Google's Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle On Leadership

So welcome tonight and thank you to the How To Academy for organizing this. I'll introduce our guests in a moment. You already know who they are. You don't probably know who I am. I've been asked to do this because I just wrote a book that won the Business Book of the Year award on leadership, and that is our subject tonight. And we're talking about the new book that the team from Google have written, The Trillion Dollar Coach. And I'd like to welcome on stage Eric Schmidt, who you all know from Google...

Jonathan Rosenberg from Google and Alan Eagle. All of them...

And these are the folks who have built the opportunity for you to find anything you want on the internet. So this book is fascinating in that it's about one person really. And one of the things I found writing about leadership is that perhaps one reason we're having a crisis of leadership in many categories of leadership is we kind of had this model of one figure, one iconic figure, and following the lead of that one person. But what you are arguing in this book is that Bill Campbell was not about one person's view but creating a team. And I'd love to hear in your initial meeting with him, like what happened when you first met this extraordinary character who wasn't about the self and the ego but about the team?

Well, let me tell you a little bit of context about the story. When I first met Bill, it was actually 2002. Eric had just started at Google and I'd been interviewing. I was an SVP at Excite@Home and John Doerr, who's an important board member, had recommended me. So I figured the job was a shoo-in.

Your meeting with Bill Campbell? My Google offer. My two post-Angel offers. So tell the truth, you had turned down Google twice. Those were both mistakes. So then this guy Eric showed up and wanted to hire me. So again, the job was a shoo-in. So I came and Eric had this secret plan to hire me. He had me come in, sit at the end of a big table in a conference room, and the CFO came in. And Google was a private company and he showed me that price times click-through rate, which was AdWords, was minting money. And so I was like now salivating and ready to accept my job offer. And Eric was gonna come in and I was gonna out-negotiate him because I'm a better negotiator than he is. And he doesn't show up. Instead, you pretend to be me sitting at the end of a table in a big conference room like waiting. Like this guy comes in, Rosenberg, that's around about you. John Doerr says you're smart, says you work hard, don't give a [__], just got one question: are you coachable? So I said, what, depends on the quality of the coach. And he like hits him and he goes out into one of our lovely micro kitchens. And I'm like, what just happened? Which point, Jonathan, you've turned down your third offer. Well, now my offer had disappeared into the micro kitchen. So I went out there groveling, Mr. Campbell, sir, Mr. Campbell, sir, I'm so sorry, Mr. Campbell, sir, please come back. He's like, Rosenberg, back in the chair, back in the room. So I go, I sit down in the room and he comes and he basically delivers a lecture and he doesn't stop talking. And it's about all the things that you just mentioned. It's about, you know, he doesn't like arrogance, he likes humility, he doesn't like people who want to take all the credit, he likes people who are team first. And the lecture goes on and on. And then finally he comes back, he's like, got one more question: if I were to be your coach, what would you want to get out of it? I was like, a pretty arrogant guy and I didn't need a coach, but at this moment in my life I needed an answer. Fortunately, I watch American sports a lot. There was a coach of the Dallas Cowboys, his name was Tom Landry, and he had said, a coach sees the things you don't want to see and hears the things you don't want to hear so you can be the person you always wanted to be or the person your mother always wanted you to be. Since my mother's in the audience, and Bill looked at me like, Rosenberg, you're so full of [__], you don't believe that, but what the heck, I can coach you. And we then spent every two weeks in one-hour therapy sessions.

Amazing. And what was your first experience like?

