Authors: Ken Auletta
Tags: #Industries, #Computer Industry, #Business & Economics
Googled (13 page)
Explaining Campbell’s role as a bridge builder at Google, Moritz said, “Bill’s contribution has been to take the emotion out of decisions. He’s more objective. He’s seen as a neutral source and a fair man.” The objectivity was needed, he explained, because: “You had two founders who were in their twenties and Eric was twenty years older, and you had to make that relationship work between people who did not know each other. It was natural that the founders would be suspicious. There were bumps at the beginning that Bill helped smooth over.” The biggest bumps, another Google insider said, were not between Schmidt and the founders, but with two venture capitalists on the board, Doerr and Moritz: “Eric had a busy-body board. The impression the board had was that Larry and Sergey were not focused. When they got Eric in, now they wanted to micromanage him.” They wanted Schmidt to push harder to monetize search. Doerr and Moritz “were both impatient,” said Shriram, who had served as a bridge between the founders and the board and gratefully handed this role to Campbell.
“I would sit with Larry and Sergey and try to figure out the things they more or less wanted from Eric,” recalled Campbell. Then he’d sit with Schmidt. He performed this particular function for three years, until 2005. Looking back over the life of Google, these sessions where Campbell performed as both a psychologist and a coach loom especially large. The company could have imploded. On Campbell’s shoulders rested a complex problem. He had to earn the trust of the founders, Schmidt, the board, and Google executives. He had to help put management systems in place, recruit executives, suggest financial controls and the structure of board and management meetings.
One would expect an ex-football coach to be an in-your-face, blustery, and threatening personality. And Campbell sounds like he would be, for he has a deep, hoarse voice that seems the product of yelling all day. But he is self-effacing, quick with a quip, more listener than talker. Schmidt likens Campbell’s ability to listen to that of a shrink, adding, “When he walks into a room, everyone smiles. I’ve never seen that.” But he also said that “shrinks are seen as passive,” which is why he believes the “coach” appellation is more accurate. “A coach says, ‘Let’s go!”’
Campbell laughs when told that some refer to him as Google’s shrink and offers this modest explanation of his role: “Sometimes when you are in a big and complex organization, your behavior is noted. And if your behavior is sometimes out of line, sometimes it’s me that will say, ‘Move it a little bit in this direction or that direction. Not much.’ Shrink would not be the right description. It’s more coaching people into the right direction.”
It did not take long for Campbell to win over Schmidt and the founders. “Bill took me under his wing,” said Schmidt, who refers to him as “my consiglieri.” Campbell is so valuable at Google, Page said, because “he has the unique ability to be a warm person, one that everyone can relate to, but also has the experience of actually running a company” Brin smiles when asked about Campbell and speaks of his “especially high EQ,” emotional intelligence. A principal criticism of Brin and Page is that they, like many of their engineers, lack EQ. Did
he,
I asked, think they lacked EQ? “We are ranked far below Bill Campbell,” Brin conceded.
he,
I asked, think they lacked EQ? “We are ranked far below Bill Campbell,” Brin conceded.
Two Campbell ideas embraced by the troika were an executive management meeting with their direct reports and Campbell that consumes several hours every Monday, and project review meetings with engineers that occupy much of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. Campbell regularly holds one-on-one sessions with other senior executives to offer evaluations, mediate management disputes, hold hands. In other companies, Brin said, politics become excessive when you get to be large. “One of the reasons we’ve been able to avoid politics is Bill Campbell. When issues arise, he’s willing to intercede.” One day I’d scheduled an interview first with Brin and then Campbell. But Brin had arrived late and we backed into Campbell’s allotted time. We were in the small conference room a few doors from Brin’s office in Building 43 and Campbell ambled in for his scheduled interview. Brin smiled and instantly rose from his chair and the two men hugged.
Campbell participates in the Monday executive management meeting, discusses the agenda that Schmidt sends out to participants specifying the decisions they need to discuss at the meeting. He acts as envoy, visiting YouTube headquarters with some frequency in the first half of 2008 to find ways to generate revenues from the popular video site and improve communications between the two companies. Campbell is the only outside person ever welcomed into Google’s inner sanctums. In addition to executive meetings, he attends board meetings. “He’s closer to us than the board,” said David Krane, director of global communications and public affairs. “Eric said management is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s stressful,” Page said. “Bill plays an important role of keeping us all healthy and interacting.”
