MBA1378 Must Read: The Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt

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Hey oh welcome to the 100 arm. Better business lessons you can count on every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a must Read episode On our Must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that I've read that has greatly influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, its insights and why you should read it too. Today's must read is the Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt. If you don't know Eric Schmid, CEO of Google, but this book is not about Google or Eric Schmidt. It's about a man named Bill Campbell. Bill Campbell was a former American football coach turned business coach for some of the best business minds in the world. What kind of minds? Well, the book is called Trillion Dollar Coach for a reason. He's helped the leaders of businesses worth more than a trillion dollars. Not only has he coached Eric Schmidt, who's the CEO of Google, but also the founders of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Also a guy named Steve Jobs from Apple. He also coached Brad Smith from Intuit, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, John Donahue from ebay, Marissa Meyer at Yahoo, Dick Costello from Twitter, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. So Bill Campbell is the go to guy everybody goes to for advice for coaching when it comes to business excellence and leadership. And this book was great because it shared all the insights on leadership, on management that Bill Campbell passed on to many of these people. This episode, this must read, is going to be a little bit different from other must reads. I'll explain in detail, but I want to give you the general takeaway I got from this book and really focus on that. There's a lot of great insights and tips, but I want to save that for you. When you read the book, I want to give you the juice. I want to give you really the impact it made on me. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. This book, Trillion Dollar Coach, is all about Bill Campbell, probably the most well known business coach of all time. The interesting thing about Bill was that he didn't really need to understand the inner workings of every little thing in a business to help the business leaders. He used a lot of the concepts that he learned as a football coach, an American football coach on the field. I want to share with you the overall insights I got from the book, but more importantly, the impact it made on me. One of the biggest themes that is shared in the book is that Bill really emphasized the power of team and how to make sure your team works well together. They come to a solution together. They value each other's opinion and they seek each other's opinion. You as the leader of the business, the CEO, you're the coach, you're the person who makes sure that they do the things they need to do and you support their progress. And I love this metaphor because it reinforces the idea that you need to make your team better. You need to give them challenges, you need to give them the opportunities to step up. And your job is to keep them focused and keep their eye on the prize. The goals that you're trying to set out for the business. Your job is to give feedback. Your job is to allow them to have opportunities to ask questions. So this theme is throughout the book. The idea of being a coach and not just a leader and not just a manager is so important. Now. There's a lot of strategies that you can dig into in the book where he talks about management, where he talks about how to lead a meeting, he talks about how to evaluate people, how to make decisions. All that stuff is in the book and you're going to dive into it and find out for yourself. But it all comes from this analogy, and I really love this analogy. And it keeps coming back to it in the book because it's a formula you can follow. It's a formula that you can really fall back on every time you're a little bit unsure about how to approach a situation on your team. Using this analogy as a coach instead of just a manager, you can apply it to every aspect of your job, even the way you communicate with your team. When a coach is on the field and they need to tell their players something, they get straight to it. They just tell them what they need to do, and they sandwich it with motivation, whether it's clapping or good job or a pat on the back. But the point here is, is that as a coach, you need to course correct, and you need to just tell people honestly and transparently what's happening and what they need to do. If you're a team member, you might be a little bit lost, especially if you're new. And it can get more confusing if you're not just clear about what you expect. Bill Campbell was also a man of very high character. There are many mentions in of what a warm and kind person he was, how he treated everybody with a hug. In fact, the book actually opens up with a scene. Bill Campbell has passed away, and the scene was at his funeral. All the different types of people that were at his funeral, from highly successful CEOs to his golf caddy at the golf course, everyone he interacted with felt special. And they felt like Bill was their best friend. He was a man of integrity. He was a man that always returned people's calls. He made time for people. And one of the things that really impacted me was the emphasis of valuing his relationships in his life. He really valued relationships. It was like his net worth, right? How many deep connections he can make with people. So much so that everybody thought that he was closest to them. But he was close to everybody, and he made time for everybody, which is very interesting, how he's able to convey that feeling to people. And I found that very impactful because, you know, we live our lives, we try to accomplish our goals in business. We try to achieve great things, create great products. But the relationships we make along the way, whether it's in business, whether it's with our employees, whether it's with other businesses or our clients or people in the media or whatever it is, this is happening all the time. People are really evaluating who we are as a people on a regular basis. And if you want to leave a legacy that matters Then it's a good idea to treat people nicely. And I really like this underlining theme in the book, that he treated everybody so well, so nicely, with warmth, with care. And he was genuine and it was heartfelt. It makes me think how am I treating everybody I'm interacting with? And I want to shift my focus in today's lesson with the overall impact and kind of takeaway I got from the book. And I think the gift that Bill Campbell had was clarity. He had clarity in everything he did. He was clear about what he expected from his team. He was clear about the instructions he gave, the people he coached. He was clear about the decisions he made. And this is really important just to be clear. Bill Campbell was a high power exec as well. He was a chairman of the board at Intuit, he was on the board of Apple, he was on the board of trustees of Columbia University. So this guy definitely walks the talk, right? But in everything he did, it was very clear. There's no ambiguity, there's no reading between the lines. And this is so important. As a leader and as a manager, your team really needs to understand what they need to do, what's required of them, how do they succeed in their job. He was big on touching base with his team members, touching base with his managers, and making sure that the leadership was doing their job. I'm going to share a little story from the book. Larry and Sergey from Google, the founders of Google. When they started Google, they said, why do we need managers? We don't need managers. Let's just let the teams decide what they want to do and what to work on and let them just focus on the product. They really didn't have any corporate experience. They came straight out of college and they just adopted the model of a university where students just really produce the work. So when Bill Campbell came along and was coaching them and Google, he said, no, you need managers. This is not healthy for the organization to have no managers in place. The engineers would perform better and the company overall performed better if there was management. They ummed and on a bit and they couldn't decide. So Bill said, hey, listen, don't take my word for it, let's ask the engineers, let's see what they want. And they went and they asked the Google engineers, hey, do you want a manager? They all gave a resounding yes as a response, yes, I want a manager. I, I want somebody I can learn from, I want somebody I can have as a mentor. It would help if I knew I was on track. I would help if Somebody can kind of help me and guide me throughout my career. Larry and Sergey realized Bill has a point. These engineers are really good at engineering. That's their superpower. And to ask them to also be really good at management is asking too much. So we should take that off their plate so they can focus on their superpower and give them a manager. Give them somebody who can help them organize their projects as well as be their mentor and course correct them when needed. And they say in the book, because of that decision, most of us are doing Google searches and not Yahoo or Bing searches. You know, Bill kind of talks about, you know, innovation is very important, but.