Well, it wasn't nearly as colorful as Jonathan's and no job offers were on the line. But I met Bill a couple of times. But the first time I really sat down and talked with him, we were doing research for our previous book which was called How Google Works. And Jonathan and I went over to Bill's house in Palo Alto and we talked for about an hour and a half. And then, but when I walked in, Jonathan was holding a glass of red wine, which was really interesting because Jonathan doesn't drink red wine or doesn't really drink at all. And Bill said, well Alan, would you like some wine? And Jonathan's like, you want this one? It's really good. So of course I said yes. So I enjoyed the wine and the next morning I get a call from Jonathan, come on over to my office. And remember, I just met Bill a couple of times. And I go over to Jonathan's office and Bill had given to Jonathan a bottle of the wine to give to me. And it was a very nice bottle of wine and it was just an example of simple generosity that really marked almost everything Bill did. So I had met Bill over the years. He was famous when he worked at Go, which was after he was at Apple. He was a bicycle on the weekends and his work ethic was so strong that on a Sunday he broke his ribs, he broke seven ribs, and on the Monday morning he did the flight to Japan for a one-hour meeting and the overnight back, the double redeye. And he was mythical in his work ethic. So when John Doerr called me and said I'd like to suggest that it's time for you to have a coach, I said I don't need a coach. After all, look at me, I'm the Big Cheese, right? I'm here, I'm adult supervision. Larry and Sergey, young people, I know exactly what I'm doing. I was a big cheese there and so forth and so on. And he listened to me for a while and he said, do tennis players have coaches? And I said, mmm, this is a test, and the answer is yes, but the tennis players are better than the coaches. And John said, it's a different skill, Eric. And he got me there. So at that point I had to meet with Bill. And then the moment you met him, you realized that he was the right person. And to give you an example of how you knew, when I met with him, I said, okay, this sounds good, we'll give this a try. I'm sure you can be helpful. How do we pay you? And he said, I don't want to be paid. I said, well, what about stock options? Everybody wants stock options. He said, I don't want any stock options. Well, do you want to be on our board? No, I don't want to be on your board. It would get in the way of my work. When you're dealing with somebody who is not compensated in any way and is acting solely to make you successful, it's a very different interaction than any other experience I've ever had.

And so interesting, so not Silicon Valley, so outside of the typical experience. And one of the things I found so interesting was if anyone would hire a Bill Campbell, if you look at his actual background, he was like 39 years old before he finished his football coaching career. And by the way, he wasn't even that good at the football.

Yeah, you know, really the second part wasn't really very good at all. Yeah, then he goes to work for J. Walter Thompson and he's doing some work for I think it's Kraft and Kodak. Okay, so what would anybody in this audience hire a 43-year-old person? Just so we're clear, let's talk about how it actually happened. Yeah, Alan, John Sculley hires Bill. Bill had met John Sculley who went on to become CEO of Apple. Bill met him I think when he was still coaching football. So really, and then he took the job at J. Walter Thompson and Kodak. But when Sculley was getting ready to launch the Macintosh, he remembered this guy Bill Campbell he had met. And Bill had been very successful at Kodak and at the time he was running sales in Europe for Kodak. And that's when Sculley hired him to come all the way to California to work for Apple and helped launch the Macintosh. And most importantly, well, they ran a Super Bowl ad. So you all are familiar with the story, maybe I'm not sure how people know. So there is an iconic ad that happened in the 1984 Super Bowl. It's American football, we call it football, sorry. And this ad is the arrival of Apple against the incumbent IBM and it's symbolized by a woman with an axe. She runs into a series of people who are automatons symbolizing IBM and its people and destroys the screen. It is one of the five most famous television ads in history. You may look for it by searching Apple 1984 ad on your favorite search engine, it will show up on your favorite video platform. So anyway, so they commissioned this ad and Bill gets the ad made and he shows it to Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs said, that's a great ad, let's run it. And he shows it to the Apple board and the Apple board says, we hate that ad, we're not running the ad, sell the airtime. So Bill tried to sell the airtime and failed. But he actually didn't fail, he just decided, you know, we said we're gonna run the ad. He actually didn't say that, he used a curse word, he said, gosh darn it, we're going to run the ad. And the rest is history.

No Eric, the Super Bowl is in different cities.

The Giants games, which are in San Francisco. I'm just helping our British audience understand.

Silicon Valley that he touched. So Bill passed away a little over three years ago and his memorial service was a gathering such as we rarely have in Silicon Valley. 2,000 people, many of whom he had worked with and coached. And we interviewed over 80 people. And Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, Dick Costolo at Twitter, Bob Iger, Andrea Young, Larry Page, Susan Wojcicki, like people who were not known at the time he began coaching them. They're all very famous now for what they've done. But how extraordinary. How did he, what was his process for choosing such incredible talent?

