Trillion Dollar Coach

This book is less of a profile, eulogy or biography, but rather an “open-sourcing” compilation of one person’s wisdom, as told by those he most affected. Bill Campbell was an integral, “x” factor part of the height of Silicon Valley’s development between the 1980s and 2000s, playing a fundamental role at Apple, Google, and many other household name companies during their rise, both as an executive and later as a “coach.”

Cambell’s life was fascinating — he was a star footballer at Colombia University, brining them to their (still) only Ive League title, then one of the country’s preeminent college football coaches, then within 5 years a senior executive at Apple as it became a Fortune 500 company. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, SVP Jonathan Rosenberg and head of Communications Alan Eagle all co-wrote the book, and were each some of the most affected “coachees” of Cambell’s.

Cambell’s style is fascinating, and one wonders whether/how he would integrate into the world today and during this coming decade. A combination of brash, brutally honest, yet simultaneously kind and magnanimous, it’s clear he had a gift that extended far beyond raw personality and deep into the underbelly of how communication internally at a business leads to things getting done, and done efficiently. The part of his career, that this book explains well but is still dumbfounding, is that Cambell would provide breakthough and penetrative advice to people running businesses that he did not understand. Campbell was highly intelligent, but was not a polymath intellectual.

It was his EQ that allowed him to see into the operations of individual people key in a company, even when that company’s technology was obtuse or unintelligible to Cambell. The book doesn’t touch on this that heavily, given that it is a tangential topic, but I see Cambell as great evidence of just how impactful the “generalist” can be in a world of specialization. It is unfortunately becoming a lost art, and its one we as a society continue to sorely need.