes to work for a dictator, but people actually like being managed if they respect their manager, if they think their manager can teach them something, and if their manager helps the team make decisions.

Bill Campbell developed a manifesto called “It's the People.” It states that a company's success is founded on its employees. A manager's job is to create an environment in which employees can grow, develop, and flourish. They can do so by giving their employees the information and training they need, and by respecting and trusting them to do their jobs well. If a manager does this,...

Trillion Dollar Coach Summary Chapter 3: Build an Envelope of Trust

If you want a relationship to be successful, you must build a foundation of trust. Obviously trust matters in friendships and marriages, but we sometimes forget its importance in managing employees. Trust means employees can safely make themselves vulnerable because managers have created a protective, nurturing environment. People can take risks and innovate at work when they know managers and teammates “have their back.”

Chapter 3 outlines principles that can help to build trust in the workplace.

Create Psychological Safety

The principle: Build trust within your teams so they can do their best work. This type of trust is also known as “psychological safety,” and it often leads to productive task conflict and eliminates relationship conflict. (Task conflict informs us of the best ways to make decisions and get things done. Relationship conflict leads to low morale and poor decision-making. Conflict over tasks is healthy, but conflict over relationships is unhealthy.)

Campbell insisted that high-performing teams don’t consist of people with similar personalities who never disagree about anything; they consist of **team members who feel psychologically safe....

Trillion Dollar Coach Summary Chapter 4: Team First

Campbell believed you can’t get anything done without a team, so the most important thing to look for in hiring people is a team-first attitude. The entire team's success must be more important than any individual's success.

Chapter 4 outlines principles that can help you build stronger teams.

Hire People Who Don't Spell Team With an “I”

The principle: People skills matter as much as technical skills. Most business people are familiar with the platitude that you should always hire people who are smarter than you, and Campbell believed it, too, but his criteria went farther than that. When hiring, Campbell looked for smart people who worked hard, had high integrity, would persevere even when faced with disaster, and most importantly, possessed a team-first attitude.

You can't have a team full of quarterbacks—every team needs a diverse array of talents and abilities. Campbell said teams needed super-smart members but also people who were good at skills like empathy and communication. He called this “smarts and hearts.” He wasn't overly concerned with experience or technical skills because he knew these could be developed. He hired people for potential....

Trillion Dollar Coach Summary Chapter 5: The Power of Love

Love isn't a word that's usually applied to business relationships. Studies have shown that people often view warm and friendly employees as incompetent and workers who are more rigid and stiff as competent. Employees often learn they are rewarded for behaving more like robots than people. They are taught to separate personal emotions from the business environment.

But Campbell believed that the workplace becomes more joyful and teams become more effective when leaders break down the walls between the human persona and the professional persona. Chapter 5 outlines principles that can help bring empathy and compassion into the workplace:

Care About People's Lives Outside of Work

The principle: Humanize your organization and you'll build a stronger team. Most companies tout the idea that they genuinely care about their employees. But many workplaces are dehumanizing, especially if high-performance expectations create a stressful, competitive environment.

Campbell encouraged executives to talk to their employees about their personal lives, learn about their families, and care about them as people, not just employees. Campbell practiced this himself and was...