So he, a lot of people use the phrase smarts and hearts. He looked for people who were smart and he looked for people with a good heart. And he looked for people that were intellectually curious and wanted to learn. And if he found that combination, I think he really felt that people are born great, they're born with greatness in them and it was his job to kind of bring that out. And one of the people we interviewed who you didn't mention, American Hall of Fame football player Ronnie Lott, said he had been coached by both Bill and Bill Walsh, who was another more famous American football coach. And he said, Bill and these Bills are people that lay awake at night thinking about how to make other people better. And that's what he did. Right, as a manager, I lay awake at night thinking about like the stuff that Eric's gonna drill me on on Monday afternoon to make sure that it's all done right. But when you're managing at scale, you really need to be spending all of your time thinking about whether or not you're delegating to the right people and the right team and you're helping them get better. And we started the book to write it as sort of a testament to our mentor and friend. What we discovered, I think, a new Silicon Valley product, which is the notion of an executive coach of teams. If you think about it, here you have these extraordinary, extraordinary successful football coaches here in Britain. Can you imagine the same teams without their coach? What are they gonna be, self-assembled? Yeah, it's crazy. You wouldn't think of it at all. And yet we presume in business that that's the right answer. So what we hope to do is popularize the rules that he taught us, which by the way are all pretty simple, right? Pretty easy to remember. They don't require understanding technology at a great detail. And in fact, what was interesting is that he managed to successfully coach all of the competitors at the same time precisely because he did not get involved in the product side of the business. And you're talking about one thing that really emerged as we talked to all these people that you met, is that, you know, people think of executive coaching as a one-on-one thing. You know, I'm coaching you and then I go away and that's what we're doing. But Bill would coach a CEO like Eric and then coach every person on that CEO's team and not tell Eric or the other CEO what they were talking about. It was always a confidential relationship. But what he was doing, what he was always doing, was creating community, creating a team. Even there, Eric mentioned the Super Bowl trips, you're creating a community of people. Same thing in business coaching as well, creating a community out of the team. And you might imagine, you know, you might think that as you go up in the hierarchy of businesses that the people are more secure, more self-aware, more stable. Nothing could be further from the truth, trust me. And so they have all sorts of problems, right? There's internal competition, there's ego involved, there's narcissism, whatever. Sometimes there's even worse kind of behavior. And so what the coach does is when people get off the reservation, he pulls them back in, right? So over and over again there would be somebody who was off playing some other game and I would say, please go talk to him or her and get them back on this program. I was just reminiscing with Patrick Pichette who's in the audience here who was our CFO. And just to give you an example of one of the things that Bill would do to get us to work together better. Patrick came maybe 2006, 2007. I'd been working at Google for a little while and, you know, we're kind of a hard company to come into as a senior person. We sort of, you know, haze and reject the donor tissue when it arrives. And Bill said to me, you know, this Patrick guy's really good, you should make time for him every Friday and go to lunch with him. It doesn't seem like anything exciting, but when I interviewed Patrick for the book, he said, you know, Bill told me when I first started that Jonathan makes snap judgments about people and if he's actually willing to spend time with you and have lunch with you regularly in your first month, that means he really likes you. And I'm like, you know, he's coaching us as a team and we don't even know it.

Yeah, you know, one of the things I found writing about leadership is that the typical path that you're told from, you know, business school or graduate school on down the line is you need to be more and more analytical. And if you drill down deeper into detail and if you control the math going into the investor meetings and the stockholder meetings, this is where truth lies. But actually, it's what I call the parenthetical. It's not the drill down, it's the ability to look across and connect the dots and consider the things that are not quantifiable. So for example, I was really struck reading the book that all these people are studying balance sheets and Bill is really good at body language. Yeah, he reads people. Can you talk a bit about that?

And this, by the way, you're so right, this is not taught in business school anywhere. And yet it looks to us like the majority of life's outcomes is not because of the policy and the technical work and the number crunching, but rather the people that you associate and the way that you work with them, which Bill excelled in. So in our case, for example, he said, why don't we manage the company well? And I said, good, we're in agreement. So we agreed on a formula. And the formula is that we would have a meeting, we would phrase a question, and then the people who would talk a lot, typically Jonathan would talk a lot, and then we'd have the other people, right, who wouldn't say very much. And we listen to them and then we try to figure out who could figure out the answer. And we would do this in a timely manner. The sum of that would produce exceptional decisions. So as an example of coaching, so we got this in place, it's going really well, we systematized innovation. And for those of you that don't remember, but I remember very well, the number, the growth and the income, we're growing, we're doubling every year. There's an enormous number of issues. Boom, boom, boom, we have to sort them all out. So one day Bill says to me, you are the best CEO in the world at taking ambiguous decisions and making the decision quickly. And I said, great, you know, here I am, I've established myself, I'm really proud and my ego just goes straight up and I'm arrogant anyway. And so a week later, having established that principle, I of course screw up. And he looks at me, he says, you could do better. And then I realized what he had done. He had taught me of what I had wanted to be, even though I wasn't really that good. And then when inevitably I didn't achieve that, he got me to criticize myself to do better. That's coaching. You see the example, right? He was getting me to want to improve my performance. And I can only imagine the same conversation in the sports analogy which he must have used earlier.

