Bill Campbell, Trillion Dollar Coach (#241)
Today’s blog post continues the series on great coaches. We started out with John Wooden and continue with Bill Campbell.
Bill Campbell
Bill Campbell (1940 – 2016) graduated from Columbia University in 1962. An All-Ivy football player, he worked as an assistant football coach for Boston College and eventually as the head coach for Columbia. As the head coach, he put together a 12-41 record over six seasons.
At the age of 39, Coach Campbell transitioned to the business world, taking a job with an advertising agency that supported Kraft. Bill was better at marketing than coaching football; he eventually became Vice-President of Marketing for Apple Inc. Under his leadership, Apple created the 1984 ad which aired during the Super Bowl and became one of the most famous ads of all time.
Moving on from Apple, he became the Chief Executive Officer for Claris (a software company), GO Corporation (a pen based tablet), and Intuit. After retiring as CEO from Intuit in 2000, Campbell coached, among others, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Sundar Pichai at Google; Steve Jobs at Apple; Jeff Bezos at Amazon; Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo at Twitter, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. He became known as the “Trillion Dollar Coach” due to the value of the companies that his clients led.
Campbell was a big believer in the power of teams over the individual in business. He felt teams were the building block of companies and helped to act as communities that helped to focus groups of people on goals. He encouraged each of the CEOs he worked with to focus on building teams.
Bill Campbell’s One-on-One Framework
Another area he emphasized was the one-on-one. Bill Campbell believed that one-on-ones were the best way to help people be more effective, grow, and build their teams. To get the most out of one-on-ones leaders need to have a structure for them, as well as take the time to prepare for them.
Do you use a framework for your one-on-ones? If you don’t, try Bill’s framework for a couple of months:
Performance on Job Requirements
How did you do?
Ex — Sales figures, budget, P&L, etc
Relationship with Peer Groups
How is your relationship with a peer group?
Ex — Marketing and Sales, Sales and Engineering, Marketing and Product
Management/Leadership
How did you coach your people this week/month?
Who have you hired recently?
What team member did something heroic this week?
Innovation
What new technology, new product, or new process caught your interest this week?
Where did you make a small improvement in a process this week?
Wrap-Up
Top 3 Take Aways from Today
Application
If you don’t have a framework for your one-on-one, use Bill Campbell’s. If it isn’t a perfect fit for your team, modify it so it works for you. And make sure you are spending time to prepare for and make an impact with your one-on-ones.
Conclusion
If you want to know more about Bill Campbell, read Trillion Dollar Coach: the Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell. Over the next several months, I’m going to take a look at a series of great coaches. Next up is Phil Jackson, the legendary coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angelas Lakers.
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Use Bill Campbell’s framework for one-on-ones to improve your one-on-ones with your team.