Trillion Dollar Coach Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Bill Campbell started his career as a college football coach, then delved into the world of business, leaving his unique business models and lessons behind. His coaching-mentality helped companies go from bankruptcy to trillions with compassion and active-listening.

About the Author

Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American software engineer, businessman, and executive chairman of Alphabet Inc (formerly named Google). According to Forbes, he is the 138th richest person in the world with a net worth of 9.1 billion dollars.

From 1997 to 2001, he worked as CEO of Novell. From 2001 to 2011, he served as CEO of Google. He attended Princeton University, where he met his future wife. In 1979, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an MS degree in designing and implementing a network (Berknet) linking the campus computer center with the CS and EECS departments. He earned a Ph.D. degree there in 1982 in EECS, with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems.

Topics

Management & Leadership

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Key Insights

Bill Campbell is a football and business legend.

This working-class Pennsylvania man took the lessons he learned as a college football coach to the world of business. His untraditional business ideas about leadership and team-building made him one of the most influential business coaches of his time.

With influences on Apple and Google, Campbell made a name for himself in the business world in the last few decades of his life.

“This is the power of coaching in general: the ability to offer a different perspective, one unaffected by being “in the game.”- Eric Schmidt

In “Trillion Dollar Coach” by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle you will learn about Campbell’s life and ideas through interviews of the people that knew him.

Bill Campbell Started As A Football Coach

Campbell was born in Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1940. Campbell’s dad was a gym teacher, as well as a millworker at night.

Campbell was always a very passionate and hardworking person. When he was a teen, he wrote an op-ed in his school newspaper to remind his fellow classmates that good grades were important.

And although grades were important to Campbell, his main passion and priority was football.

In 1958, Campbell started attending Columbia University where he studied economics and joined the football team, the Lions. At this time in his life, Campbell was only 165 lbs. and was 5’10”. He was the smallest member of his team.

But, although he was small he had willpower. His team rightly nicknamed him, “Ballsy.”

“Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.”- Eric Schmidt

When Campbell was captain, the Lions won the 1961 Ivy League title, which is a title they haven’t received since.

When Campbell graduated, he was offered a job as an assistant football coach at Boston College. He accepted in 1964 and moved to New England.

Over the next ten years, Campbell gained recognition as a top-notch football coach and received many offers from universities around the country.

One of the offers was from Penn State, which at the time was the home of the best football coach in the states, Joe Paterno. Campbell, however, turned it down in favor of taking an offer from Columbia, where he graduated.

In 1974, Campbell returned to Columbia University. The football team was in terrible shape and there was not enough funding. This affected the team’s performance. During Campbell’s time as a coach, the team won 12 games and lost 41.

In 1979, Campbell resigned from Columbia University.

Campbell Moves To California

When Campbell was 39 years old he said ‘goodbye’ to football and entered the business world.

His first job was at J. Walter Thompson, which was an ad agency. Campbell was successful because of his positive demeanor and determination. Kodak, one of the clients at the time, loved Campbell, and decided to steal him from the agency and put him as head of consumer products in Europe.

In 1983, Campbell was contacted by John Sculley, who was an old friend of his from the university. Sculley had recently made the decision to...