Published on December 11, 2023
After moving to Silicon Valley from my home country India, William Vincent Jr. (Bill) Campbell has always significantly inspired me. Bill is known as the Silicon Valley’s top coach and the values he has self-practiced and coached while coaching great leaders like Steve Jobs, Sheryl Samberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Dick Costolo owes my trillion-dollar salute for him!
Bill was born in homestead, Pennsylvania. He did his bachelor’s in economics and master’s in education from Columbia university. He was initially the football player and later the coach of the Columbia football team. He moved to Silicon Valley in 1983 after one of his football friends introduced him to John Sculley (that time’s Apple CEO). Bill has significantly contributed in making companies like Apple, Google, and Intuit and setting up foundation of the right culture.
The book ‘Trillion Dollar Coach’ written by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle includes interviews of more than 80 senior industry leaders whose career successes and personal lives were influenced greatly by Bill’s coaching.
Here are the top 25 nuggets I loved to pick the most from this book and Bill’s inspiring life as the top coach of the Valley!
- Don’t fake it!
- Strive to win, but always win right, with commitment, teamwork, and integrity.
- At the end of the day, what really is how you live your life and the people in your life.
- There are things we all care about as people – love, family, money, attention, power, meaning, purpose – that are factors in any business situation.
- To care about people, you have to care about people – Learn people’s names, ask them questions outside of work. Care for them. Really care.
- Know people to know people. To care for people, you have to care for people.
- Build communities. Community building doesn’t need to be expensive. Build communities inside and outside of your work. A place is much stronger when people are connected.
- Remember – You are here to help them.
- Managers who put their people first and run strong operations are held as leaders by their employees.
- To build effective teams you need to understand and pay attention to the human values.
- Think that everyone who works for you is like your kids. Help them course correct, make them better.
- People are most effective when they can be completely themselves and bring their full identify to work!
- Develop skills of listening. When you listen to people, they feel valued.
- Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women.
- Only coach the coachable, the traits that make a person coachable includes honesty and humility, the willingness to preserve and work hard, and a constant openness to learning.
- Failure is a good teacher. Loyalty and commitment are easy when you are winning and much harder when you are losing. But that’s when they are even more important. When things are going badly, teams need even more of those characteristics from their leaders.
- Great products and the teams that create them are at the core of a great company, everything else should be at service of that core.
- Be generous in spirit and in time for others.
- Don’t work the problem, work the team!
- Be a savvy manager and a caring coach.
- Simple practices that add up to strong operations help bringing management excellences.
- Practice the art of writing perfect emails.
- Vision is an important role – heart and soul matter.
- Let the best idea strive, not consensus!
- Be creative. Your post-fifty years should be your most creative time. You have wisdom of experience and freedom to apply it where you want.