Sensitive coins for this audience. Talk about pairs. He was very big on pairing people up and not solving problems by yourself but working in a team and the importance of that.

Yeah, he did that with me. He sat in on my staff meeting once. And my staff meetings were strategically on Monday afternoons because Eric's were Monday mornings. And then I could just dole out the three or four action items that I had to my staff, which was, you know, Sundar Pichai who's now the CEO, and Susan Wojcicki who you mentioned, and Marissa Mayer who ran Yahoo, and Salar Kamangar who created AdWords. And so I would go out and, you know, hand out action items. And it seemed like the most efficient way to me to just give one thing to one person, the next thing to another person. Bill told me after sitting in on my staff meetings, you're just like a dictator, willy-nilly throwing out tasks to these people. What you should do is build for the future, build relationships between people for the future. And you do that by managing every permutation and combination of pairwise relationships on your staff. So if you've got something as easy as planning an offsite, don't give it to one person, give it to Susan and Marissa. I'm like, well, that's crazy, that's a waste of time. He said, no, that's an easy task, they'll enjoy working with each other and they'll come to a good outcome. Then in a month when there's a really difficult task that they might otherwise disagree on, give them a deadline and ask them to work together. And now it's a very different way of running your staff.

It looks like also he called on all of you to do something very unusual in business, which was to be heroic, to have a heroic vision. And I was struck by the list you have on page 51 of your book, which is Bill's framework for one-on-ones. And one of the key things is how to have a heroic vision. Talk a bit about what it is to have a heroic vision.

Well, he had a very clear structure for one-on-ones. He wanted to talk about your performance on the job, your relationships with your peers, this innovation and sort of heroic vision component, and then how you were doing with your management practices. And notice the first one was relationship with peers because it's a team effort.

Experience of what is a heroic approach? I would say that the heroic approach really comes from having a vision for the team. And I think this is actually a really important point in today's work environment, which is that, you know, it used to be that people just went to work to get a salary and a title. And now in Silicon Valley, and I'm sure here as well, people go to work because they want to work for a place they care about that is doing good. So a key part of creating a team, and whether you're expressing this in one-on-ones or in any other environment, is to really have that powerful vision for what you want to do with your company that really makes the people that work there want to really care about it, want to come to work every day. So yeah, that's a very important component of being the coach. You know, the coach is the person who's there also the cheerleader, you know, and really makes people believe that they can be heroic. We have a phrase in here, an evangelist for courage. One of our colleagues at Google called Bill an evangelist for courage. And when you're the coach, you want to make people believe they can be greater than they believe they can be. And that's, you know, you want to blow confidence into people.

Let's make our moderator feel great. You're doing a great job. Doing a great job. Come on people.

We call that the percussive... okay, so by the way, that was just a group experiment. Sorry, we had to do that without preparation. It's called the percussive clap. It's part of his teaching.

You talk in the book about him in terms of a bit of sort of tough love. And apparently he swore quite a lot, like he did not hold back. You have a list of like the top Bill-isms, which is half of them I can't say because they won't be able to broadcast this recording. Most of them are not appropriate today.

Yeah, you're as dumb as a post is one. You ought to burn that shirt. Yeah, you're a numbnuts. You've got hands like feet. Don't [__] it up. There you go.

Now, but it's really interesting though is you talk at one point in the book, you say it's a kind of masculine form of love. It's a very tough love. It's a very in-your-face, you know, don't mess this up. And I wonder how does that play in this era? You know, we're now in a politically correct era. And I was really struck by, I'm gonna come on to, you talk a lot about why it's so important, and he thought it was so important to have women and diversity and more focus on some things we might call more feminine approaches like empathy. And so this combination of being able to swear his head off at you and yet demand that you have more empathy, it was very unusual. Because I don't think the concept of love as we talked about in the book is really a masculine concept.