Everything has a cost.

At what cost are we going to innovate to what extreme? Larry and Sergey wanted to innovate to the point where there's no managers. What's the cost of that? They didn't even perceive that there was a cost. So ask yourself, as an exercise, anytime you try something new or something different, what's the cost? What's the trade off? Just so you're aware of what you're losing and gaining. Going back to my biggest takeaway of clarity. Sometimes things get busy in a business. Like currently our software business, Webinar Ninja, is super busy. We're a growing team and there's a lot going on. There's things going on in marketing, there's things going on in content. Engineering is working on projects. Customer service is working on their own thing. There's so much stuff going on that sometimes we don't have clarity on the why. Why are we doing all this? Why are we working so hard every day? And this is why he really loves doing all hand meetings, or I should say all hands meeting, which is basically a meeting with everybody in the company. And he tries to do it as frequently as possible. We've been doing this for a little bit now for over a year, and it's basically once a month. We do a call with every single person. It's a video call, face to face. Our team is remote, but the point of the all hands is to remind people to align people with the goal, the prize. Keep your eye on the prize, right? What are we trying to accomplish here as a team? And we only can do it together as a team. Everybody's doing their little job, everybody's doing their part of the task. But those little jobs and little tasks come together to a big result. I might be doing a little thing here, writing a blog post. It's not the whole business, but it supports the goal. And we need to make sure as leaders that everybody sees their role, their tasks and how it contributes to that goal, how they're actually moving us forward in their own way. That's what I mean by clarity. There's so much clarity in this coaching. You want people to go to work and have a clear understanding of this is why I do what I do. This is why I love it. This is why I continue to do what I do. You never want to have a moment where your employees wake up one day and they're like, what am I doing? What is this all about? Is this just a hamster wheel? It's your job as the leader to reinforce and to clarify the meaning behind their work.

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To wrap up today's must read episode, the Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, I highly recommend you pick up this book. I picked it up on audible. I really like it in the audio version. I listen to it in the gym when I'm working out, when I'm running some errands, and it's really an easy read to listen to. I think it's about six hours long. So in about a week or 10 days you can finish the book nice and easy, especially if you have somewhat of a long commute. Voice actor is actually quite good and he changes his voice when he's quoting Bill Campbell to kind of resemble his voice. One of the things I kept on thinking about when I was listening to this book is how can I apply what Bill preaches and teaches to my business? But also how can I be more like Bill Campbell, make that kind of impact in the world, make that kind of impact on others? What I realized is that I got to start with my business. I got to start with the people that work with me. I got to be the best coach possible to them. Then I can move on and try to help other people, other business owners. Then hopefully when I'm long gone, I could be remembered as somebody that cared, that helped, that contributed, just like Bill Campbell. Thanks so much for listening to the Hunter MBA Show. If you love you here. Hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat. So you get the next episode automatically to your device. Subscribe Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The craziest thing about this book and the story of Bill Campbell is that he coached all these execs, all these very, very successful people for free. He never asked for a dime. He never charged. He did well professionally, and I think it was part of his effectiveness. People would listen to him because he had nothing to gain by giving this advice other than to help you. He's not on the payroll. Right. I just found that interesting how generous he was with his coaching. All right, that wraps up today's episode. I'll see you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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