David Kopec: Welcome to business books and company. Every month we read the best business books. Read with us so you can become a better investor, better manager, or a better entrepreneur. This is our third episode. We read trillion Dollar Coach, which is a story of Bill Campbell, a former football coach turned Fortune 500 CEO who became the mentor to some of the most notable business leaders of our time. The book, written by some of his mentees, including the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, covers a brief outline of his life and his executive coaching strategies. But before we get to the book, let's introduce ourselves. I'm David Kopec, your moderator, an assistant professor of computer science.
Molson Hart: My name is Molson Hart. I'm an entrepreneur. I founded three different companies and I'm running all three of them concurrently. Very poorly. And I specialize in cash flowing businesses.
David Short: And I'm David Short. I'm a product manager and former consultant.
David Kopec: Okay, so before we get into the details and nitty gritty of the book, let's start with Bill Campbell himself. So who was Bill Campbell?
David Short: Bill Campbell grew up in a steel town in Pennsylvania. Homestead. He went to Columbia in 1958, where he played football both ways as a lineman. He was five foot ten and weighed 165 pounds. But he was the captain of the team and led Columbia to their only Ivy League championship. He actually worked as a cab driver while he was in school, then got a masters in education from Columbia and became the assistant football coach at BC before becoming the head coach at Columbia for six losing seasons. At 39, he completely transitioned away from coaching football and became an advertising executive at JWT. He then went in house at Kodak, where he became the head of european consumer products. John scully ultimately recruited him to be an executive at Apple, where he was the vp of sales and marketing and within nine months actually led the launch of the Macintosh. There's an interesting story where he ignores the board advice for the 1984 Super bowl ad and says, f it, let's run it. And that was all within five years of leaving coaching. After that, he became the CEO of Klarus, which was a short lived Apple spin off of non OS software development. Then the CEO of Go, which there's a pretty good book called a Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan that documents. And then CEO at Intuit. He was then an executive in residence at Kleiner Perkins and an executive coach to Steve Jobs. Many people at Google, including Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Jonathan Rosenberg. Jonathan and Eric are the authors of this book. Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit. John Donahoe, CEO at eBay. Ben Horowitz, Bill Gurley Sheryl Sandberg. And in addition to all of the coaching that he did, he was also a board member at Apple for 20 years, chairman of the board of trustees at Columbia, and chairman of the board added to it. The thing I found really interesting was that he actually didn't take cash or equity for the coaching that he was doing. He really just did it out of the goodness of his heart. He felt like making great leaders was an important and valuable thing to do.
David Kopec: So for listeners who are not familiar with the technology industry, he's basically one of the most connected technology executives of the past 20 or 30 years. Is that fair to say?
Molson Hart: I mean, I'm not in Silicon Valley, but that's certainly what I've heard. I also heard he coached, like, the Airbnb guy, Brian Chesky. And just throughout the years, I've heard everyone talk about how great he is. Ben Horowitz, who's someone I respect, who also wrote a good book, hard thing about hard things. And then Ben Horowitz makes an appearance in this book a couple of times.
David Kopec: Okay, so getting into the book itself, what were some of the most important coaching strategies that Bill Campbell employs that were effective with his mentees?
Molson Hart: So the thing that, the main thing I took away from this book, and actually, even though I didnt like the book, it changed the way I did management. So in some ways, it was a good book, is that he combined caring, which is something I already understood about management, and how important that is with candor. So I think what that guy's special skill was is that he was able to communicate the truth without alienating people, without making them angry, without making them feel bad about himself. And I don't fully understand how he did it because, you know, at one point in the book, they talk about how, like one of his, like, favorite sayings or something like that is like, you're as dumb as a post or don't eff it up. But he somehow managed to say things like that while at the same time really broadcasting to that person. They really cared about him. Maybe it was with like a touch or a grab or a hug. You know, you go in for a hug and say, you know, don't f this up or whatever. But that, to me, is what I took away from the book, and that's what that guy's philosophy seemed to be. Bill Campbell.
David Short: Yeah, that's a great point, Molson. And I think that is one of the critical things to take away is that he talked about coaching in the moment and not waiting for performance reviews. He also talked about delivering critical feedback in private, so not doing it in front of everyone. But then the way that they talk about him in the stories, it does sound like he very openly did criticize people, but that he had built such a sense of trust and friendship and community with people that they knew he was doing it from a goal of making them better, not a goal of insulting them or making himself look good.
David Kopec: So he could be brutally honest with his mentees. And yet they still somehow responded to that, always in a positive way. Is that a fair summary?
