The trillion dollar coach
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What Silicon Valley titans learned from an American football coach. Despite a fairly unspectacular career with the Columbia University college football team, Bill Campbell found himself guiding the leadership at the top of both Apple and Google simultaneously.
One of his mentees was the former Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who speaks about the surprising contribution that someone with a background in sports and no knowledge of programming was able to make to the tech firm's spectacular rise, and why he thinks all companies should have a coach sit in on their board meetings.
The nexus between sports and business has a long history, and another individual who embodied that was Niki Lauda, the Formula 1 driver who survived a horrific crash and went on to found a string of pioneering budget airlines in Europe. Manuela Saragosa speaks to Oliver Clark of the aviation news and analytics company Flight Global about the business legacy of Lauda, who died earlier this week at the age of 70.
(Picture: Columbia Lions quarterback Anders Hill; Credit: Williams Paul/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Zaragoza. Coming up, the trillion-dollar coach. |
| 0:08.4 | He had a formula for management, a formula for how you do one-on-ones, a formula for how you run staff, |
| 0:13.5 | meanings, a formula for how you make decisions. And he taught us his approach to building trust with people |
| 0:18.8 | and bringing love into the workplace. |
| 0:21.7 | Bill Campbell was an American football coach who went on to tutor some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. |
| 0:27.9 | But what can high-performance sports teach the world of business? |
| 0:31.2 | I tracked numbers of the people that played when I played. |
| 0:35.8 | And virtually every one of them that left tennis and either |
| 0:39.3 | went into business. If they went into business, they became multi-millionaires. |
| 0:43.7 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:50.1 | Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergei Brins, Cheryl Sandberg. They're all big names in Silicon Valley, |
| 0:56.6 | all of them associated with successful big tech firms. What's less well known is that they also |
| 1:02.4 | shared the same mentor, a former American football coach called Bill Campbell. Bill Camper was no |
| 1:08.8 | household name. He worked behind the scenes. He didn't like the spotlight. |
| 1:13.0 | But many of Silicon Valley's leading figures will readily admit that they owe him a huge debt. |
| 1:18.5 | Here's a snippet of Bill Campbell speaking on Fox News back in 2011. |
| 1:23.3 | I always say this. I have fired more people for attitude and behavior than I ever have for performance. |
| 1:29.2 | You've got to have people that really care about the outcome, the total outcomes, the outcome of the team. |
| 1:34.8 | Well, Bill Campbell died several years ago, but two of Google's top executives are intent on keeping his legacy alive when it comes to management style. So much so, they've written a book |
| 1:46.1 | about him called The Trillion Dollar Coach. The authors are Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google, |
| 1:51.9 | and Jonathan Rosenberg, a former senior vice president of products at Google. Both remain |
| 1:57.2 | advisors to the company. They spoke to my colleague Ed Butler, Eric Schmidt first. |
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