I only heard of Bill Campbell briefly before reading this book, but he was truly impressive as expressed in this book. The biggest takeaway is that when thinking about all the success of Silicon Valley and all the advanced technology behind, it all eventually comes back to people and relationships. This is the foundation for what drives the success of anything in business or life. Great for an audible listen.

While some ideas on how to work with people are interesting and it’s an easy read, the book is a praise to capitalism and doesn’t provide the reader with useful prompts which encourage critical thinking. The main character, Bill, is made out to be a social relationship superhero - someone extremely empathetic, who understands people, knows how to guide them, and so on. Sadly no criticism whatsoever is provided so it doesn’t really sound realistic, as none of his flaws are presented. He seems to be only focused on the company making decisions and moving forward as a team - unfortunately he doesn’t seem to care what decision is made. A leader of the future should certainly be a people’s person but the success of a company only judged by market share is not enough. What we really need is responsible teams who are not focused only on making profit but bringing in sustainable investments into life, actually making the world a better place and helping communities thrive. None of this is mentioned. I am not sure who is the target audience of this book.

The second readthrough was better than the first.

Scott Adams says that to stand out in life you should be pretty good at two things. Bill Campbell was pretty good at coaching and pretty good at business, and the combination was powerful.

- build community
- take time to be human with people

Lots of good basics in here + some new ideas to experiment with for me.

Ok, getting this out of the way upfront: there is definitely an overly expansive repetition of Bill's achievements in various places in the book. They are truly impressive and it's deserved to call them out, but it gets a little repetitive in places. It's also a little silicon valley centric in terms of the way things are presented (a manual for success).

That's the bad part. However, it still gets five stars. Why? because the content really is pretty unique and insightful. Bill Campbell was clearly special in how he did things and the authors do a great job in teasing out some key insights into why his methods work.

There are not many books about the role of a team coach in business and this really highlights how important this can be. It's quite inspiring to see how simple and applicable some of the techniques can be.

Expect to have to wade through just a little hubris, but it's worth it in my opinion!

Some nice ideas, but ultimately a bit of a wet and depressing anthology of uber powerful people realising it sometimes helps to care about others.

Fine lessons in honesty, transparency, and taking care of those you can.

I watched the documentary of Kanopy, but didn't read the book. Bill may have been a natural coach, but his advice as conveyed in the documentary, is pretty banal. Don't recommend.

This is perhaps my favorite business book in years. Bill Campbell was a tremendously influential executive coach and an icon that few of us mere mortals outside of Silicon Valley have ever heard of, but I wish that I had known sooner. This book is not a biography, it’s a great tribute to Bill’s style, methods and success from the people who benefited the most from his wisdom. The audio version is very well done. There is foul language so may not be suitable for some audiences.