In all, Trillion Dollar Coach, a book summarizing the lessons of legendary Silicon Valley business coach Bill Campbell, has been somewhat of a disappointment. Having recently read other acclaimed biographies (such as I Have America Surrounded on Tim Leary and Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson), I was hoping to read a book with the same level of depth, research and nuance. Looking back on it, this was of course a foolish expectation - none of Trillion Dollar Coach's authors are journalists or career writers, but rather busy technologists with diverse interests beyond writing. It's silly for me to expect that they'd spend time truly researching Bill Campbell's childhood or interviewing his children. Certainly, the byline makes it clear that this book is a collection of principles/lessons.
It's a bit less silly to expect that the authors would present a more nuanced perspective on the Coach though. The book doesn't dwell too much on Campbell's background or failings. Reading it, you'd think the only flaw the Coach ever had was his penchant for swear words - but don't be alarmed! He does it out of love, so it's all fine. I was hoping for a bit more meat on his failures: the unimpressive coaching career, the problems at Go - not least because this would help us learn alongside the Coach. The book breezes through Campbell's formative years and barely mentions his family. The Coach was born a fully-formed 40-year-old seasoned executive.
My second gripe with this book is the sometimes maddening lack of specificity in some of the situations Campbell helps adjudicate. In one such example, the book describes Campbell helping decide if a Google product should fall under one Googler's remit or under another's. We're never told what the product was, and the lesson falls flat as a result - the anecdote, stripped of its content, is too bland to truly land a punch.
That being said, I put this book down feeling weirdly warm and fuzzy. It's essentially a version of the eulogy that the authors didn't get the chance to put together before Campbell's memorial service - long by eulogy standards, but short by book standards (2h read). The Coach was clearly an outstanding man, whose guiding principles can be mostly summarized as "Be a good person". It all made me a tinge sad that I never got the chance to meet him.
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22 April 2019 -
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