I mean, Bill was a guy's guy. He was a football coach. He would tell jokes, swore a lot, you know, liked a good beer, you know, and that was his style. It doesn't have to be everybody's style. But this word came through, the word love came through so many times when we were talking to people, from the men and the women who we talked to. And the gist of it was that Bill made it okay to bring love into the workplace. And this is an entirely appropriate, chaste kind of love. But it was really, you know, he made it okay to bring humanity into the workplace. People talk about work-life balance. Bill didn't have work-life balance, it was all life. Yeah, he was just building communities. And, you know, the key insight was it's okay to love the people that you work with. Like to really care about them, to get to know their families, to get to know their lives outside of work, to show up for them. And that was like my key insight coming out of this whole thing. Like you just never hear about that, but that was the most important, most powerful word we heard was Bill's love. And he was most effective when people he knew became ill with some tragic illness or what have you. One fella, Mike Homer, had been sick for a long time. He would visit the wife of, he was unfortunately at home essentially in a hospice, and he would go and support the wife and the family and so forth. Obviously his role with Steve Jobs during his illness was fundamental. So he put his money and his time where his mouth was on the things he cared about. And he was definitely a great champion of women. You know, one of the stories, tell a couple of stories in the book about Bill noticing in meetings that there would be a big conference table and women would come and not sit at the table, right, waiting for somebody else who might want the chair. And he would say, no, you sit there. And if anybody says anything, I'm here, I've got your back, and you belong at the table. He really believes strongly in diversity across the board and felt diversity is your best defense against myopia. Different opinions and different people make for better teams. And on the one hand, I think, and part of this is coming from the background of an American football coach, American football coaches are generally around guys. So there was sort of this side of him where he did these trips with the guys. But he was much more, he was the most empathetic man I've ever met. Right, not something that I think most male CEOs or executives are as good at. And he was a great listener. And when he was tough with you, it was always in private. You know, there are other people who will, you know, yell at you in front of the team. He never did that. If you did something wrong, you found out about it after the meeting in a quiet room by yourself.

Yeah, I noticed he also coached girls' football teams as well.

He coached 7th and 8th grade girls at Sacred Heart. And he would say he coached them just the same. He swore just as much at the girls as he did at the boys. And famously, he would focus on what he was doing at the time. So he had a cell phone and the cell phone would ring. One of Bill's superpowers was building trust. And you build trust by really listening, by putting away the phone, really being present. So we heard this from several of the kids he coached playing football, they're 7th and 8th graders, and everyone knew if you worked with Bill every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 to 5:30, that was football practice. Everybody except one guy. And so there was this famous time when there was coaching football and Bill's phone rang and he takes it out, he looks at it just enough for the kids to see that it was Steve Jobs calling. And he folds up his phone, he puts it away because he was with the kids. The other thing he would do, you know, your typical Silicon Valley parents who send their kids to these private schools would show up and they would say, you know, Joey is gonna be at practice on Tuesday, but on Thursdays, you know, he's also on the soccer team and next week we're going to Cabo, but, you know, otherwise he'll be at practice. And Bill would say, well, that's no problem, he can be on the B team, which wasn't Bill's team. So Bill really made sure that everyone who was part of a team knew that the team came first.

Because I really think this is a crucial aspect of leadership. I know, again, when I was reading this book with my co-author Chris Lewis, we also landed on love and heartfelt leadership as opposed to head-led leadership. And yet it's such a taboo subject. But one thing seems sure: if you love what you do, your competence follows preference. So can you tell when the people at Google are really loving what they're doing? It's just easy for you to see who loves this and therefore their competence is apparent? Or is that something that you had to work at to figure out who's got the love? I mean, is that a thing that was supposed to, or you don't have to teach you how to do that?

Absolutely. Let's just also talk a little bit about empathy. This is another interesting topic that is so often set to the side when you're talking about business leadership. But strikes me most of the value of a brand, where does the trust come from? It comes from empathy with the customer, with the end user, with the people who are backing the company. How do you build empathy in a person? Where is that a thing that just has to exist already?

I'm just asking.

I again, I don't think I can comment on empathy in the context of our book, but I can comment on trust again. As in being a coach, I think you build trust by listening, you build trust by being loyal, you build trust by being an advocate and a cheerleader. And I suppose that could lead to empathy as well. But that's really, you know, what we learned about how Bill operated was this idea of...

Building trust is really one of the superpowers of being a coach. I want to point out something also right now. Everyone's probably going, 'Well, gosh, I wish I knew that Bill Campbell guy,' or 'How do I hire someone like him?' You know, like you're on your phone googling 'Bill Campbell coach-like person.' First of all, there's not many of them. But the whole point of the book is that these skills, these things that we're talking about, whether it's cheering or pairing people, or heaven forbid, listening, are things that any of us can do. And you know, we were talking earlier about what does leadership mean. And you know, part of it is being a great manager, being a great performer, but this, we think of this as the other element of us. These simple things that Bill taught us that are actually really hard to do on how to be a great coach. Management plus coaching equals leadership.