David Short: I'm sure that's not the case. There's no way that people weren't ever offended by some of the brutal things that he seemed to say. But I think that he had developed enough camaraderie and he'd had a track record of success so that people did trust him. And so they took the negative criticism and saw what the real nugget of wisdom was there. They didn't just say, oh, this guy's being mean. He does clearly care about me. So I'm going to think past my initial negative reaction that everyone has when they're being criticized and actually try to find the value. And a lot of very successful people apparently did trust him to do that. So I'm sure over time it becomes easier and easier for new people to say, okay, all these successful people before me have said that his advice is invaluable. Maybe I should trust it as well.
Molson Hart: So there's a part of the book and it's a chapter, or I don't know what it is, but it's called top ten billisms, and I think it's almost worth talking about so the listeners understand what we're saying. Bill often had a unique way of telling you that he loved you. These are his top ten favorites. You should. You're as dumb as a post. He's one of the great horses. Ass of our time. You're numb nuts. You've got hands like feet. Don't eff it up. That's the sound of your head coming out of your ass. I mean, maybe. Maybe when he was delivering lines like this, he was just like, kind of like joking. It's unclear whether or not he was. He was delivering lines like this in front of other people. Maybe these are just jokes and when he's doing candor plus caring, he's saying different things. But this is pretty striking like these. Being known as your top ten quotes, your top ten bill isms for someone who's also known as, like, the de facto most respected CEO coach in all of Silicon Valley, which is like the greatest gdp generating area in the entire world today.
David Kopec: Right. He's extremely candid, and he's not politically correct. None of those phrases that you just mentioned are politically correct. And he also was known for hugging a lot. Right. Do you think that if he hadn't been this storied coach already that this kind of behavior would fly with a modern post me too coach in today's world?
Molson Hart: That's an interesting question. I wonder if he, like, hugged Marissa Meyer and Sheryl Sandberg as much as he hugged, like, Eric Schmidt or whatever.
David Short: My guess is that he did and that if the right person or wrong person perceived it negatively and spoke this way about him before he was the most famous coach and known for hugging everyone and things like that, then I'm sure it could have led down a potentially negative path. But it doesn't sound like he was doing actual terrible things in a me too way. He was just a, you know, very physically expressive, friendly person, which, honestly, is not something I'm super comfortable with. I don't know. If I had a boss who hugged me all the time, I would be super excited about it. And so I don't plan on taking that away as something that I'm really going to pursue for myself. But I do think that the ideas he has about ways to make people feel like they're part of a community are really important. And once people do feel like you're sort of part of their family, when you really do know all the details about their family, that is different than just a normal boss.
David Kopec: Right. I wonder if it's this kind of thing where you don't want to be the one not getting the hugs. So I don't know if you remember this episode of the tv show Friends. Chandler has a boss who will pat everyone who's successful on the butt all the time, and it makes him really uncomfortable. So he goes and he tells his boss, you know, I don't really want you to do that to me anymore. It really makes me uncomfortable. And then I. He's the one not getting it and everyone else is, and then he's like, you know what? Maybe I should be getting it because it makes me actually feel like I'm part of the team. And so then he actually ends up asking his boss for it. So I wonder if this is one of those situations where even if he was making people uncomfortable, he's a super famous coach, and so you're just going to want it because you want to be part of that club of people who he hugs.
Molson Hart: Imagine being Bill Campbell and be like, this is my legacy. Just, like, grab ass on friends.
David Kopec: Maybe I'm going into it too much, but let's get into it.
Molson Hart: I think it's totally true. I mean, I try not to touch my employees outside of, like, high fives and stuff like that. But I've seen, like, probably stupid studies where they talk about how NBA teams that give each other five more win more. I don't know if that's because they give each other fives because they're winning or because the fives cause them to have better teamwork, but I don't know. I feel like we all intuitively feel like the more that you're, like, kind of, like, touching and grabbing your team members, the people who work with you, the people who work above you, probably the more you care about them. And if the more you care about them, the better you're going to work with them as a team.
David Kopec: Sure. Sure. Let's get into more specifics. So we've said that he was very candid. We said he was very honest, brutally honest. We said that he was somebody who hugged a lot and showed a lot of caring. And we can say throughout the whole book, there's a lot of praise of Bill Campbell, that everything he does was great. And it's, it's almost a bit of a hagiography. Right. It's, it's, he's this wonderful guy who helped everybody and. But what were the specific things he was actually telling people as a coach? Let's get into some of those. So one of those was about small talk. He says we should start every meeting with some small talk to generally make people comfortable, but it should be small talk. That's not just how is the weather, but actually about their lives. Do you agree with that? And do you think that was really an effective strategy at making people comfortable?