Why does he volunteer to spend approximately two full days a week on the Google campus? “This is family for me,” he said, a catch in his voice. “These are people I love dearly. I’ve been doing this since late 2001. I probably get as much out of this as everybody gets out of me. The joy of participating at a company that is at the leading edge of anything going on in the personal technology space. It’s centered here. There’s innovation daily. They think about changing the world.” He refuses to be paid more than a dollar a year; in 2007, his compensation was increased when he was given a reserved parking space on a campus where spaces are usually filled by 10 a.m. Brin said he and Page had to insist on compensating Campbell with Google stock options. The fact that Campbell plays such an atypical role at Google suggests that in addition to coach or shrink he can also be described as a babysit ter. The fact that Google needs one is a reminder of its youth.
TO BETTER UNDERSTAND Bill Campbell, Jr., roll the reel back to Homestead, Pennsylvania, the small steel town near Pittsburgh where he was born on August 31, 1940. His mother, Virginia Marie Dauria, was a home-maker while his father, William V Campbell, worked the night shift in the steel mill and taught high school physical education. He became the basketball coach at Duquesne University, where he was a close friend of the football coach Aldo T “Buff” Donelli, then the principal of the local high school and finally the school superintendent of the district. Bill’s mom stayed home to raise him and his younger brother, Jim, who went on to become an All-American wide receiver at the Naval Academy. Bill was an honor student at the public high school, and though he weighed only 175 pounds, he was voted All Western Pennsylvania as an offensive guard and linebacker. What was his football talent? “Speed. And I would hit ya!” he said with a laugh. “When colleges came around, I couldn’t understand why guys who weren’t as good as I was were going to Penn State and Pittsburgh. It pissed me off. So I got recruited by the Ivy schools.”
Bill chose Columbia, where Buff Donelli, who had gone from Duquesne to Boston University, had just replaced Lou Little, the Columbia football team’s longtime coach. Bill received a scholarship and played middle linebacker on defense and offensive guard. He went on to star and captain the 1961 Columbia team that tied Harvard for its first, and only, Ivy League football championship. He hurt his knee that year, which ended his playing career and earned him a 4-F draft deferment. When he graduated in 1962 with a degree in economics, he decided to stay at Columbia to get a master’s degree so that he could stay involved with football. He was studying economics, but “I wanted to be a coach,” he said. Donelli appointed him assistant freshman football coach, and he doubled as a resident adviser. His second year, he scaled back graduate studies to part-time in order to serve as the offensive and defensive end coach on the varsity football team.
His career goal was to become a head coach. “My dad was a coach,” he said. “There was nobody I admired more than my dad and Buff Donelli. These were the two role models I had. I wanted to be Buff Donelli. I wanted to be Bill Campbell, Sr. My dad was so respected in town. He had been the coach, the superintendent. He just had this way about him. He could unite anybody.”
Bill had a summer job after his second year as a coach at Columbia and eagerly anticipated year three, starting in September 1964. But he received a notice from his Pennsylvania draft board to report for a physical. Expecting to again be declared 4-F, he was surprised when he passed. He was even more surprised that “they took me in the service that same day.” He was swiftly dispatched by train to Fort Knox and never got back to collect his belongings at Columbia. For the next two years he was an army private stationed at U.S. bases, landing at Fort Gordon, Georgia, where he ran the athletic program and was both the assistant football coach and the quarterback.
After being discharged from the army, Campbell returned to Columbia as the coach of the freshman football team, and studied for a master’s degree in education. The next year, he became Donelli’s offensive line coach and thought he was on his way to head coach—until Donelli chose to retire. The new coach brought in his own assistant coaches, and Campbell was out of a job. He found a new job as linebacker coach at Boston College, where he stayed six years, rising to defensive coordinator. He returned often to New York, where he met his future wife, Roberta Spagnola, a Columbia University dean, on a blind date. When Columbia called in 1974 and asked him to return as head coach, Campbell jumped at the chance. He and Roberta married in 1976, and would have a son and a daughter.