You talked a lot in the book about improv and the importance of improv, almost a playful back and forth banter where you problem solved but also learned about each other. And talk to us best about how do we do more improv so we try some here?

Yes, and Eric, you have to give me more. Okay, sorry, wait, don't say a name so this, otherwise I could pick it up. Yes, so the way it works, Alan, okay, is you say something like, 'Isn't the weather in London very nice?' And then Jonathan says, 'It was nice when I went to Cabo with the sea bill.' And I'd say, 'When he was at Bill, when he was in Cabo, he met a caddy.' And you'd say, 'I hate golf.' That's improv. Okay, we see, I learned something every day from these guys.

Story from Marissa Mayer. We were talking about how Bill had worked with her. And Marissa, of course, a very smart person, and he told her that when her group was talking about an issue or making a decision, she couldn't speak until everyone else had spoken. Like, which was very difficult, very different, because she always had the answer because she really was the smartest person in the room. Yeah, but she was forced to like stay quiet and improv and you involve the entire troupe. Open-ended questions, keep it open, keep the conversation going. And that actually made her actually respect her team a lot more because some of the quiet people, it turns out, had some really smart things to say.

Now all three of you, you're working at this extraordinary company, it's having a massive impact on society, extraordinary history. And yet at some point, I think each of you, if I'm not wrong, thought about quitting. Didn't you? Didn't you? Did. And I'd like to hear about how did you come to that moment where you went, 'I'm out,' and then say, 'No, I'm not out.'

Well, the first time was actually ten months into my Google tenure. I've been trying to hire people and, you know, they gave me the 'it's a team' lecture when I started. So I went out to go find analytical MBAs because that was my background and we make great product managers. And Larry pretty much rejected all of the people who I was trying to hire. And I was on Bill Campbell's couch after ten months. We had first year cliff vesting and I was thinking of quitting before that, which would have been really stupid. And I'm failing to build a team. And Marissa Meyer actually came in, she was meeting with Bill next, and she had this crazy idea to go hire what she called a PM's, associate product managers. And she went on and explained this idea. Well, Jonathan, Larry doesn't like people like you, he likes people like me. And I like wanted to kill her. But she explained that Larry thought it was really hard to teach business people computer science but it should be pretty easy for me to teach computer scientists business. So Bill kind of talked me off of the cliff, didn't talk me out of quitting. And Marissa then went and hired those people and many of them are now some of the most senior vice presidents in the company. So he took me off, he talked me off of that ledge. There was another ledge when Eric stepped down as CEO and Larry took over. We moved from a functional structure to not really a business unit structure but what we call the product area structure, kind of more organized than functional towards business units. And I wanted to run YouTube or search or ads and Larry offered me this little enterprise business and my feelings were hurt. So I said no. And that business is now ten plus billion dollars and growing. It was another percent a year. Yeah, but Bill and I were close enough that he managed to suggest that I do some advising and stay in the company even though I wasn't in an operational role. And he was really responsible for that.

I thought one of the most interesting lines in the book was, 'Why would Eric Schmidt need emotional support?' You know, because here this iconic success, and yet in real life, the higher you go in organizations and the more risks that you're taking, actually the more isolated you are, the fewer people to talk to quite often. And I think this is a really key point to convey to an audience. And what happens to you emotionally as you say, here you are at the top of your game and you don't look it personally.

Well, I'm here for Eric whenever. Yeah, Jonathan, you're holding my hand. We haven't, we had a story I think that you told us in the book about how Eric had misunderstood something at a meeting. This was really only recently, within the last year or two, misunderstood it, got upset, the idea, the thing faster, and sat there for a week. I think this was after Bill had passed away. And so this little problem got worse and worse just because of a little minor miscommunication. And you know, one thing that we discovered through the book, and particularly I discovered, is that the higher you go in the organization, the stakes are higher, the ambitions are higher, the egos are higher, the insecurities are higher. These miscommunications have much more potential for damage if you don't have a coach. Patrick, who you mentioned earlier, who's here in the audience somewhere, called it the 'ten in the machine.' And what the coach will do is observe in the meeting and then after the meeting go and talk to people. 'Eric, I saw you flinch a little bit when someone said this thing, let's go talk about that.' You know, and identify these little miscommunications. That's a coaching practice that Bill did very well.