David Short: I think it totally is. I have actually already implemented this for myself. Not that I didn't ask people about their weekends, but I've made it more of a point at the beginning of every meeting on Monday that I do. Oftentimes there are multiple people joining a meeting or something, so there's kind of that awkward, like, when do we start? And so it's easy to just say, how would you do this weekend? Oh, I went to New York and saw this play, blah, blah, blah. It just helps you to make yourself into more of a person by explaining what you've been up to and you hear more about their lives and what they care about. And it's honestly just, it is nice to hear and talk with people about things beyond the report that's due soon or the project that you're in the middle of or how close you are to finishing something.
Molson Hart: We should have done it before we started this podcast.
David Kopec: You would have felt more comfortable, you would have been better in the podcast if we had had some more small talk.
Molson Hart: I mean, I'm not even sure if you like me as a person. Kopec so every now and again you should be like, hey, what you do this weekend? Be like, I don't know, how about you? No, but just being facetious there, I also implemented it. I also think it works. I think it was a great little simple, easy to achieve addition. It's not just about creating a caring also, like, takes the edge off a little bit. I think in an otherwise, like, scary.
David Kopec: Meeting, that makes total sense. Okay. Another one of his specific coaching strategies is what's called the rule of two. If you have a disagreement between teams about something, have the two most invested on those two teams meet on their own to come to a decision? Have you ever employed that strategy in your careers? What do you think about the strategy?
David Short: It seems kind of arbitrary to me. I don't know. I think it could work, but I think there are a lot of different ways to potentially resolve conflict in a group. But I think it's better than nothing. So I'll probably try it the next time I run into the problem and see if it seems to work well. But most of the time, I instead say, these seem like the things that we're debating about. Can one person do this to give us a little bit more information about this piece? Can one person do that to do the other thing? I'll take on the consolidating those and sharing with the group, and then let's decide on this date.
Molson Hart: My companies aren't big enough for this problem to occur. Basically, like, everyone is kind of like siloed off. The company just isn't big enough for two people to have differing opinions on something up into this point. So I can't really speak to it, but I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, like, let people resolve their own problems if they can, and it, like, improves teamwork between them. It's less work you need to do also, and you get buy in. I remember there was a part in the book where Bill Campbell is coaching Marissa Meyer, who I think is a terrible CEO, just absolutely abominable. So it was really great to see her appear in this book. And at one point he's like, hey, Marissa, like someone posed a question. You don't have to answer every question in all the meetings. You should let the team figure it out for themselves. They can actually improve their teamwork and gain something from that. And so to me, that's kind of analogous. Letting your team work things out themselves can sometimes be better than deciding everything yourself.
David Kopec: Of course, another of Bill Campbell's strategies was around something pretty sensitive, which is layoffs and people getting fired. He says it's very important to treat people who have been laid off or fired with the utmost respect, including giving them a good severance package, being really honest with them about why they were let go, because otherwise it can hurt morale to the people who remain. Do you agree with that?
David Short: So I've never had to actually fire someone. I came close once with a consultant who was struggling and clearly not enjoying the project. And ultimately she did leave to work at a tech startup instead of a consulting firm. So I can't speak from personal experience, but I think it fundamentally makes sense. You want people to think highly of the experience that they had. They can ultimately still send people in your way. If you leave on good terms, it only opens up, you know, better opportunities for the future. There's no reason to attack someone just because they didn't meet all of your expectations and they're not going to be able to continue to work.
Molson Hart: So obviously, I think we all agree that you should treat outgoing people with decency, and you should be moral and utmost of utmost importance. You have to be fair to them. But I'm not sure it makes that much sense to, like, really roll the red carpet out the door for them. I mean, what's the point of that?
David Kopec: Well, what if they speak poorly about you? For example, I was working at a startup that I was a co founder of seven years ago, and we were running out of money and we had to let somebody go. And when we let that person go, we didn't even have the money really to give them severance, but we gave them two weeks anyway because we felt it would be really disrespectful not to if we hadnt. And then they had gone on social media and said something negative about the company. Lets say the company had recovered and then maybe we would lose a future employee from that negative person to person chatter.
Molson Hart: Yeah, thats certainly a downside. I wonder to what extent extra severance accomplishes that, because pretty much anyone who gets laid off is going to talk poorly about the company that laid them off. Almost certainly.
David Kopec: Okay, fair enough. What about the other part about this? Giving an exact reason. Bill Campbell apparently thought it was important that you really tell somebody why they were laid off, not kind of beat around the bush and say, oh, we're, we're downsizing, but give them a specific reason why their role is being eliminated.
