Written by modern leaders of industry, this book shines a light on the possible source of many cultural trends found in modern IT organizations or most corporations in America today.
The book itself is a tribute to Bill Campbell, a well known corporate coach who was well connected among technology executives. It opens with comments about who attended his funeral in 2016.
Organizing Bill’s coaching method in 6 chapters of stories and examples which do a great job of helping the reader get to know bill who sounds like a walking controversy, the book tells tales of Bill from his early football days before diving into how he approached teams in corporate America.
As it’s told, Bill seemed to naturally understand or Intuit what is taught today in modern IT organizations as Servant Leadership. As the leaders at google understood on the surface, Bill understood that winning teams make winning organizations and a coach is required to help unite and guide them to make decisions on their own. Bill was also able to lead people, because he genuinely cared about the people he was working with.
A common theme throughout the book was “your title makes your a manager, your people make you a leader”. This was reiterated throughout and became a dependable metaphor throughout the stories.
Bill’s efficiency was in his ability to focus on the human challenges that presented any team. Top performers often have conflicting views on the right direction of a project or any other decision. Bill would quickly discover who or what was causing tension and bring it front and center for the group to deal with. This expedited decision making and solidified key relationships for continued success.
This book solidified a lot of the lessons I’ve picked up and would categorize under Servant Leadership. However, I got the most value out of the stories. They served to demonstrate how powerful some of these basic principals are when applied consistently.
In fact, consistency is when these principals begin to have their most power. When the people around you begin to depend on you to be a servant leader. Bill was able to be consistent and dependable when applying his natural talents which lead him to be trusted by some of our titans of technology.