Trillion Dollar Coach

Closer to a memoir than a method, and written by people who loved their subject — read the hagiography with one eye open. Bill Campbell emerges as more or less flawless, which no one is, and the book is not much interested in the times the approach didn't work.

What survives the affection is worth having.

The first is the insistence on coaching the team before the problem. Campbell's reflex, faced with a business issue, was to look at whether the right people were in the room and whether they trusted each other — on the reasoning that a functioning team will solve a problem you never hear about, and a broken one will keep bringing you problems forever. For anyone whose instinct is to solve the thing in front of them, that is a genuinely difficult discipline and the right one.

The second is that the manager's first job is building the team that solves problems, rather than solving them. Stated baldly it sounds like a truism. Watch how senior people actually spend their week and you will see how rarely it is believed.

It is also a useful corrective to the idea that coaching is a soft skill living somewhere outside the operating rhythm. Campbell did it in the middle of the business, about the business, continuously — not in a scheduled hour with a external coach twice a quarter. That placement is most of the point.