Eric Schmidt — Lessons from a Trillion-Dollar Coach (#367)

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Eric Schmidt:

Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

• Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
• How Google Works by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
• The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
• Sun Microsystems’ Rise And Fall by Lee Gomes, Forbes
• Novell
• Xerox Alto, Computer History Museum
• Xerox PARC
• The History of the Apple Lisa by Christoph Dembach, Mac History
• The History of the Apple Macintosh by Christoph Dembach, Mac History
• Digital Equipment Corporation
• Hewlett-Packard
• Oracle
• Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, Stanford GSB
• Alphabet Chief Sees AI Helping Spur Scientific Discovery by Jon Nalick, Caltech
• The Benefits and Pitfalls of Pair Programming in the Workplace by Sam Harris, freeCodeCamp.org via Medium
• The Go Programming Language
• Eric Schmidt: “Change Happens when Things are Hard” by Dave Murphy, Stanford Business
• Compaq
• Kleiner Perkins
• National Semiconductor
• Fairchild Corporation
• The Traitorous 8 and Birth of Silicon Valley by Wade Slome, Investing Caffeine
• Intel
• Lockheed Martin
• Microsoft
• What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff
• Could Boston Be the Next Silicon Valley? by Richard Taylor, BBC News
• Why the Next Silicon Valley Will Probably Be Outside the US by Richard Florida, CityLab
• Cisco
• What is Proxy Caching? by Robert Gibb, MaxCDN
• YouTube
• Netflix
• What Is a CDN? How Does a CDN Work?, Cloudflare
• Sequoia
• Blitzscaling 08: Eric Schmidt on Structuring Teams and Scaling Google with Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partners
• 70-20-10: Vital Statistics That Helped, The Independent
• Walmart’s New Ceo Has Made Its Iconic Saturday Morning Meeting Optional by Max Nisen, Quartz
• Former CEO Eric Schmidt Says Google Had to Revamp Its Whole Hiring Process Because They Were Interviewing Candidates 16 Times by Nick Bastone, Business Insider
• Silicon Valley’s Legendary ‘Coach’ Bill Campbell Has Died by Kara Swisher, Recode
• Chegg
• Real Life Extension: Caloric Restriction or Intermittent Fasting? (Part 1) by Tim Ferriss, Tim’s Blog
• Why Is Too Much Sugar Bad for You? by Lauren Cox, Live Science
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