Molson Hart: I think that's honorable. I think it's good for the person who's being laid off. Like, in the long run, obviously, in the short run, it feels terrible for them if it's like, yeah, you were bad at your job for the following reasons, but in the long run, it's the right thing to do. Of course, the flip side of that is it's enormously difficult to tell someone, hey, you were not good for this job, because I just, you know, don't think that you're good at x, y, and z. So a little bit of a double edged sword there. You probably, probably the right thing to do is to tell that person why they're laid off. But you kind of need to bookend that constructive criticism with positivity on, you know, as you leave into it and as you terminate that message.
David Kopec: Another one of Bill Campbell's pieces of advice to the executives that he coached was to make product people the stars of any cross functional team. And this is interesting because he himself was not really a product person in the sense that he was a football coach. He went from being a football coach to a sales guy and a marketing guy and then rose from that to become a CEO. So he was not an engineer. He was not somebody who was, let's say, a software developer or a hardware engineer or something like that. Yet he really put those people on a pedestal. Do you agree with that philosophy, and do you think it's interesting that given his background, he came to believe in that?
David Short: I think it's kind of just the Silicon Valley approach. In general, I think engineers are the most highly paid and most difficult to hire people in most tech companies. That's probably not entirely true. I'm sure there are certain types of senior executives that are difficult to hire for as well. But I think in general, it's a very common Silicon Valley thing. It's not that common in other parts of the country. And I think that's basically what defines a tech firm for me, is that the engineers are put at the center, seen as the most important, and it's not a sales or marketing person who gets to make the decision on the direction that things are going.
Molson Hart: Are engineers even product people, though?
David Kopec: It can depend. So I think in some organizations, engineers have a lot to say about product direction. And in other organizations, there's a product manager type role, or there's somebody who is actually on what's called a product team that's separate from an engineering team that may actually be dictating to engineering. So I think it can really vary.
Molson Hart: So here's how I think about it. In the short term, the most important people in any company are the sales people. After the salespeople, you have the product people. In the long term, the most important people in the company are the product people, and the second most important people are the salespeople. After that, there's a huge drop off.
David Kopec: So you mean what are some other roles, like HR legal? You'd put those way below.
Molson Hart: Oh, my God. Yeah.
David Kopec: Okay.
Molson Hart: It almost never matters.
David Kopec: Okay, David, what do you think?
David Short: So, having worked in a tech firm for about two years now, I've really enjoyed the dynamic of the way it works for us is that product managers ultimately own the backlog and the engineers own what it is that they're going to work on in a given sprint. So the product manager decides, this is the project that we're working on. This is the long term goal that we have, and these are the separate tickets for how we're going to get there. And then the engineers agree, this is what I'm capable of getting done in the next two weeks sprint. But on longer term scales, we'll also work with the engineers to say, there's some tech debt that we have from something that's happened before. The product's not going to work because it's going to operate too slowly because of some decision that was made before. So while you want this new feature, instead, we need to invest in a refactor of some of the code in order to get it into a better state. I think we have a pretty good balance, and then we're regularly meeting as product managers with other business stakeholders, and they're giving their insight as essentially customers of the software that we're developing. And so working through that process, they get to sort of, on a quarterly basis, say, this is the direction that I think that you should be going, but the product manager is owning it on a sprint by sprint basis. In consultation with the engineering team.
Molson Hart: Mark Zuckerberg works on product probably four out of five days a week. Mark Zuckerberg, outside of his little code experiment, where he's like, I'm going to start coding again, or however he sounds, does not code. He no longer does engineering work. I think that that's not originally what we were talking about, but to me, that says a lot about kind of like where the importance lies not to belittle engineering. Obviously, your product needs to work if it's a software product, but, you know, product in the eyes of the customer is of utmost importance.
David Kopec: David, I'm interested, putting on your consulting hat. I think you worked for the better part of a decade as a management consultant. Do you agree with Molson's assessment that product people and salespeople matter so much more than any other function in the company? Did you ever come into companies where the legal team was really the roadblock? Or maybe the HR team was causing huge issues?
David Short: So I think that is a great point. And that's probably distinct from what Molson was talking about, which is that the other organizations can become roadblocks. And so they can have a huge impact on the success or failure of the team. But that's very different from whether or not they're really driving the success. It's more like they can prevent it, but they can't really cause it. And so I worked at banks a fair amount. So, yeah, certainly there's a lot of things that get blocked by HR or by legal teams that, you know, more product type functions are trying to get some new thing out the door. But the legal team is concerned about the CFPB and how they would react. And so that's why things come out of banks at a much, much, much slower pace than they do out of other kinds of technology companies, because there are a lot of engineers that are working for these big banks, but they're not developing at any kind of the pace that you'll see in a tech firm.
David Kopec: Okay, fair enough.
Molson Hart: What do you think?
