I just finished reading “Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell” this week, and I highly recommend you to read it!
This book is about Bill Campbell’s coaching and management principles.
You may ask: “Who is Bill Campbell?”
Just check out who attended his funeral in 2016: Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Mary Meeker, John Doerr, Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen…
Bill Campbell was the executive coach of most of these Silicon Valley’s leaders, including Steve Jobs.
This book is not only a bible for people who want to be a business coach, but it is even a bible for founders, CXO, management, managers, and for anyone who is managing a team!
Some of my favourite quotes from this amazing book are:
- If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.
- “Think that everyone who works for you is like your kids,” Bill once said. “Help them course correct, make them better.”
- Compensation isn’t just about the economic value of the money; it’s about the emotional value.
- The purpose of a company is to take the vision you have of the product and bring it to life.
- It is important for management to let people leave with their heads held high.
- Trust means you keep your word. Trust means loyalty. Trust means integrity. Trust means discretion. Trust doesn’t mean you always agree; in fact, it makes it easier to disagree with someone.
- Leadership is not about you, it’s about service to something bigger: the company, the team.
- How important it is to pay careful attention to the person you are dealing with … give them your full, undivided attention, really listening carefully.
- Saying what you really think in a way that still lets people know you care.
- Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed? “When I became CEO of Google,” Sundar Pichai says, “Bill advised me that at that level, more than ever before, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.”
- The most important characteristic Bill looked for in his players: people who show up, work hard, and have an impact every day.
- Not what happened and who’s to blame, but what are we going to do about it?
- Most people knew not to call Bill during those hours, but at least one person did not. Occasionally Bill’s phone would ring during practice and he would take it out of his pocket just long enough to see who was calling, and for the kids to get a glimpse at the caller ID. Then Bill would put the phone back in his pocket, letting the call from Steve Jobs go unanswered. “There was nothing cooler than knowing that for that hour at practice, we were the most important thing to him,” one of his players says. “We had his full attention.”
- Get the team right and you’ll get the issue right.
- It’s okay to love. That people in your team are people, that the whole team becomes stronger when you break down the walls between the professional and human personas and embrace the whole person with love.
- Being an effective giver isn’t about dropping everything every time for every person. It’s about making sure that the benefits of helping others outweigh the costs to you.
- To be successful, companies need to have teams that work together as communities, where individuals integrate their interests and put aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good and right for the company.
- You cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.
- Positive human values generate positive business outcomes.
- “You’ve been blessed, be a blessing.”