SHOW NOTES

• Why did Eric begin his undergrad in architecture and shift to electrical engineering? [08:17]
• Eric talks about working at Sun Microsystems in 1983 and contrasts the world of electronics then with today. [10:06]
• How did Eric wind up at Sun and who does he consider his mentors from those days? [12:22]
• Has Eric always been known as a clear communicator, or is it something he developed over time? [14:28]
• What did Eric learn about the executive arts at this point in his career, and how did they differ from the way things are done today? [15:23]
• When you’re teaching, learning, and doing business in uncharted territory, sometimes you’ve got to write the reference material. [18:19]
• On the seemingly everywhere venture capitalist John Doerr and how small Silicon Valley is — and was, especially in its early days — despite how vast it might appear to outsiders. [20:26]
• Eric’s 30-second history of Silicon Valley. [24:07]
• Does Eric believe Silicon Valley is a unique, non-recurring phenomenon? What would it take to replicate its positive characteristics for entrepreneurship elsewhere? [26:35]
• John Doerr’s role in introducing Eric to Google. [28:36]
• Eric sets the scene of his interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin. [29:57]
• How time proved all sides right in an argument between Eric, Larry, and Sergey about proxy caches. [31:07]
• During his Google interview/argument, what clued Eric in to the fact that he was dealing with atypical founders? [32:36]
• How did Larry and Sergey assess Eric as a potential leader, and what qualities in Eric did John Doerr see as a complement to those of the Google founders? [33:23]
• In what ways did Eric lend his “adult supervision” to manage the brilliant chaos of early Google and spur its growth? [35:13]
• Eric explains Sergey’s 70-20-10 model and how it’s been applied at Google. [37:24]
• What Eric believes a company should focus on to keep growing pains from becoming an equally scalable distraction. [39:29]
• What Eric considers his most important job as a CEO. [41:08]
• What did Google’s weekly meeting schedule look like initially, and how has it adapted over time? Is it what Eric would consider ideal? [42:37]
• Who was Bill Campbell, and why did Eric, together with Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle, write Trillion Dollar Coach about him? [46:13]
• Why does coaching matter in the business world, and what made Bill such an exceptionally gifted coach? [47:34]
• What were Bill’s opinions about starting and running meetings? [49:27]
• The key difference between a coach and a manager. [50:44]
• The importance of regularly articulating motivating principles over falling back on feelgood cliches. [52:00]
• How would Bill facilitate solutions when decision makers didn’t see eye-to-eye? [53:37]
• When Google went public in 2004, Bill recommended that Eric step aside as chairman, but made sure he would be reinstated as chairman later. What was his thinking behind this, and how did he pitch it to Eric? [54:57]
• Though Eric was initially resistant to the idea of having a coach, here’s what happened during his first meeting with Bill to convince him otherwise. [56:33]
• An example of how Bill moved when charged to execute a task. [58:23]
• How does one person successfully lead 100? Ask Bill Coughran. [59:23]
• What types of words would Bill Campbell write behind his whiteboard to prompt conversation in a meeting, and how would he structure the results? [1:01:23]
• How did Bill Campbell walk the delicate line between simultaneously helping Google and Apple — and being so trusted by both? [1:03:10]
• What was Bill Campbell’s secret for accurately sniffing out BS when people weren’t being honest with him, and what were the consequences of such dishonesty if discovered? [1:06:21]
• As Bill reportedly told Chegg’s Dan Rosensweig, “I don’t take cash, I don’t take stock, and I don’t take shit.” So how was he compensated? What were his primary motivations? [1:08:01]
• As someone who was always trying to find the right people for the right problems, how did he handle firing the wrong people when things didn’t work out? [1:10:53]
• How Bill became part of “the fabric” at Google — and Apple — and facilitated conversations between the two in a way no one else could. [1:11:24]
• As a coach, how did Bill course correct Eric when he saw him violating his own rules? [1:13:10]
• What were some of Bill’s workplace and weekday rituals? [1:14:22]
• What Eric tries to incorporate into his own life from Bill’s Saturday morning routine. [1:15:27]
• What does a typical morning look like for Eric? [1:16:36]
• How would Eric recommend that someone in need of a coach vet potential candidates? [1:17:50]
• What does Eric hope to gain (or lose) by intermittent fasting? [1:18:46]
• What book does Eric gift the most, and why? [1:21:04]
• Does Eric have any favorite failures or challenges that set the stage for later successes? [1:24:00]
• Eric’s co-pilot was instructed to be unhelpful during jet training as a way to prompt leadership-level decisions. When did Eric first notice something amiss, and how did he deal with it? [1:26:33]
• Has Eric’s exposure to the arts developed his intuition in a way that’s been useful toward making hyper analytical business decisions? [1:27:48]
• What would Bill Campbell have considered “success?” [1:30:20]
• What would Eric’s billboard say? [1:31:34]
• Parting thoughts. [1:34:40]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

• Bill Campbell
• Jonathan Rosenberg
• Alan Eagle
• Bill Joy
• Butler Lampson
• Bernard Lacroute
• Peter Wendell
• John Doerr
• Vinod Khosla
• Terry Semel
• Arthur Rock
• Steve Jobs
• John Chambers
• Larry Page
• Sergey Brin
• Bill Gates
• Salar Kamangar
• Susan Wojcicki
• Marissa Mayer
• Jack Dorsey
• Jeff Bezos
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Bill Coughran
• Kara Swisher
• Dan Rosensweig
• Peter Attia
• Dominic D’Agostino
• Steven Pinker