David Kopec: KOPEC well, I think it depends on the business. So, for example, if you're in the movie business, then a lot of your business is making deals and it's acquiring the next film. And in that case, somebody who writes really good contracts and ties in the actors for the right prices and ties in the producers for a multifilm contract. When they see that's going to be a really talented producer, then the legal team actually, they can be the stars. So I think it depends on, personally, I think it depends on the business. But what I'm saying is to get the people in place that are going to make those great movies requires some really great contract work.
Molson Hart: Yeah, but wait, wait a second. If we go to the previous episode, what did Ross Perot say about lawyers? Kind of like how you have to come up with the agreement and then send it to a lawyer.
David Kopec: Right. No, that's true. And again, he's in the technology business. Right. He's in fact, in technology consulting across. But let's say you're in the movie business and you're the CEO of a movie company, and you really want to get a few particular producers, directors and stars in your next film. Isn't the person who's going to actually reel them in, which is a combination of a talent acquisition person and a lawyer going to be very important to your business?
Molson Hart: I don't think it's going to be a lawyer. I think it's going to be a non lawyer. And I think that probably most of those documents standard, like, I know that like a release for when someone appears in a film or on a podcast, for example, those things are pretty standard. Usually you almost like, just get one, and then at one point you just use it over and over again. And one of my businesses is like legal tech, and I can't tell you how often the lawyers just kill the deal for no reason. I think that what you're basically talking about is essentially a salesperson. That's like a weird way to characterize it, but to me it's appropriate. I mean, you have to sell Brad Pitt on being in your movie. You have to sell a producer, you have to sell a distributor. I don't think legal comes into it. I would really, I mean, I don't know the movie business, but every other business I've been in legal is just like this almost perfunctory step that you involve at the end to make sure you don't blow something up.
David Kopec: I'll bring up one movie industry scenario, which was when Pixar was going public. And there's a book about this called to Pixar and beyond by the CFO at the time. So the person who was working with Steve Jobs to bring the company public, and he brought into the company to take it public. If he hadn't come up with some creative ways to make the contract with Disney and some creative ways to spin the company for it to go public, then the rest of Pixar's success couldn't have happened. And so in that case, I think he, as a CFO was really pretty key. Now, that's not exactly legal, that's more finance, but it was not a product person, not necessarily a salesperson, who enabled that success in that case.
Molson Hart: I mean, that guy seems very replaceable to me. Whereas, like, John Lasseter. Sure. Or Steve Jobs were totally irreplaceable. So, like, and I remember that book, we actually read that as a part of our book club. Right? That was like the guy, correct me.
David Kopec: If I'm wrong, well, I read it. I'm not sure it was part of the book club or not, but it was a. Okay, yeah.
Molson Hart: So that guy, I don't know, I remember reading that book just thinking that that guy tried to make himself seem way more important. They actually was, but whatever.
David Short: There were some pretty weird terms in the deal with Disney that Kopecz probably write about that. Basically, had it been structured in any other normal way, Pixar would have failed. And so, again, you're right, it was that guy writing about how important he was. But I forget what the standards were exactly, but it was just these weird things about how they split the profits. But if it went over a certain amount, then Pixar got everything and Disney got much less than they had in historical deals before that. But Pixar ultimately succeeded because they had hit after hit after hit. So, yeah, I do think it was still, had John Lasseter failed, they still would have failed.
Molson Hart: Whose idea was that, though? I thought that was jobs idea. And jobs was kind of famous for walking into at and t and being like, this is the iPhone, I'm taking, you know, x percent, and that's how it's going to be. And he used his reality distortion field to make that happen.
David Kopec: Well, I have to say, even though I'm kind of arguing this point, I do agree with you that in that book, for people who are interested to Pixar and beyond which I do think was a good book, he's trying to make himself important, of course. And some of the dialogue between him and Steve Jobs did not come across to me as realistic, let's say. But anyway, let's get back to our book, trillion Dollar coach.
Molson Hart: That's a perfect segue. Sorry to interrupt you. To the authors of our book.
David Kopec: Yeah. So another principle of Bill Campbell's is that as a leader, it's more important to make decisions, to be decisive than to make every decision correctly. And I've heard this before, that if you're a leader, it's more important that you have direction than that. You always have the exact right direction. Do you agree?
Molson Hart: I agree. I'm not sure I categorize it in exactly that way. It's absolutely essential that you don't have analysis paralysis. You have to make decisions even if you're not 100% sure whether or not they're right. Oftentimes you can go back. I can't even explain why this is true. But just in business, like speed is just so, so important, especially at the early stages of the business. You just can't get barred down in analysis paralysis. You just have to like continuously take actions and you're kind of like you've got one eye like totally closed and the other eye is like half open. But as you make these decisions. But that's just what works best. I can't really explain it. I don't know why that is in general, kind of looking at human nature, though. I think that we can all appreciate that leaders need to be strong and they need to be confident, and they need to just kind of take action and lead the team forward, which is something separate, which is another reason why I think that this is true.
