Trillion Dollar Coach · Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle · 2020
Bill Campbell's coaching shows that even executives at major tech companies need guidance - it's all humans, all the way up. This book contains valuable wisdom on effective coaching for individuals and teams, though it's not the most structured read, it offers plenty of practical, timeless advice on this important leadership skill.
Key Highlights
Bill Campbell coached Silicon Valley's elite, including Steve Jobs, Google founders Larry and Sergey, and CEOs Eric Schmidt and Sundar Pichai. His approach transformed tech leadership through genuine human connection. He hugged like a bear, brought love into the workplace, and made time for everyone. His primary skill was identifying and resolving tensions within teams.
Campbell's leadership was built on communication, respect, feedback, and trust. He believed high-performing teams need leaders who coach effectively. His people-first philosophy recognised that individuals are what make companies successful and that managers should focus on helping people grow and develop.
Campbell believed great people want to succeed and will flourish in environments that amplify their energy. Managers create this environment through:
- Support: Providing tools, information, training, and coaching
- Respect: Understanding goals and life choices while aligning individual needs with company objectives
- Trust: Empowering people to make decisions and believing in their capabilities
The best leaders maintain relationship transparency through listening, feedback, and candor. They set high standards while supporting people to reach them. Great coaches give energy rather than depleting it, and prioritise listening, understanding, and encouraging. Remember: your title makes you a manager, but your people make you a leader.
The top priority of any manager is the wellbeing and success of their people. Effective managers run decision-making processes that ensure all perspectives are heard, lead based on first principles, and only coach the coachable, those showing honesty, humility, perseverance, and openness to learning.
Great leaders practice free-form listening by giving full attention without anticipating responses. They maintain no gap between statements and facts through relentless honesty, coupled with caring. They deliver timely feedback privately when negative, and act as evangelists for courage by believing in people more than they believe in themselves.
People perform best when they can be their authentic selves at work. The most successful approach is to work on the team first, then tackle the problem. Pick team members with both intelligence and empathy, those who learn quickly, work hard, show grit, integrity, and maintain a team-first attitude. Strategically pair people on projects to maximise complementary strengths.
Winning depends on having the best team, and the best teams include more women. Focus on identifying the biggest problem first, address negative issues without dwelling on them, and understand people's lives outside work. Build communities, be generous with your time and resources, and celebrate others' successes demonstrably.
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Clinical reminder alert fatigue in healthcare: a systematic literature review protocol using qualitative evidence
Katarzyna Lewandowska et al. 2020. (View Paper → )
In conditions of intensive therapy, where the patients treated are in a critical condition, alarms are omnipresent. Nurses, as they spend most of their time with patients, monitoring their condition 24 h, are particularly exposed to so-called alarm fatigue.
Alarm fatigue is a real thing for healthcare practitioners. Be careful not to design your product in isolation, think about who will be using it and what their environment is like.
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Book Highlights
The all too common practice of siloing business units into isolated groups that rarely talk, share information, or, God forbid, actually collaborate, has been a widely acknowledged organizational Achilles’ heel at many companies for many years. Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown · Hacking Growth
The following elements will increase the odds of driving value: Start small and evolve gradually. Focus on outcomes. Create opportunities to collect feedback. Dare to discard a solution when it creates no value. Collaborate instead of coordinate. How you apply product delivery doesn’t matter. What matters is what you create from it. David Pereira · Untrapping Product Teams
The first kind of difficulty occurs when we face a problem that stumps us, but would be routine for someone else. This is a difficulty of learning from others. What are the strong methods experts use to solve those problems effortlessly? Scott H. Young · Get Better at Anything
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Quotes & Tweets
It’s not enough to have a firm grasp of the industry you’re building in. If your product doesn’t speak to core human impulses, it probably won’t scale. Reid Hoffman
When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. Steve Jobs