Over his six years at Columbia, Campbell had a record of twelve victories, forty-one defeats, and one tie. He blames his losing record on his devotion to the players as men rather than as athletes. He was a nurturer. “I really felt like I committed to these kids. My view was more father coun selor and adviser .... I wanted these guys to achieve. I wanted them to go to work for Procter and Gamble or IBM, if that’s what they wanted. I took great pride in getting summer internships for them at Merrill Lynch and Salomon Brothers. I was more engaged with them. I often think that had I been less worried about that and more dispassionate about playing, maybe I would have been better.” If he had to do it over, though, he says, “I wouldn’t change. I couldn’t change.”
After leaving Columbia, he became a sales and marketing executive at J. Walter Thompson, where he stayed until Eastman Kodak, a client, recruited him to be its director of marketing. Then, in 1983, John Sculley, recently appointed the CEO of Apple, heard about Campbell from a relative and began courting him for the job of vice president of marketing. He clinched the sale by demonstrating for Campbell the revolutionary Macintosh computer, which Apple would introduce in 1984. “It would be pretty unusual today to hire a football coach to be your VP of sales,” Sculley later told a reporter. “But what I was looking for was someone who could help develop Apple into an organization.” Campbell took over sales as well as marketing just months after he joined Apple, and set about firing the consultants and most of a sales force that “wore polyester pants and gold chains.” He said he replaced them with recent college graduates, half of them women, and all hungry to succeed. “What I learned from coaching,” he said, “is that if your guys are not as big and fast as the other guys, you’re fucked!”
Campbell’s boldness appealed to the ever-rebellious Steve Jobs. The two men bonded. By 1984, said Campbell, “Sculley and Jobs were going at each other already.” Although Jobs had recruited Sculley to bring professional management to Apple, he came to think he was more interested in marketing, including marketing himself, than in Apple products; Sculley believed Jobs wanted an acolyte, not a CEO. Nevertheless, Campbell earned the rare distinction of being able to both befriend Jobs and command Sculley’s respect. Before Sculley succeeded in pushing Jobs out of Apple in 1985, Campbell warned him it would be a huge mistake. Tensions flared between Campbell and Sculley, and in 1987 Campbell was put in charge of Apple’s Claris software division, with the intention of spinning it off as a private company with Campbell at the helm. But with Claris thriving, Sculley changed his mind. Campbell left rather than remain as a division head under Sculley.
At the recommendation of John Doerr, the Go Corporation hired Campbell as their CEO. The company was an early pioneer in pen computing—too early, it seemed, and when the market didn’t respond, Campbell unloaded the Go Corporation on AT&T, in 1993. He next became CEO of Intuit when Doerr suggested to founder Scott Cook that Campbell would be a great partner. Four years later, he moved up to chairman of the board. On the eve of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997, he asked Campbell to join his board.
Today Campbell serves as a mentor to some of the Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, from Marc Andreessen to Steve Jobs, whom he walks and talks with most weekends in Palo Alto, where they are neighbors. He estimates that he spends about 10 percent of his time on Apple business, about 35 percent on Intuit business, an equal amount at Google, about 10 percent as chairman of the board of Columbia University, and the remainder on assorted activities. He said he has donated his Google stock to the foundation he established to make charitable gifts to his hometown, among others. He donated money to his Homestead high school for a new stadium, scholarships in his father’s name for student athletes, a new gym named for his brother, who died of lung cancer in 2006, and Apple computers for the school. In the fall, he coaches sandlot football for eighth-graders from St. Joseph’s School of the Sacred Heart in Atherton, California; in the spring, he coaches the eighth-grade girls in what’s called powder puff football.
He doesn’t have a lot of enemies. Marc Andreessen said of Campbell, “He’s been incredibly important in the Valley. Business is changing so quickly,” and less experienced entrepreneurs turn to Campbell for guidance. “Bill has been a model mentor. When he’s not in the room, he’s still there because people ask, ‘What would Bill say?’”
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