Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt

Author:Eric Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

WORK THE TEAM, THEN THE PROBLEM

At a Google meeting a few years ago, the group was discussing an issue related to costs in some of the developing businesses. Ram Shriram raised concerns: the numbers were getting big! Shouldn’t we get more details on how we are working on this? There was some back-and-forth, then Bill spoke up. Don’t worry, he said, we have the right team in place. They are working the problem.

“I learned something from that,” Ram says. “Bill didn’t work the problem first, he worked the team. We didn’t talk about the problem analytically. We talked about the people on the team and if they could get it done.”

As managers, we tend to focus on the problem at hand. What is the situation? What are the issues? What are the options? And so on. These are valid questions, but the coach’s instinct is to lead with a more fundamental one. Who was working on the problem? Was the right team in place? Did they have what they needed to succeed? “When I became CEO of Google,” Sundar Pichai says, “Bill advised me that at that level, more than ever before, you need to bet on people. Choose your team. Think much harder about that.”

Bill helped us employ this approach in a problem that arose in 2010. Apple (and in particular, Steve Jobs) believed that Google’s Android operating system violated patents that Apple had developed for the iPhone. They sued Google’s business partners, the manufacturers of Android phones. This wasn’t just a business or a legal problem to Bill—it was personal. He was close friends with Jobs and a member of Apple’s board—as well as an informal but influential coach to Google’s leadership team. It was like his two children were fighting, with much more at stake than a favorite toy.

Bill’s approach was to focus on the team, not the problem. He never even offered an opinion on the relative merits of each side’s case, even though he was quite knowledgeable about the issues and the phone features in question. He did, however, counsel Eric to put the right guy in charge of talking to Apple: Alan Eustace. Alan became the chief diplomat interfacing with Apple. It became his job to ensure that the relationship between the companies didn’t implode.

Much later in Bill’s career, Google was planning an important change to its corporate structure. The company was forming a new holding company, to be called Alphabet, and moving some of its most speculative efforts (called “other bets”) out into separate companies. This new organization was a major shift in the operating structure and management culture; Sundar Pichai was being promoted to run Google, with Larry Page moving over to become CEO of Alphabet. Meanwhile, the company’s head of sales, Nikesh Arora, had left, creating a big hole in one of the key leadership positions. The company contacted Omid Kordestani, its first head of sales. Would he be interested in coming back?

“It was clear at that point that we would

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