David Short: I think it's often the distinction between startups and mature companies is this ability to just take immediate action. I think it's what big tech companies try to continue to ingrain is they say that they're still nimble, or they say that they're still able to move quickly. And what they mean is that they have decentralized to some extent. So the CEO doesn't need to sign off on every little thing that teams are independently capable of hiring and expanding and getting more engineering resources or whatever, paying for Amazon Web services to get something off the ground faster than it would have otherwise been. And it's really necessary to keep growing at really rapid rates to just keep making those decisions and acting quickly. And sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong. But at large corporations, where I tended to do the consulting before, it's the complete opposite. People totally go into this analysis paralysis position because it's much easier to get fired for being wrong than it is to get promoted for coming out of nowhere and really succeeding. Sure, that does happen. People do take big risks and they do end up going faster up the chain because they did. But a lot of people end up losing out because whatever you swing for the fences and you flew out, it was a fly ball and then it got caught. Right? So I think in large corporations this tends to stagnate. And he's totally right that it's more important to be decisive than it is to be right every time, because the bigger you are, the more data you have, the more models you have that you could go through to say, what's the probability that this is going to succeed versus this other option? Or should we hire a consultant in order to think about the approach that we're going to take? But if you just take the action and make sure that you have good metrics so that you can see whether you're succeeding or failing and keep reflecting. Then you're able to succeed, I think, much more.
David Kopec: So Bill Campbell was okay with some employees not quite fitting the mold of the other employees at the company. He was okay with putting up with eccentric employees. He had a very simple equation. He said, if it takes more time to manage somebody than the output that they put out for the company, then it's not worth the time. But a lot of times, actually, some of your most productive employees might be eccentric. So my question to the two of you is, how eccentric is too eccentric? What can you put up with as a manager?
Molson Hart: I got fired from my first proper job out of college, probably for being too eccentric. I'm trying to scan through the people I've hired, to be honest with you. I just. I've never, like, hired a Steve Jobs, so I can't really speak on this.
David Short: We talked about it a little bit in the last podcast on sort of ten x engineers. And can you deal with that? I mean, I think his equation makes sense, that there are people that flout normal societal conventions, but are so good at what they're doing that it's worth it to deal with them. And then there are people that are actually causing more of a problem than they're worth, even though they might be quite successful. If they're making ten other people not succeed, then it's not worth it, even if their ten x agreed.
David Kopec: Five years ago, when I was running my iOS development consulting company, I was adjuncting at a community college. And I remember very distinctly when I started doing that, teaching computer science classes. The chairman of the department said to me, you have to maintain high standards. Even though a lot of these students are going to fail. Maybe even a third of them fail in an intro to computer science class at a community college, you still have to maintain those high standards, because otherwise the degree becomes worthless for everybody else. Bill Campbell said something similar in the, in the book, or at least through the authors of the book. He said that you have to always maintain the highest of standards. Even while you might still be compassionate towards people's faults and towards the things that are going on in their lives, you still can't excuse those standards slipping. Do you agree with that?
Molson Hart: For sure. It's toxic. As soon as you excuse or allow bad behavior, low quality work, it demoralizes everyone who puts in good work.
David Short: Yeah, absolutely. You need to very quickly give feedback. You need to have expectations that they're going to deliver something in a specific time, and if they don't do it in that amount of time, then you should immediately ask them. Really, they should have told you beforehand why they weren't going to and what it is that's taken longer than expected. And if you have that happen for two or three weeks and they're still not getting up to speed on things, then you just have to move forward and they need to leave.
David Kopec: Is there any time when you've allowed an employee to have lower than your highest standards because of something going on in their life and that was excusable?
Molson Hart: Yes, for sure. People are not like a straight line on a graph. We're all like this. There are days where we do poorly. Maybe we were hungover the night before, the day we're working because we drank too much the night before, or, you know, a really stressful event occurred the night previous and the day previous, whatever. And so we don't do a good job. And then we also have days and weeks where we're performing at a high level. People's performance is variable. There's another time where you allow kind of poor standards to persist, and that's when you really need the person. And that's a really kind of difficult and toxic situation to be in where, you know, let's say you have some ten X developer who's toxic, but at the same time, that person is absolutely necessary and critical to the success of the company. That's a really tough situation to be in as a manager.
David Kopec: Okay, so we've talked about a lot of the specific recommendations of Bill Campbell. Which ones have I missed? What were some that stuck out to you from the book beyond the ones that we've talked about so far?