Yeah, there's a section where you talk about the Athena principle and the sort of touchy-feely understanding, not the math but the mood. What's the mood of the team or any given individual and how to answer that question, how to get that person into a better place. And that by the way must mean, you know, everyone incredibly well. It kind of reminded me of a very old book about when the Australians won the America's Cup and they hired for the first time ever a team psychologist. And they were completely, you know, laughed at at the time as being a silly thing. But what they learned was the guy who's on the winch will basically do that until he dies, he has no limit. And the guy who smells which way the wind is gonna go can't do the job if anyone says hurry up. And as they learned about each other, they realized somebody has to tell the winch men to stop before he's dead and somebody has to tell the hoped no noise until the guy who smells the wind is good. And so did you feel that way and the teams were working with the two new people so intimately you kind of knew how to manage the personality?

This is a good time to mention that if you don't want to read the book, we encourage you to read the book, we put up a SlideShare about his playbook. It's for free. It's on, if you type 'A Trillion Dollar Coach SlideShare,' you'll see all of the guidelines in 36 pages. But you can call it a handbook if you prefer. And if you want to buy the book, you can call it anything you want.

No, but it's super interesting for the audience because again, the people here today, the people who'll be watching this, they're all trying to create the next big company that's doing these amazing great things. So are we looking for the wrong people? Are we hiring the wrong people? This is why I came back to this idea. I thought, how would I feel as a person in the tech world looking at Bill's CV when he's 43 years old? Actually, it's not the way people hire these days. We hire people with very different backgrounds. And the question is, how do we bring into our organizations people who have these skills? How do you find them? What would you look for in a person?

So again, super interesting because you were working in a world which is a lot of coders. Coders are not famous for interpersonal skills and for a lot of the things we're talking about. And increasingly coders are driving organizations like yours, policy. So how do you square that? How do you teach people who are highly technical to be more human?

And I don't think when Bill found people that he would coach, they had to be passionate about the business. They had to be passionate about something, right? If he'd meet you and you had no hobby, you weren't an athlete, you weren't interested in art or something, had to be something, some spark of passion when he first met you that would attract him to you. Then I think he felt he could instill some passion for whatever the business function that you were in. But he liked people who were emotional. He liked people who cared. You know, he would, he said, I sent one guy to him once who got very good performance reviews on everything except the statement from his people, you know, 'Person X cares about me.' And so he went to Bill for a therapy session and Bill threw him out after like 30 minutes. And he called him one of the names in there. And he said, after 30 minutes, it was like, 'To care, you have to care.' And that was his diagnosis for the person. But you know, the person was really smart, the person could manage against objectives, but the person really didn't care about his people. So when he came to Bill to ask, Bill's answer was, 'He doesn't care. I can't teach him to care.' You know, in the earlier book that the three of us wrote, we talked a lot about recruiting. And recruiting, so when Google was first founded, but technically we were hired based on technical sort of tests. And the non-technical people, sales and marketing, were hired on one simple principle: they had to be exceptional in something. And they're in surgery, in particular in building the sales force, liked people who were Olympians because they didn't really understand sales very well but they certainly understood how hard it was to be an Olympian. So I show up and there's all these Olympians like in weird Olympian sports and so forth and a few ex-American football players. And so it's like, this is the sales team. But it turns out that they worked incredibly hard because they had learned that discipline. Think about what it takes to do that. So if you look for things other than technical brilliance, you could also look for consistency, responsibility, raw intelligence, so forth. We also worked a great deal on the kind of schools you went to, your grade point averages, and so forth. And all of that produced a very, very high sort of intelligence, maybe not a high EQ place, but a high IQ place. And then the EQ can be added with appropriate management techniques.

It's especially relevant in this moment in history when everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and taking over more and more the function in society. And I always think we also gonna still need human ingenuity, a CHAI who will be as important as AI. But where's your view on that subject?

At Google, you must have had from the very beginning a kind of understanding of the social impact of what the firm was doing. And it's come such a long way from the time it was founded. How did you stay current as the environment changed? And I raised that question because now we are in a moment of history where lots of questions are being raised about data and privacy and how information is used. You know, Bill Campbell said you got to ask the hard questions and this is a very hard question that we face right now. So good to talk a little bit about your vision for how data is used in society broadly and where are we going with this subject, especially in light of the current controversy which is hitting Silicon Valley rather hard.

I was very delighted by the section of the book where Bill is coaching someone who's over the age of 50 and you talk about how people in their older years have a huge contribution to make. I mean, I've founded a tech company over the age of 50 and to be a woman in tech over 50, everybody's like, 'What?' I mean, this is like a monopoly for young people. I'm like, 'Not anymore.' So, but this is really interesting. How do we bring older talent, as you see, we've got an aging society, we have a lot of intellectual capital in older people, how do you bring them in to this creative process?