David Short: So he talks a lot about people. I know there's a couple quotes that I have here that I thought were good to care about people. You have to care about people. And he apparently said that a lot, but it actually totally does make sense. And it's obviously whatever. There's a word for this that I'm blanking on, but it's actually not very hard. If you actually care about people, you will ask them those questions about their lives, and you will be genuinely interested in whether or not they're succeeding, and you will review their work because you care about them and you want them to succeed. So it really is just like kind of an input thing to some extent. And then he also talked about, Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically, but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this ability to make far analogies. The person has to work hard and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard to define characteristic grit, the ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again. So these are kind of standard things that people would look for in employees. But I do think that they're, you know, a good summary, too. You want someone who's smart, high integrity, has grit, and, you know, able to figure out what they need to work on.
Molson Hart: When Brad Smith took over as CEO of intuit, Bill told him that he would go to bed every night thinking about those 8000 souls who work for him. What are they thinking and feeling? How can I make them the best they can be? That's like hugely essential. I mean, if you have 8000 employees, just like a 10% improvement in company wide motivation can just have enormous results.
David Kopec: That makes a lot of sense. One thing we didn't bring up about the book is that the authors do try to give it a bit of an academic spin. They'll talk about, oh, here's this principle of Bill Campbell's in his coaching. And then here are some academic papers from business academics that show why that's true. Did you feel there was a bit of confirmation bias there where they would, they already thought Bill Campbell was the greatest coach of all time, and then they happened to find papers that supported the things that Bill Campbell did? Or did you feel that those really added value as you read the book?
Molson Hart: Definitely did not add value, I felt. I've never worked at Google, but I got the impression that that's like the Google culture where like, if you want to communicate an idea, sell an idea to someone, you need to, like, cite an academic study. It was totally useless. I really wish Bill Campbell had written a book. And I mean, he died of cancer, I believe, which is really sad and not like at an old age, which is terrible. I just really wish that guy had read the book, had written a book so I could read that instead of this, like, weird parody by these three guys, two of which I had never heard of.
David Short: Yeah, I mean, I think the research says parts of the books just felt like the least value add to me. It felt like it was like Adam Grant's grad student was writing this, or whoever the third person is in the. So there's Eric Schmidt and there's Jonathan, and then there's Alan Eagle. And Alan Eagle was Jonathan's speech writer or something like that. So I'm guessing it's that guy who put in the research on what does the most recent academic research have to say about things that Bill just knew from his gut? But totally agree. It felt like a complete waste of space in the book.
David Kopec: Well, it's a great segue. Do you think that Bill Campbell actually would have liked this book?
Molson Hart: No.
David Kopec: Why?
Molson Hart: In part because of what we were just talking about. I think that if you subbed all the institutional academic knowledge on management, and, like, in managing people at Harvard, it would. That the sum of that would be less than what Bill Campbell knew. So, I mean, for that reason, I don't think he would like.
David Short: I think he would have appreciated that Eric and Jonathan, you know, loved him so much that they spent a year or whatever writing a book about him. But I do not think he would have actually liked the book. And I think they say that he didn't want people to write a book about him.
David Kopec: Right. They said he didn't want people to write a biography about him. And this is not really a biography. Right. There are some pseudo biographical elements, but it's mostly about his coaching and what he tried to do as a coach and why he was successful as a coach.
Molson Hart: The only thing worse to me in this book about the studies than the studies was when they were talking about themselves or Eric Schmidt. I mean, maybe that's how people feel when they listen to our podcast, but I had no idea who these people were or why I should be listening to them and their experiences at Google. Just, like, where's the value in that?
David Kopec: Yeah, I could see that. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the contents of the book, but now we're getting to the part where it sounds like there's elements of how it was written that neither of you really approved of. So overall, do you actually recommend other people read this book?
Molson Hart: No. I mean, I feel like a better way to do it would just be like, watch a bunch of YouTube videos of Bill Campbell, or, I don't know, just listen to this podcast.
David Short: It was a short book, and I did gain some knowledge from it. Obviously, I've tried to impart all of that inside this podcast, but I would recommend it in the same way that I did the. The Ross Perot book. Like, it's not a great book by any means, but there are some good nuggets in there. And I didn't know a lot about Bill Campbell before this, aside from having read that book about starting up. Go. So it was interesting from that perspective. And I did watch a YouTube video as a result of reading this as well, which was also valuable. So, I mean, it's literally probably 130 pages of real text, so you can probably read it in a weekend.
David Kopec: So who actually should read this book, assuming that they don't agree with you and think that it is worth reading, who are the people that are most appropriate for the book?
Molson Hart: I think Alan Eagle should read the book and edit it. Edit everything out. There was a study or comment about Jonathan Rosenberg.
David Kopec: Okay, David, what about you? Who would you actually recommend this book to?