Yeah, that's one way to stay engaged. Yeah, that'll do it. And it's, you know, gets back we were talking about earlier about athletes and, you know, this can be true at any age. What do our athletes do? They're constantly learning, constantly getting better, and they know how to fail because lots of times you don't win the game or you don't win the match. And you know, that's something that you just need to preserve no matter what age you are. Keep learning and, you know, when you fail, get up and be stronger and come back at it again.

About what you're all doing now, like what are you spending your time doing now? What things are you building now?

Well, I'll start with that because mine's easy. I have a full-time job running a couple of sales programs at Google and as a little sideline, we call it a 20% project, I write books with these guys. 20% project is really a cultural phenomenon at Google where if you're doing your regular job and you're doing it well and you're performing well, you have the freedom to go work on whatever you want to work on. And oftentimes it's maybe something related to your job. So you're working in a product area and you have this new idea for a feature but no one else really cares about it and you don't have any funding for it. So you go mock it up or you go hack it, something together, and you try to get other people to join you. And most of the time you fail, but you learn something. But every time, once in a while, you come up with something really remarkable like Gmail or Chromecast or, you know, something like that. Or it could be you may be working on a club or something like that. So my 20% project was, like I said, writing a book with these guys. So I'm still a Google employee and I'm now on the book tour. I do a lot of coaching internally with Google. Many of the product managers who used to work for me, every now and then an assignment comes up. There's some transition with an executive internally. So when I talked earlier, I've worked on the robotics team for a little while when we had a transition there. I worked with the Fiber team for a good chunk of last year. I spent some time with the Google Health team earlier this year. And since I'm good at improv, I'm now gonna set up Eric Schmidt by saying that I'm spending some time helping him.

You know, again, one of the things you guys emphasized in the book is that it's not about the money, that you did it because it was fun and it was interesting. But life is short. You know, I'm at the age, Jonathan and Alan are still very young, I'm at the age where people that I know are beginning to die. So on that happy note, let me tell you that, you know, there's a specific amount of time you've got and you could basically sit around and watch TV. And by the way, my standard line on that is, don't watch TV, watch YouTube instead. But, you know, get off your rear end and do something. And what we hope with this book is that we will tell people that these principles, which are really human principles, apply to every leadership situation, every opportunity. Even if you're not going to be a coach, you're not going to be a manager, the principles of building networks of people. So that's what I learned in doing this book, was the network of people that I built, which I thought was ancillary to the technical work, the strategic work, and all those negotiations with your prime ministers and on and on, all the stuff that I had to do that was primary, in fact was secondary to building the network of people that will now sustain what we want to do next.

Well, you know, that's the famous Harvard Medical School research has been going, I think, 80 years now, right? The happiness survey where they basically tracked people over 80 years and found that the single greatest contributing factor to longevity was the good quality of the friendships and relationships. In fact, one of the things that has been further refined on that is to me an astonishing statistic, which is that 95 percent of your life's outcome is not determined by government policy or what these companies do and all the TV things that are happening and, 'Oh my god, this and that,' and so forth. It's in fact determined by the outcome of the people around you and both the intimate family and then sort of business and professional and social networks. And if there was anyone who was a fantastic networker, it was Bill Campbell, right? That he died very rich with that. This is a guy who said, I love that line... well, what was the quote? Is, 'I don't take money, I don't take stock, and I don't take [__].'

So we just have a few moments left. Can I just ask you guys any thoughts for the audience about what they ought to be thinking about doing based on the messages in here? What's sort of a core takeaway that you can leave with this audience?

I guess for me it's that these are principles that can be learned and that leadership is about your people electing you captain of the team. And you earn that, you don't get that from your title. And people are always watching and people are observing and you're only gonna get to building trust if you've exhibited those practices properly. And without trust you can't build a team. And if you build a team, we have a formula for pairing people, getting to the table, and making decisions. Actually, in my book, I kind of concluded leadership is not about the leader, it's about the ship.

Well, I think Eric said something really important earlier, which was that the network and the team that you created through all your work was a primary, not ancillary. I think everybody here is on a team. Everybody here, many people here may lead teams. You may want to get things accomplished. Think about the team first and how can you make that team better or the best it can possibly be, and great things will happen.

Well, I think we might bring it to a close. Thank you so much for... thank you, thank you so much.