David Short: I would say people who are struggling with coaching. I think it's certainly part of my job and not something that I think I'm necessarily the best at. So I think I got some nuggets of wisdom from it and, you know, maybe his family or whatever, too. It's just, like, a nice thing to hear.
Molson Hart: Just burn it. Funeral fire.
David Kopec: Well, we apologize.
Molson Hart: Okay, look, the book isn't actually that bad. And I. And I did, like, learn. I really like combining honesty with caring, candor with caring. It just. It just. The book could have been so much better. And when you have such a great man with, like, so many stories to be told out there in Silicon Valley, I feel like it's kind of hard to write a bad book. I mean, you know, I. Yeah, yeah, agreed.
David Short: It's not a bad book at all. I think I gave it four stars on Goodreads or something like that. It's just not nearly as good as it could be. And so that's the struggle in recommending it is like, hopefully someone will write a better Bill Campbell book one day, but. Sounds like Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt spent a ton of time with him, so I don't know who would do it better. I don't think Steve Jobs is going to be doing it.
Molson Hart: We got to be careful. They're going to suppress our podcast on Google Search. This podcast is only available in the Apple I store. The I store. What am I, like, 75 iTunes.
David Kopec: Okay, well, all right, we're coming to the end here. So is there anything about the book that we didn't talk about that you really wanted to get across to our listeners?
David Short: So maybe my favorite thing that I read in the book was about these annual trips that he does. So he goes to the Super bowl every year. He goes to play golf in Cabo San Lucas. He goes to play baseball or go to baseball games in his hometown in Homestead and then Pirates in Pittsburgh. He goes to the College Football hall of Fame induction ceremony. He goes fishing in Butte, Montana. So all those trips sound fun. I wish I had been friends with Bill Campbell and went on these trips. But the most incredible thing about it is that he actually endowed all of those in his will. So these trips continue after he died. And I think that's just the coolest thing that I've ever heard. If I ever am a, you know, many times over millionaire, I'm totally going to endow some annual trips. So I do go skiing in Utah every year. Hopefully I'll add some more to my annual trips list.
Molson Hart: That's pretty cool. Does that mean that if you die, the other people on the trip don't have to pay as much?
David Kopec: That's exactly what it means, yeah.
David Short: He paid for everyone on all of these trips. He totally covered them. I am not doing that on the Utah trip, but I would eventually, maybe.
David Kopec: Molson, what about you? Is there anything we left out that you wanted to mention?
Molson Hart: Yeah, so I'll do a little bit of rapid fire. I've got some excerpts from the book that I thought were interesting or thought provoking. Quoting from the book, they chatted with several software engineers that night and most of the responses were similar. These engineers liked being managed as long as their manager was someone from whom they could learn something, someone who helped make decisions. I thought that one was interesting. I mentioned this earlier, but you may know the answer and you may be right, he said, but when you just blurt it out, you have robbed the team of the chance to come together. Getting to the right answer is important, but having the whole team get there is just as important. That's about Marissa Meyer and how terrible she is.
David Kopec: And you know, I have to agree with you about Marissa Meyer. I read that book, Marissa Meyer and the quest to save Yahoo, which came out, I don't know, like five years ago when she was in the midst of trying to do a Yahoo turnaround.
David Short: And how'd that quest go?
David Kopec: Well, she was really portrayed pretty terribly in that book. I don't know how fair the reporter slash author was, but she made some really bad decisions. Some good decisions, too. But she made some really bad decisions. So I would say she's probably an overrated CEO anyway. So there was some real wisdom in trillion dollar coach, but it wasn't our favorite book, so I take responsibility for that because I recommended it. But our book for next month, it's your recommendation. Molson. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what we're reading for next month?
Molson Hart: Yeah, sure. We're reading made in Japan. By Akio Morita, the CEO and founder of Sony Corporation. I'm really pumped for it. I've started reading the book already a little bit.
David Kopec: Great. I'm really excited, too. Well, before we go, is there anything that either of you want to plug? And if not, how can our listeners get in touch with you?
David Short: You can find me on Twitter. I'm avid g short, so things I.
Molson Hart: Want to plug well, yeah, follow me on Twitter. On Twitter. I'm going to put a bunch of excerpts from this book that I thought were pretty good from the Bill Campbell book, not the Sony book. And I guess if you want to hear me on another podcast, you can go listen to the recode Vox podcast like Land of the giants about Amazon, and I talk about what it's like to be a seller on Amazon.
David Kopec: Great. And you can find me on Twitter avekopack. That's Davekopec, and we love to hear your feedback. So get in touch with the three of us. Let us know what you're thinking about the podcast, what we could do better. We always want to improve. Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes or your podcast player of choice, and we'll see you next month.